You see, on the surface, Uber “adding stablecoins” looks like a technical footnote. But peel back a few layers and it’s less about payments, more about rewriting the underlying rules of global commerce. Dara isn’t just cutting fees; he’s quietly redrawing borders

Uber’s scale isn’t a detail. With 170 million active users and over $40B+ in quarterly transactions, when they shift their money rails (even “just for study”) it’s a planetary-scale stress test for the old order. Visa and Mastercard lose $60B in market cap in a week, and that’s just from rumors. Imagine what happens when Uber flips the switch for real

But don’t get too excited about buying your ride with Bitcoin. They want stability, not the volatility with high transaction fee. This is Uber’s chance to build its own internal nervous system

Regulators are right to sweat: the geopolitical chessboard is fracturing, with every country dreaming of its own programmable digital coin. Uber, meanwhile, aims for a universal lubricant, a frictionless rail that no central bank can pull off the tracks. If this works, Uber might turn from gig-economy app to something closer to a “platform-state”, where the driver is both labor and citizen, the ride is both work and remittance, and the app is the bank

Maybe it sounds far-fetched. Maybe it’s inevitable. And what happens to the millions whose economic lives now flow through its software, and the governments that suddenly realize the pipes are being rerouted right under their noses