There is a moment most people remember the first time they send crypto. You paste the address, you look at it, and then you look at it again. A long string of characters that doesn’t tell you anything.
- No confirmed name on the other end
- No bank to call
- No recourse window
What I learned from my version of that moment was not that crypto was broken. It was that we built a very effective settlement layer, and then treated authorisation as optional. In every mature payment system, this comes in sequence. You establish who you are paying, and under what conditions, before settlement becomes final. Crypto skipped that step, and that is one of the main blockers to institutional adoption.
The Card Tap That Crypto Still Can’t Replicate
Think about what happens when you tap a card. Before money moves, an authorization message flows through the network. It carries structured information that each party can act on like merchant identity, risk signals, routing details, and settlement only follows once trust is established.
Blockchain transactions invert this sequence. Settlement is the first event. Everything that creates trust, who is sending, to which legal entity, for what purpose, and under which policy, is pieced together after the fact, if it is reconstructed at all.
This is an infrastructure sequencing problem. And the pressure to fix it is now coming from both regulation and market demand.
Three Dates That Changed the Conversation
In the EU, Travel Rule obligations for crypto asset transfers moved from "coming soon" to "in force" at the end of 2024. Compliance teams stopped treating this as a pilot problem and started treating it as a production one.
In June 2025, FATF agreed updates to Recommendation 16 on payment transparency, with a stronger focus on fraud and error prevention alongside AML. That may sound incremental, but it changes how systems are designed. The implementation horizon runs to end 2030, but the institutions that will handle this well are already building toward it.
In the US, the GENIUS Act brought stablecoin issuers clearly within Bank Secrecy Act obligations. Inside institutions, the question changed. It stopped being "does this apply?" and became "how do we build this into the flow without slowing everything down?"
That question only has a clean answer if authorisation is built into the process before settlement.
Trust by Design, Not by Accident
For stablecoins to work as everyday B2B rails, they need to produce the same outcomes other payment systems produce. Beneficiary assurance before settlement. Structured payment context that travels with the transaction. A clear liability model for when something goes wrong.
If a finance team cannot verify the counterparty before sending a six-figure payment, the system will not be used, regardless of how fast settlement is.
None of this requires abandoning open, permissionless networks. The more practical approach is to keep settlement open, and add a trust layer around it. Let the open network handle value transfer. Let the trust layer handle context, verification, controls, and audit evidence.
Privacy and trust do not have to conflict here. If designed properly, selective disclosure and secure messaging allow the right information to be shared with the right parties, without turning every transaction into unnecessary data exposure.
The address anxiety I started with is not inevitable. It is a design gap. The goal is not to remove the open address model, but to give it the context, trust, and recourse mechanisms that payment systems require.
It is the missing layer required for these systems to be used at scale.
About the Author
As an early member of the Financial Crypto community, Pelle Brændgaard built pre-blockchain crypto platforms, helped develop OAuth, and brought Bitcoin to Africa with Kipochi. He brings over 25 years of experience working in fintech, banking, blockchain, and decentralized identity in Europe, the US, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America.