Stablecoin and on-chain paymentsالمدفوعات على السلسلة On-chain

An on-chain payment is value moving between two parties on a shared ledger, with no bank in the middle carrying it. What it is mostly used for today is not everyday buying, but moving large amounts between companies in different countries.

It is not a magic substitute for mada or sarie. It is a settlement path that solves one specific problem and fails visibly at others. Knowing which of the two is in front of you is the whole skill here.

The problem it genuinely solves

Take a real case. A Saudi company wants to pay a supplier in Singapore 100,000 dollars. The traditional path sends the money from its bank to a correspondent bank, then another correspondent, then the supplier's bank. Each stop screens, deducts a fee, and adds delay. The result is two or three days, at a cost you cannot state precisely until it lands.

The reason is that banks in different countries share no common ledger, so they exchange messages and each holds accounts with the other. It is a decades-old system and it works, but it is slow and opaque about price.

The same transfer in a stablecoin (العملة المستقرة) arrives in minutes, with a network fee that may be a few dollars. Both parties use the same ledger, so no chain of messaging intermediaries is needed.

The benefit is not theoretical. The World Bank puts the global average cost of cross-border personal remittances above six percent, and in some corridors it is higher. That is the gap stablecoins moved into.

Where the savings disappear

Here is the part marketing decks leave out. The on-chain transfer is cheap. Getting in and getting out are not.

The supplier in Singapore does not pay salaries in tokens. They need Singapore dollars in a bank account. That conversion goes through an off-ramp (منحدر الخروج), a licensed company that buys the token and sends cash. It takes a spread, applies identity checks, and may hold the amount for review.

So the right question is not "what is the network fee". It is: what does the on-ramp cost, what does the off-ramp cost, and how long does each take in this specific country. In corridors with mature ramps the savings are real and large. In corridors without a reliable ramp, the savings vanish entirely at both ends.

What you give up for the speed

What an on-chain payment loses above all is reversibility. A wrong card payment can be undone through a chargeback (الاسترداد), and a wrong sarie transfer may be resolved between the two banks. An on-chain transfer is final. Send to the wrong address and it is over.

That inverts product design. Instead of relying on later correction, the error has to be prevented up front: a saved address book, a small test transfer first, and double confirmation for large amounts.

Finality does not mean obligations vanished either. A payment product still needs sanctions screening, a rejection message the customer can understand, and a complaints path. There is even an international rule, the travel rule (قاعدة السفر), requiring virtual asset service providers to attach sender and beneficiary information to transfers above a threshold, exactly as banks do with wires.

How long before you treat it as arrived

A transaction is not final the moment it is sent. It enters the network, gets included in a block, and then more blocks are built on top of it. Each additional block makes reversing it harder, which is why people say to wait for a number of confirmations.

This is a product decision, not a technical one. A merchant handing over a cheap item may accept one confirmation. A treasury team receiving a million dollars waits for more. The less you wait, the greater the risk of releasing goods against a transaction that gets undone.

A third issue beginners overlook: accounting. A stablecoin balance has to be booked in the company's records, valued at period end, and explained to an auditor and to the tax authority. The question is not whether the transfer is technically possible. It is whether your accountant can close the month with it.

What the market is doing now

These are no longer fringe experiments. PayPal launched its own stablecoin, PYUSD, in August 2023. Stripe acquired Bridge, a stablecoin infrastructure company, in October 2024 for around 1.1 billion dollars. Two payment companies of that size moving in says the bet is on specific corridors, not on replacing cards.

Three corridors stand out: business payments between countries, moving a company's treasury between its own entities, and worker remittances into countries with weak banking or a volatile currency.

And why it does not fit local retail

You will not find a good reason to pay for coffee in Riyadh with a token. mada arrives in seconds, is accepted everywhere, is free to the customer, and gives them dispute rights. Any product asking them to install a wallet, buy a token, and pay a network fee offers a worse experience for nothing.

That is the rule governing this entire field: tokens win where the existing rail is slow, expensive and cross-border, and lose where it is fast, cheap and domestic. Saudi Arabia has sarie and mada, an excellent instant domestic rail. So the question here is about cross-border alone.

Locally, start from permission rather than technology. If your product stores or moves value for a customer, the central bank is in the analysis, whatever token runs underneath.