Is a stablecoin just a "digital easy card"? A cognitive battle that stifles Taiwan's encryption future.

This article reveals how this "cognitive warfare" has pushed Taiwan to the brink of the global digital economy, conveying the arrogance of traditional financial regulation to look down on blockchain technology, and allowing Taiwan to miss out on the strategic short-sightedness of the next generation of financial infrastructure. (Synopsis: Bloomberg view: Hong Kong taxis demonstrate the perfect case of "stablecoin daily life") (Background supplement: Deloitte survey: 99% of corporate CFOs will adopt cryptocurrencies for a long time, stablecoins and bitcoin are attracting attention) The original text of the submission is provided by Eric Jiang, who has served in Taiwan's public stock banking for more than 15 years, and is now the regional head of blockchain and compliance and due diligence in foreign banks. It does not represent the position of Blocktempo. When a chairman of Financial Holdings, who holds trillions of dollars in assets, compares a global financial instrument with a market value of more than $260 billion and a daily trading volume of tens of billions of dollars to a transportation ticket in his hand, this is not just an inaccurate comment, but a wake-up call warning us that when Taiwan faces the wave of next-generation financial infrastructure, the helm is still in the harbor of the previous era; More importantly, the chairman of Financial Holdings and related conservative representatives are still exchanging views with FTC officials at various virtual asset and fintech seminars, which is influencing the progress of one of Taiwan's perhaps most important financial bills in recent years, the Stablecoin Act. Recently, Mr. Dong Ruibin, Chairman of Zhaofeng Financial Holdings. The statement that "stablecoins are like Youyou cards", bluntly saying that they lack utility for consumers, and asserting that there is no room for survival in Taiwan, comes from a person who is important in the financial industry and often exchanges views with Taiwan's regulatory council, central bank and other generations, and his influence on regulations and regulation cannot be underestimated. But this seemingly pragmatic metaphor commits a fundamental "category fallacy", a cognitive dislocation of the rocket as a motorcycle in commentary. This kind of thinking seems to be projected on the root cause of Taiwan's current "seemingly progressive" virtual asset regulations, which may also become the biggest stumbling block to our participation in the global digital economy. Is the EasyCard a digital stablecoin? A fundamental misunderstanding of fintech Comparing stablecoins to Youyou cards is the most basic "category fallacy" (Category Error), not only to see the trees but not to see the forest, but also to treat a spaceship ready to explore a new continent as a tender ship that can only rotate in various docks. Youyou card, essentially a "limited balance payment tool", its core function is small, near-end value transfer, what changes is our "payment action" - from taking out cash, into card sensing, the use scenario is limited to Taiwan, its system is centralized, each transaction needs to be cleared by the Youyou card company and the cooperative bank, and the profit model of the card issuer is to use the average balance of the transportation card held by the customer multiplied by the number of customers to obtain short-term funds for project investment or financial arbitrage. Its risk lies in the credit of the issuer, so the core of supervision is to ensure the safety of "stored value", such as requiring bank trusts and special funds, as of 2025, there are about 194 million electronic stored value cards in circulation in Taiwan, and the number of active cards is about 13.8 million, which is a mature and large local payment ecosystem, but compared to stablecoins, that's all. Stablecoins, on the other hand, are not "limited balance payment instruments" at all, they are "programmable financial infrastructures" (Programmable financial Infrastructure). It was born to create a low-volatility, high-liquidity "value medium" on the global blockchain network. What it changes is not the act of paying, but "the nature and flow of value." Stablecoins flow peer-to-peer, 24×/7, across borders, bypassing the layered clearing networks of traditional banks such as SWIFT. The more core difference is "programmability" - developers can build a variety of automated financial applications on top of stablecoins, such as real-time settlement of cross-border payroll, automatic payment of supply chain finance, automatic claims of insurance, seamless trading of decentralized exchange (DEX), automatic arbitrage implementation, and so on. Operators that need liquidity obtain stablecoins through stablecoin issuers, and stablecoins achieve large-scale reserve guarantee and profitability by investing in short-term treasury bills and short-term commodities for arbitrage, which is completely different from the profit model of small stored value Youyou card operators, from customers to cash flow, which is completely different from risk. According to the data, the total market capitalization of the global stablecoin market has exceeded $267 billion in 2025, and the daily real payment volume on the chain is as high as $20 billion to $30 billion. Payment giants such as Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal are all laying out stablecoin settlement networks. This is a completely different species from the Youyou card in terms of scale, level, and application potential. Chairman Dong Ruibin judged stablecoins by "no interest payment", "convenience is not as good as credit cards" and "will not be popularized in Taiwan", just like a self-proclaimed military expert commenting on an F-35 fighter "without cup holders" and "too little space in the back seat", completely misplaced the parity. In fact, the mainstream of long-term Taiwanese underground trading is USDT, which has long entered the public's life, but later Taiwan's regulations in order to fight fraud do not allow the public to trade USDT privately, and there is no legal channel to conduct offline transactions, whether this involves unconstitutionality, to be studied and clarified by the legal system, not to be discussed too much here, but it can be seen that the bureaucrats who make laws are very alienated from the people's lives. And what he didn't see even more is how Taiwan's industry and economy will be subverted by this new global financial underlying agreement, you can't use it, or you think Taiwan can't use it, it doesn't mean that other foreign investors and tourists who come to Taiwan can't use it, when China accelerates the deployment of the US stablecoin bill through Hong Kong, South Korea's Lee Jae-myung, and Trump, such a "Taiwan is unnecessary" and "the U.S. Pass card is earlier and better" arguments, which is just an old and harmful theory that sells qualifications, basically unable to connect with the world. National borders disappear in the stablecoin world: Taiwan is losing its "currency discourse" Dong Ruibin's second blind spot lies in his extremely inward-looking "domestic consumer" perspective, he accurately analyzes the conflict of interests between issuers and users (issuers can earn interest on reserve assets), but completely ignores the global power shift that stablecoins are triggering: from "sovereign currencies" to "super-sovereign currency networks" dominated by technology companies or decentralized protocols. Ironically, Dong Ruibin himself mentioned that the reason why China and Hong Kong are actively developing stablecoins is to compete for "monetary discourse". This observation may be correct, but he has not been able to take this insight to his own perspective and consider Taiwan's place in this game. As global digital trade, cross-border e-commerce, and remote work become more common, businesses and individuals are looking for settlement tools with the lowest friction and highest efficiency. If a Taiwanese software company has employees or customers in Europe, the United States and Southeast Asia, what it needs most is a channel that can receive US dollars or euros instantly and at low cost, which will not be traditional wire transfers or even EasyCard, which is expensive and wasteful, but most likely USDC or EURC stablecoins based on the Ethereum or Solana networks. When this trading model becomes the norm, a new type of "digital dollarization" (Digital D...