How are we supposed to spend our crypto money?
In 2025, I lost over $15,000 due to P2P scams
At that time, I needed to fund the kindergarten project, and trying to offramp quickly without fees, I looked at the option most available - Peer to Peer sales
It's been working relatively fine for me for over 3 years, so there were no suspicions. Money was withdrawn and well spent. All seemed fine...
But after 2 months, I get a call from someone, demanding me to return everything that was withdrawn.
I immediately thought of this as a scam and dismissed it, but later our bank accounts were banned and we received official statements from the court.
What happened was a classic P2P scam - the triangle.
Triangle scam method visualized by signzy
On P2P platform, someone approaches you to buy your stables. They send the money from a third-party, you receive it, everyone happy.
But later, the third party declares themselves a victim of a scam and requests the money back. And because it's a centralized system, you have to return the funds or choose to get arrested.
The system does not care if those third parties are scammers themselves. They only look after the fraudulent P2P transaction.
Call me naive, but I never encountered a scam on P2P. Hence my guard was down.
And still, we have to spend our money somehow. What's the point of earning if you cannot utilize them, right?
You have multiple options to do it:
1. Offramp via centralized exchanges
2. Use Neo-banks such as KAST or Tria
3. P2P sales
4. Crypto to cash IRL transactions
Immediately, number 4 is shadiest method. You send crypto to a seller and they supply you cash IRL. No bank involved. Obviously high chance of scam and potential danger to you, like in the accident with @sillytuna in 2025. Anybody can track and rob you, knowing your face and the contents of your crypto wallet.
Although we don't have $24 millions, this might happen to anyone in crypto
Next, we have P2P. As I explained earlier, it involves lots of scams; has a lot of friction to it; and is not recognized in most jurisdictions.
Neo-banks and centralized exchange off-ramps are interesting. They sure seem legit and allow you to seamlessly spend your crypto, but there is a high cost involved.
When you spend your stablecoins with those methods, service providers do not just receive crypto. Your money first gets converted to fiat (USD in our case) and then goes through foreign exchange markets or FX, to be converted into the fiat currency of your respective location.
And each transaction like this costs us up to 13% because FX spreads and bank fees. Imagine spending $100, only to receive $87 equivalent of purchasing power.
Oh you don't have to imagine though, it is happening to us daily.
Rich gets richer
In fact, SWIFT and banks, remittance providers, card networks and all intermediaries extract over $21.8B per day. Stablecoins promised us cross-border settlements at low cost, but in reality we are still running through the same system.
This is the problem @seraprotocol is trying to solve. Sera is building an onchain FX settlement layer that aims to power transactions across 70+ stablecoins via Central Limit Orderbook model (CLOB).
It's us who pay for this extraction
As of now, the stablecoin market in crypto feels pretty raw. The total market cap of stablecoins constitute over $305B, but only $0.8B of them are non-USD based. They are balanced through AMMs, and don't have sufficient liquidity to provide seamless trading experience. Thus, you will feel the slippage at sums as low as $5k.
Instead of utilizing AMMs, Sera is using CLOB model to power FX transactions. The liquidity will be placed by market makers who are incentivized by spread between different currencies. During the process, the users still pay for the premiums, but receive much better exchange rates with almost instant settlement times, as compared to traditional overran rails.
The goal of the project is extremely ambitious - for some it might even seem too big to be accomplished. But I'd rather believe and see how Sera develops and starts to bring real value.
I sincerely wish the Sera team and @DouglasGan success with their project, so that hundreds of thousands of people can enjoy regulation-pro, cheap payments!
Thank you for a read!