Flash Dollars (Velocity in the Onchain Economy)
What happens when dollars move 1,000,000x faster?
In my last post I wrote about onchain orchestration and contemplated the above question at the end. Here we take it on.
When Michael Lewis wrote Flash Boys, he pulled back the curtain on the high-frequency trading (HFT) arms race at the time — a world where microseconds mattered. Traders built private fiber lines between exchanges, and market makers co-located servers beside matching engines to gain microscopic advantages. The lesson was both thrilling and unsettling: the faster money moves, the more the system amplifies both efficiency and fragility.
That story wasn’t just about Wall Street drama. It was about velocity — the rate at which capital circulates — and the power (and potential peril) of infrastructure that makes money move faster than ever before.
Today, that same consideration is important for the onchain economy. It is imperative that we anticipate the inevitability of faster, smarter money — and design the right infrastructure and incentives to accommodate it.
Velocity redux
Economists use "velocity of money" to describe how often a unit of currency changes hands in a given period. In traditional finance, velocity is constrained by intermediaries and existing infrastructure — banks, payment rails, clearinghouses. A dollar might move a few times a day, or a week, or not at all.
Onchain, those constraints mostly disappear. Stablecoins already move across protocols, wallets, and chains with a fluidity that dwarfs fiat settlement systems. As DeFi dollars become more interchangeable, as blockchains continue to scale, as interoperability protocols mature, as agentic commerce becomes a reality — stablecoins could move thousands (millions?) of times per day, continuously and often autonomously redeployed, rebalanced, and bridged.
This is not a small change. It’s a paradigm shift in how capital behaves. Velocity, in the onchain world, won’t just increase — it will absolutely explode, in a way we can actually feel.
Blockchains and interop as HFT engines
In this world, every cross-chain send or swap, rebalance operation, and yield migration starts to look more like an HFT operation: short-duration, latency-sensitive, often arbitrage-driven. The infrastructure challenge becomes clear: How do we make these global, trust-minimized systems fast enough, reliable enough, and composable enough to support that kind of volume and velocity? Our success in this endeavor will make all the difference in bringing "institutional dollars" onchain and keeping them there.
I think a few things are important here (not a coincidence that each of these factors into @eco's design and endgame):
- Shared liquidity layers that pool stablecoin depth across chains instead of further fragmenting it.
- Highly programmable routing that optimizes order flow and transaction execution across that liquidity.
- High-speed interoperability and order matching protocols for batching and clearing value with extremely high performance.
- Verifiable compute tools that allow automation to act quickly, but safely.
The faster and smarter we can move money, and the deeper our liquidity to support that money movement, the better we can accommodate a future with many tokenized dollars streaming across a unified onchain economy.
Avoiding the Flash Boys trap
But if we’re not careful, when every onchain dollar becomes a flash dollar, we’ll recreate the same dynamics that made traditional markets more opaque and unequal (indeed, we've already seen this with predatory MEV games). The opportunity of crypto is to give every user HFT grade execution and the benefits that come with.
The key is remembering: velocity should serve utility, not privileged speculation.
That means designing fair sequencing, transparent mempools, latency-aware interoperability, and economic incentives that reward liquidity provision over information asymmetry. In other words: to make flash dollars possible, crypto needs its own HFT infrastructure that’s open, composable, and aligned with users.
Brave New World
We’re fast entering an era where stablecoins don’t just sit in wallets — they move, more continuously and autonomously, across protocols and ecosystems. The dream isn’t "high-frequency trading" per se. It’s high-frequency coordination — real-time, programmable money movement across an economy where every participant can plug into the same rails and benefit from the same speed.
If we accomplish this, the onchain economy will be the biggest economy that's ever existed, sooner than later. Have I said that before?
Some endnotes
- This article written by an unapologetic em dash maximalist.
- The Flash Boys analogy is obviously apt for the MEV game as well, which is much more played out. It's just not our focus here.
- You could unpack the consequences of massively higher velocity of money in an entire series of posts (or an entire dissertation for that matter). Maybe we will eventually. But this is intended to be a quicker, thought-provoking intro.
- If you're interested in reading more about how stablecoins and crypto affect traditional money functions and assumptions, people like @CampbellJAustin are great follows.
About Eco
Eco is the network that powers real-time money movement across every major stablecoin and blockchain, ensuring dollars flow seamlessly across today's fragmented multichain landscape. Leading apps and protocols integrate Eco to power stablecoin flows where best-in-class execution is required — upgrading stablecoin UX throughout their ecosystems and unifying them all in a thriving Stable Economy.
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About Eco Inc.
Eco Inc. is a blockchain company building software that maximizes money’s value. The company is a founding contributor to the Eco Protocol and the builder of Bend. We expect better from our money, and we want you to as well. That’s what drives us every day.