• AI tools and no-code platforms mean a two-person agency in Lagos or a solo creator in Bangkok can be selling to 40 countries within months. Cross-border commerce is no longer an enterprise problem.
• The infrastructure is production-ready. Stablecoin settlement crossed $27T in 2024. GENIUS Act and MiCA have delivered regulatory clarity.
• Incumbents are architecturally stuck: Shift4, one of the world's best-resourced payment companies, took 3 years and 3 vendors to ship stablecoin settlement. Nuvei found the integration so complex they delegated to stablecoin-native startups rather than build it themselves. The compliance layer alone, KYC flows, transaction monitoring, regulatory reporting, was designed around fiat rails; mapping it onto on-chain settlement isn't a config change, it's a rebuild.