Introduction

The payments industry has undergone a profound transformation over the past several decades. From the introduction of plastic cards in the mid-20th century to the rise of digital wallets in the mobile era, every leap forward has been catalyzed by new technologies enabling new applications. Card networks like Visa and Mastercard revolutionized consumer payments by introducing a secure, standardized infrastructure for offline and later online commerce. As mobile technology advanced, digital wallets such as WeChat Pay and Alipay redefined convenience and user experience by bringing payments into the smartphone ecosystem. These platforms layered new services—identity, rewards, and integration with super apps—on top of legacy card rails, accelerating digital adoption in many markets.

Yet, beneath this surface of innovation, the underlying architecture of global payments has remained largely unchanged. Centralized intermediaries continue to mediate trust, extract fees, and limit access, especially in emerging markets where infrastructure is lacking and financial exclusion persists. The evolution from cards to digital wallets was iterative, not transformational.

Today, blockchain technology represents a paradigm shift. Instead of simply digitizing traditional payment models, it reimagines how value can be transferred—peer-to-peer, trustless, programmable, and borderless. It enables a foundational rethinking of who can participate in the financial system and how transactions are verified, settled, and governed. Much like the internet unbundled media and communication, blockchain has the potential to unbundle payments from the closed systems of incumbent networks, opening the door to native digital payments that are accessible, efficient, and inclusive by design.

Although blockchain technology has been around since the publication of the Bitcoin white paper, we’ve long been waiting for the right moment—a convergence of technological readiness, user adoption, and infrastructural maturity—to build a truly global payment network. That moment is now.

Several trends indicate that the foundation is finally in place:

• Mobile-first crypto adoption is surging

  Countries like Nigeria, India, and Argentina are seeing rapid growth in mobile wallet usage—not just for trading, but for real-world payments such as bills and retail purchases. Today, there are an estimated 30 to 60 million monthly active crypto users globally, a sign that crypto is transitioning from speculative use to mainstream financial behavior.

• Stablecoins have achieved product-market fit

  With $8.5 trillion in transaction volume in Q2 2024—more than double Visa’s $3.9 trillion—stablecoins are no longer experimental. They are reliable, scalable tools for global value transfer, finally earning their place alongside legacy networks like Visa, ACH and PayPal.

• Payments hardware is becoming modular and open

  POS systems are moving from proprietary software to Android-based platforms, enabling seamless integration of blockchain modules. This rare hardware transition opens a scalable, low-friction path to embed crypto payments into existing merchant workflows.

These converging trends mark more than just a tipping point—they represent a structural shift in the digital payments landscape. For the first time, we have both the infrastructure and the user readiness to connect the openness of Web3 with the usability of Web2, using blockchain not as a speculative layer, but as a foundational protocol for real-world commerce. It is within this rare window of alignment—across users, technology, and hardware—that Onta Network emerges.