My interview last week with Rémi Burdairon sparked an intriguing discussion. Some readers questioned whether stablecoins and tokenisation would really revolutionise agricultural commodity trading.
Li Liu commented:
Stablecoins are plausibly useful as payment infrastructure — faster settlement and higher dollar velocity are real advantages. That claim stands on its own. Where the argument weakens is when this payment efficiency is implicitly extended into regulatory bypass and then further into systemic credit expansion via tokenisation….
Tokenised warehouse receipts do not create trust — they merely digitise it, and only to the extent that physical control, inspection, and legal enforceability already exist. The interview actually acknowledges the core constraint: the weakest link is the physical-digital boundary. That admission undercuts any near-term “revolution” narrative.
Rémi replied:
One could argue that this is merely a disruption, but given that this industry has barely evolved over the past 50 years, I would rather call it a revolution in motion.
That revolution is already underway in India, where the warehouses that issue the tokens are government-owned. (I hope to write more about that soon.) However, attempts elsewhere are running into headwinds.
As one reader wrote to me privately:
Turning warehouse receipts or future crops into tradable tokens does not manufacture trust out of thin air; it digitises the trust already embedded in storage, law, and inspection.
However, while the revolution in tokenisation may be making slow progress against strong headwinds, that of stablecoins is already well underway.
Bloomberg ($) reported earlier this week that stablecoin transaction volumes hit around 33 trillion dollars in 2025, with USDC dominating DeFi flows and USDT used heavily for everyday payments and trade settlement, signalling “mass adoption of digital US dollars” as a store of value and medium of exchange.
The newswire added:
For citizens and firms in inflation‑prone or capital‑controlled economies, stablecoins are the path of least resistance to holding and moving dollars.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported ($) that by one estimate, almost 80% of Venezuela’s oil revenue is collected in stablecoins like Tether.
In a separate article, Bloomberg writes:
Cryptocurrencies — particularly dollar-pegged stablecoins — are widely used in Venezuela after prolonged bouts of hyperinflation, sanctions and capital controls. The country’s total crypto transaction volume reached $44.6 billion last year, up about 19% from 2022.
Despite having only about half the population of neighbouring Colombia, Venezuela matched its crypto transaction volume last year.
“Venezuela is one of the most prominent examples of countries where crypto adoption became an economic necessity,” said Michal Moneta, chief operating officer at the Onchain Foundation. “It wasn’t about favourable regulation. Individuals found solutions to their problems in cryptocurrencies.”
Stablecoins offer an obvious upgrade to the agricommodity supply chain without asking the industry to rethink who owns the silos.
They are faster and more affordable than traditional FX payments in dollars. Significantly, a trader can continue using the same warehouse receipts while only switching the payment mechanism from SWIFT to stablecoin.
In the US, the Genius Act now establishes clear reserve, disclosure, and licensing requirements for stablecoins.
The revolution might be more gradual in Africa, as Rémi explained:
Regulatory bypass risks may indeed exist in countries where crypto assets are restricted or banned; these are high-risk corridors where stablecoins are viewed as FX circumvention tools. In countries where crypto assets remain unregulated, the situation is admittedly a grey area: stablecoins can be used, but are not always locally off-rampable without offshore structures or local OTC intermediaries.
That said, de facto acceptance is clearly growing. In South Africa, Nigeria, Botswana, Namibia, Mauritius, etc., regulatory frameworks now exist that formally recognise crypto assets. South Africa, in particular, is currently the best-in-class African jurisdiction for stablecoin trade settlement. So my view is therefore that we are moving toward a more generalised acceptance of crypto across the continent
Even so, regulators feel more at ease with a regulated electronic money instrument than with a token that grants ownership of cocoa stored in a warehouse.
All in all, the most realistic near-term outcome is not tokens replacing warehouse receipts, but stablecoins becoming the standard settlement system for agricommodities.
Is the CEO of Tether correct when he says that, within five years, all commodity transactions will be paid in stablecoins?
What do you think?
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