I have seen many excellent viewpoints from my peers, and I would like to share some of my own thoughts.

Cryptocurrency payments cannot be replaced by traditional payments.

Firstly, for most of my peers, the core demand for using cryptocurrency in daily payments is not "more convenience," but "more freedom." This often occurs in scenarios involving currency exchange, settlement, and hedging against local currency risks.

When a country's or region's fiat currency enters a state of high inflation, severe devaluation, or even loss of credit, stablecoins pegged to non-local currencies effectively outsource the "unit of account" and "store of value" directly to the US dollar system or a stronger currency system.

Especially in countries and regions with strict foreign exchange controls, extremely high costs for cross-border currency exchange, or where private currency exchange is in a gray area, the significance of crypto payments is not the payment itself, but "bypassing currency devaluation," which is difficult for traditional payment networks to replace.

Secondly, many peers have mentioned cross-border e-commerce. The banking system certainly has ways to handle cross-border payments, such as SWIFT, wire transfers, credit card processing, and even local collection accounts.

However, the real pain point in cross-border e-commerce lies in the links, time zones, and capital occupancy rates. Once multiple banks are involved, working day windows, reconciliation and refund processes, and dispute handling come into play, the efficiency ceiling of traditional payments is locked by the system architecture, breaking the entire process into multiple segments for risk control, clearing, settlement, and reconciliation.

The advantage of crypto payments is that they can compress multiple segments into a final settlement. Especially when it involves cross-time zone, multi-market, and multiple payee revenue sharing and aggregation, the certainty and traceability of crypto payments become very strong.

Next, programmable payments. This mainly refers to the financial attributes of the funds themselves; money on the blockchain is not a static asset; it can simultaneously serve multiple roles such as deposits, guarantees, revenue sharing, collateral, and settlement.

When cryptocurrency payments are tied to interest, compound interest, and credit limits, they evolve from a payment tool into a cash flow operating system. Although PayFi has not fully materialized yet, many prototypes have already emerged based on the concept of PayFi, using future earnings to discount today's consumption, covering liability payments with asset-side earnings, and turning payments into a form of dynamic asset-liability management.

Traditional payments can also offer installment plans, consumer loans, and cashback, but they cannot achieve an open interest rate market, nor can they provide multiple strategies for revenue sources, and they certainly cannot achieve Lego-like earnings. The options for earning interest in traditional payments are limited, while the space for interest combinations on-chain is much larger.

Cryptocurrency payments can exceed the ceiling of traditional payments.

The first thing that comes to mind is borderless payments. Strictly speaking, traditional payments have already achieved part of this, such as credit cards being borderless payments, and U cards operate on the same principle, essentially being multi-currency payments + local clearing. Consumers can spend in different currencies, while merchants still receive their local currency.

However, the borderless nature of traditional systems is based on the premise that it must ultimately settle back to the local fiat currency. What merchants want is not necessarily their local currency, especially in countries with high inflation, strict controls, or for merchants engaged in cross-border business, the local currency is merely a passive settlement result and not an ideal asset.

If the payee does not want the local currency but prefers dollars, euros, or gold, traditional payments find it difficult to provide a comprehensive closed-loop service that includes fees + currency exchange + tax + fund management or even wealth management. In contrast, cryptocurrencies can achieve this, especially programmable cryptocurrencies.

For example, the same payment can be completed instantly on-chain, automatically deducting platform service fees, automatically distributing funds to suppliers, automatically allocating taxes to a designated address, automatically converting part of the profits into stablecoins and entering a revenue account, and even triggering different settlement paths based on exchange rate or interest rate conditions. This process may still feel like "I paid," to the user, but for the merchant, it has already become "I turned cash flow into real-time scheduling of the balance sheet."

Therefore, I prefer to define the mark of "exceeding the ceiling of traditional payments" as three things occurring simultaneously:

First, settlement changes from working days + multiple clearances to 7×24 + near real-time finality, directly increasing cash flow turnover speed, significantly reducing capital occupancy costs, and lowering the threshold for cross-border business.

Second, receiving payments shifts from being the endpoint to being the starting point; receiving payments naturally carries revenue sharing, reconciliation, risk control, tax reserves, fund management, and revenue strategies, merging the payment chain with the business chain, transforming the financial system from being reactive to proactive.

Third, the choice of assets shifts from institutions back to merchants and individuals, where what is received is not a forced settlement in local currency but a selectable form of asset. This is where crypto payments truly surpass the traditional ceiling—not by being faster or cheaper, but by merging the rights to receive payments, exchange currencies, and manage assets into the same open network, accessible to anyone in a productized manner.

Finally, I would like to add my own judgment: the strongest breakthrough for crypto payments in the short term will definitely not be in offline retail, nor will it necessarily be in cross-border settlements, but rather treating payments and receipts as starting points and using the financial actions following payments as an operating system. This is the beginning of how cryptocurrency payments can break through the ceiling of traditional payments.

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