Recently, the U Card has been pushed into the spotlight of public opinion.

After reconsidering the entire process, here are the current stage assessments.

Structurally, the U Card is not new.
The card itself remains a USD card issued by Visa / Mastercard.
Clearing, settlement, pre-funding, risk control,
all occur within the traditional bank card system.
The only change is the entry point of funds:
no longer USD transferred via bank wire,
but USDT / USDC coming from the blockchain.
When a purchase is truly completed,
the actual payment is not made with stablecoins,
but with the fiat reserve funds of the card issuer.
The real location of the stablecoins,
is in the account held by the issuer,
not within the payment network.
Because of this,
all genuine risks and compliance pressures
are concentrated on the card issuer.
Therefore, the U Card is not a “light mode.”
It appears smooth and seamless
because its complexity is overall elevated.
What the card issuer is doing essentially is:
using their own compliance credentials, clearing capacity, and risk control systems to
perform a legal fiat currency conversion for stablecoin users.
From this perspective,
the U Card is not the ultimate form of stablecoins.
It is more like a makeshift, yet very practical, intermediate solution under current regulatory and infrastructure conditions.
It does not aim for a “payment revolution,”
but addresses a more specific and conservative issue:
how to enable stablecoins to be used without changing the existing payment network.
If one day,
stablecoins can be directly accepted by merchants, directly cleared, and directly settled,
the importance of the U Card will diminish,
and at that point, it might not even be in the form of a “card.”
But until then, the core value of the U Card is not in the realm of imagination,
but in how many high-frequency, real consumption scenarios it can capture.
This is my current stage assessment: the U Card is just a customer acquisition tool and a product of a transitional phase.