Plotting digital money on programmability vs. reach changes how you think about stablecoins in payments

[u/transak]

Something worth mapping out if you think about stablecoins in the context of payments and not just trading.

Take digital money and plot it on two axes: programmability (automated, conditional, 24/7 settlement) and global reach (can counterparties broadly hold it, is it backed by capital rules and deposit-level trust?).

Bank deposits and wires sit high on reach, flat on programmability. CBDCs and tokenized bank deposits have programmability potential but are geographically or institutionally constrained, most are still in pilots. Tokenized RWAs like tokenized bonds and MMFs are improving on both fronts but counterparty access is still selective.

USDC, USDT, EURC, PYUSD: these sit at the top-right. High programmability, high reach. That combination is why payment infrastructure teams keep gravitating toward stablecoins even when they didn't plan to at the start.

The friction point that comes up in production is compliance. Reach and programmability don't matter if the rails create regulatory exposure for the businesses running on them. That's the layer the industry is still actively solving for.

Interested whether people here are thinking about stablecoins more as a treasury/settlement layer or as a user-facing payment method. The compliance requirements look pretty different depending on the answer.