Chatting About Stablecoins, LINE Pay, and the B2B Era

A friend and I got into a casual debate on LINE a while back over stablecoins. What started as small talk turned into a real argument — from whether restaurants should accept stablecoin payments, to Taiwan's payment regulation reality, and it finally landed on a bigger question I've kept turning over since: is this an era where B2C startups are doomed to get flattened by giants? Here are the cleaned-up notes, roughly in the order the conversation went.

Stablecoin fees are lower — but that's not what restaurants actually want

My starting point was intuitive: LINE Pay's credit-card processing fees are genuinely high. Swap in a stablecoin settlement and the fee percentage drops a lot — shouldn't that be more comfortable for merchants?

My friend's pushback was immediate — you have to think from both the buyer's and the seller's side at once. A lower fee percentage only matters if someone is actually willing to pay with a stablecoin. Of the people who walk into a restaurant to eat, how many are actually holding stablecoins they can spend directly? Without liquidity, an elegant fee structure on paper is worthless.

He added an even blunter observation: compared to saving on fees, taking cash is often more advantageous for a restaurant owner — it's opaque, hard for regulators to trace, and that incentive alone already outweighs whatever percentage points LINE Pay would save. In other words, what merchants actually prioritize was never "which payment tool has the more advanced technology" — it's cash flow and bookkeeping flexibility.

People building in crypto jump too fast from "the fee is lower, so it should get adopted" — without asking what a restaurant owner actually prioritizes.

LINE Pay isn't selling payment technology — it's buying customer intent

At that point I pushed back with a question: then how did LINE Pay win? Its liquidity wasn't handed down from the sky either — it was built slowly by the financial industry. Didn't it have to endure the same high-fee-percentage problem at some point too?

His answer made me rethink the whole sequence. What LINE Pay is really buying is customer willingness to use it — not building a better payment technology. LINE first created liquidity out of its existing scenarios and user base; payment was just a layer stacked on top later. Once liquidity and trust are in place, what runs underneath — including whether to eventually wrap in a layer of blockchain — stops mattering much, and there's no need to tell users "we're now using blockchain."

Technology is never adopted first and then creates the scenario. The scenario and the liquidity come first — only then is technology quietly allowed to swap underneath.

That's also why "build a better payment product" sounds appealing but gets the sequence backwards — you don't build a better payment rail and have the scenario and users follow. It's the other way around.

Taiwan's payment regulation reality: a cost worth totaling up first

My friend's advice was blunt: for the payment space specifically, a Taiwanese team is better off thinking hard before jumping in. His reasoning wasn't that the technology can't be built — it's the regulatory cost. Go read the relevant financial regulations and you'll see: just the compliance work, the back-and-forth with regulators, and getting the necessary qualifications is a long process that has nothing to do with actually building the product. For a startup, that upfront investment easily turns into a sunk cost with no return.

His conclusion: rather than grinding away at a track with a high regulatory bar and no guaranteed differentiation, go find an application that's genuinely real — one you can prove someone is willing to pay to solve. It's the same conclusion a lot of B2B founders eventually reach — find the smallest wedge where the pain runs deepest, instead of falling in love with a technology first.

B2B is this era's answer — B2C gets flattened by giants

The conversation eventually circled back to a bigger thesis: his read is that this is the era of B2B startups, and B2C will get flattened by giants.

I pushed back once more — really? His reasoning was simple: models let the giants generate their own content too. B2C products used to be able to compete around giants using content, community, and differentiated experience — but once the cost of generating content approaches zero, giants can fill in that "differentiation" themselves, and the gap small players used to survive in gets paved over.

B2B's position is different — its moat is often not the technology itself, but an insight embedded in a specific workflow: do you actually understand where the customer's real pain is, who the decision-maker is, which kind of cost you're actually saving them. That kind of understanding can't be copied overnight by a stronger model, because it isn't content — it's relationship and context.

There's no single right answer from this chat, but it did sharpen a fuzzy intuition I'd been circling: instead of asking "is this technology better," ask "who actually needs this, and can a giant not fill that in."