Today I got asked a question about our market making operation. Someone noticed that almost no FX swaps were done on the weekend. And I guess this is where we talk about the role of market makers and why everything changes once you step into onchain FX and payments. Traditional market makers were built for price discovery. That is their job. They quote around volatility, monetize uncertainty, and live off speculative flow. When traders move, they move. When traders sleep, they sleep. Weekends included. Payments do not behave like that. Payments do not spike with volatility. Payments do not care about risk cycles. Payments do not time the market. Payments follow the operational heartbeat of businesses, and on weekends, businesses are not clearing payroll, not pushing vendor batches, and not matching corporate inflows to outflows. So the book stays quiet. This is the first real separation between market making for trading and market making for payments: one follows volatility, the other follows economic activity.

This is exactly why the big crypto market makers cannot bridge into onchain FX. Wintermute, GSR, Flowdesk. All talented. All well capitalized. All structurally optimized for speculative flow. But when they step into a payments driven environment, nothing responds. Their models expect traders. Their liquidity expects volatility. Their infrastructure expects directional appetite. What they encounter instead are companies with deadlines, compliance windows, treasury teams, and settlement obligations that have nothing to do with market cycles. Once liquidity is tied to real payments, the behavior changes. Rebalancing becomes organic because it is fed by actual flow instead of synthetic volume. Ticket sizes above one hundred thousand dollars stop being a stress test and become part of the rhythm. Settlement becomes continuous instead of chained to local banking hours. And you finally remove the overhead that made FX swaps painful, which was never volatility itself but the settlement friction created by institutions that cannot move as fast as the payments they’re meant to support.

Now the clearinghouse topic. People love pitching stablecoin clearinghouses as the future. I strongly disagree. A clearinghouse in this space is usually one company with fifty KYB relationships, aggregating a basket of providers, and forcing everything to settle through a single stablecoin, usually USDC. It is a router with a fee structure, not FX infrastructure. And the economics are not as clean or as permanent as people pretend. Stablecoin issuance is not free. Circle charges. Tether charges. At scale, those fees stack aggressively. Sometimes you can buy stablecoins cheaper on secondary markets than minting them. Nobody in the clearinghouse camp likes mentioning that part. I have seen too many decks claiming that a direct issuer relationship keeps their cost basis flat forever. Trust me, you do not want to be standing in the way of a for profit issuer trying to widen margins once bond yields normalize and the market stops giving away returns for free.

This is the real issue. If your entire model forces every corridor to settle into one stablecoin, you did not build resilience, you built concentration. You compressed every FX condition into a single dependency and called it efficiency. Payments companies do not need a clearinghouse. They need embedded market making that reflects the actual shape of their flow. Every corridor has its own supply and demand curve, with its own liquidity patterns, its own settlement behavior, its own seasonal volatility, and its own operational constraints. You cannot compress all of that into one asset and expect the system to behave. And this is the future we are building toward. Contrarian or not, when you study how real payments move and who can actually clear them at scale without pretending they are trades, the stack of poker chips ends up on this side of the table every time.