TBC (Turing Bit Chain)

The Structural Fragility Behind Prosperity: The "Parasitic" Dilemma of Stablecoins

The narrative around stablecoins has shifted from being a "cryptocurrency transaction medium" to a "global financial infrastructure." Cross-border payments, a massive market with over $150 trillion in annual transactions, are being disrupted by on-chain stablecoins. Traditional SWIFT networks typically take 3-5 days to complete a cross-border transfer and charge total fees up to 6.5% of the transaction amount. In contrast, blockchain-based stablecoin transfers can be completed in seconds, usually costing less than $0.01. This dramatic reduction in costs has directly driven a surge in crypto payment adoption in emerging markets like Southeast Asia and Africa.

However, this prosperity is built on a fragile foundation: the vast majority of stablecoins are "parasitic" on public blockchains that were not designed for them.

USDT and USDC are mainly issued on account-based public blockchains like Ethereum and Tron. These chains were originally designed to support complex, state-shared smart contracts, not high-frequency, low-cost simple value transfers. This creates a fundamental contradiction: the core use case of stablecoins—payments—requires extremely high throughput, minimal latency, and near-zero fees; yet, the underlying infrastructure they rely on makes significant performance compromises to support global state synchronization and complex smart contract execution.

As a result, we see a strange cycle. Whenever stablecoin adoption increases due to a hot topic (such as surging remittances in emerging markets), the gas fees on the underlying public chain spike accordingly. During the DeFi summer of 2021, simple USDT transfers on Ethereum sometimes cost over $50 in fees. This directly contradicts the original goal of financial inclusion: users who need low-cost remittance services are effectively shut out by high on-chain costs.

A deeper hidden risk lies in security and finality of settlement. Under the account model, complex smart contract interactions introduce endless possibilities but also enormous risks. Reentrancy attacks, contract bugs, oracle manipulations... these risks are incompatible with stablecoins' role as a "store of value." An asset intended to serve as "digital cash" operating in an environment full of unpredictable smart contract risks is a systemic mismatch in itself.

Existing solutions—whether shifting to other high-performance L1s or relying on various L2 scaling solutions—are merely patches within the "parasitic" framework. They address some performance issues but cannot resolve the fundamental model-level contradiction: the global state of the account model is inherently bottlenecked by serial processing.