This year there are two numbers worth noting: the number of merchants using Binance Pay skyrocketed from 12,000 at the beginning of the year to 20 million, with over 98% of B2C payments settled in stablecoins; at the same time, Falcon Finance announced that through AEON Pay, it has integrated USDf and FF into over 50 million offline and online merchants globally, starting with high-growth markets such as Southeast Asia, Nigeria, Mexico, Brazil, and Georgia. Stablecoins have evolved from being 'chips for transactions' to 'cash for buying coffee', and Falcon Finance / USDf is taking a more aggressive approach — it aims to push a synthetic dollar originally used for CeDeFi yields directly to the cash registers of the real world, allowing you to see both APY and 'scan to pay' in your Binance wallet.
In the past few years, the story of stablecoins mainly unfolded on exchanges and on-chain: USDT and USDC became the basic chips for contracts and cross-market arbitrage; more experiments occurred in DeFi farms and RWA treasuries—you throw dollars in, exchange for a higher string of numbers, and then pray the protocol doesn’t rug pull at some early morning. After 2025, the narrative began to run offline: data from TRM and several research institutions indicate that during the same time period, the annual trading volume of stablecoins has surpassed $4 trillion, with high-inflation markets in South Asia, Latin America, and Africa using stablecoins as 'digital dollar deposits' and 'cross-border wages'; McKinsey even directly pointed out that 2025 is likely to be a turning point for stablecoin payment infrastructure, with businesses beginning to seriously use 'tokenized cash' for settlements and treasury management. But the reality is, most of these 'payment stablecoins' themselves do not generate yield; you either have to separately find places to farm, or accept your funds sitting in your wallet being eaten by inflation.
Falcon Finance / USDf initially did not just want to create a 'better USDT', but aimed to create an 'explainable yield dollar': you can mint USDf by collateralizing USDT, USDC, BTC, ETH, or a basket of RWA on Falcon Finance's universal collateral infrastructure. The protocol uses this pool of collateral to run funding rates, basis, RWA coupon strategies, and then deposits the yield into a net value curve through sUSDf; FF packages the entire stack's protocol revenue, repurchase, and governance rights into a rights ticket. For many, Falcon Finance has previously been relatively 'insider': USDf/sUSDf feels more like a CeDeFi yield tool used by advanced players and institutions; you would see it in structured products and Treasury allocation tables, rather than at a convenience store checkout.
AEON Pay has obviously pulled this line outward a step. AEON is designed as a payment framework for 'bringing crypto into physical cash registers', having already entered the Discover/dApp area of the Binance Wallet. Users can search for AEON Pay in the Binance wallet and use their wallet's coins to scan and buy coffee, order takeout, or take the subway. Falcon Finance chose to connect USDf and FF to AEON's network at this point, essentially integrating its liquidity pool, which primarily served DeFi/CeDeFi, with real-world POS machines—it's stated plainly in the announcement: through AEON Pay, USDf/FF can now be used in over 50 million merchant scenarios across Southeast Asia and multiple countries, making it one of the largest real-world applications of DeFi to date.
What does this mean specifically for an ordinary Binance user? Previously, your wallet would probably have three types of 'dollars': USDT/USDC for trading, 'spot yield notes' (like certain RWA fund shares) that you hold, and occasionally some odd stablecoins for promotions; now if you hold Falcon Finance's USDf/sUSDf/FF, these positions are no longer just 'watching K lines and APR numbers', but have the opportunity to become balances that can be used to scan merchant codes for payment. USDf minted from a BTC collateral can be linked to Falcon's sUSDf treasury to earn CeDeFi yield, while the other end connects to convenience stores and online payment scenarios through AEON Pay—this is a very intuitive combination for a new generation of users accustomed to managing 'investment positions + daily cash flow' in one app.
From Falcon Finance's perspective, this step is precisely in sync with the rhythm of Binance and stablecoin payments. Binance Pay has seen merchant growth of 1700 times over the past 10 months, with 98% of B2C transactions among 20 million global merchants settled using stablecoins; AEON Pay has embedded itself into Binance Wallet and other leading wallets (Bitget, OKX, KuCoin, Solana Pay, etc.), specifically targeting regions with high inflation and high foreign exchange costs—Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America. Connecting USDf to this channel is essentially betting on one thing: the next true scenario for large-scale cryptocurrency adoption is not NFT, not GameFi, but 'a more usable dollar', and one that also generates yield.
For merchants and institutions, the difference between USDf and traditional payment stablecoins is more reflected in 'where the funds go afterwards'. Ordinary merchants receiving USDT/USDC typically choose to immediately exchange it for local fiat currency, or simply get stuck in the exchange as dead balances; Falcon Finance's explored path is: merchants can directly or through partners deposit their USDf into the sUSDf treasury or other low-risk strategies, obtaining a relatively smooth yield curve; institutions and payment companies can regard USDf as a 'settleable, configurable' structured dollar asset, participating in DeFi/CeFi yields while retaining high liquidity within the Binance/AEON ecosystem. This further pulls stablecoins from being merely 'payment tools' towards 'treasury management products'—as mentioned in the McKinsey report about 'companies using stablecoins for treasury and cross-border settlements', Falcon is using CeDeFi language to push this to the extreme.
Of course, this model of 'yield dollars entering merchants' also requires more trust engineering than pure payment stablecoins. The DeFi security report for 2025 has already warned everyone that in Q1 of this year, various DeFi/CeFi attacks caused losses exceeding $2 billion; on-chain security issues have not disappeared, but have continued to escalate in complexity; when the CEO of Chainalysis publicly warns that 'too many DeFi protocols focus only on TVL without paying attention to security', any protocol wanting to link its assets to real-world cash registers must provide a higher transparency standard than ordinary farms. This is why Falcon Finance continuously emphasizes its custodians, insurance funds, audits, PoR, and on-chain/off-chain transparency: the trust assumption of CeDeFi is inherently heavier than pure DeFi, and now it must serve small merchants offline in Southeast Asia and Africa, making it even less acceptable to use phrases like 'trust the team' to brush past it.
The correct usage of Falcon Finance / USDf / sUSDf / FF after AEON Pay may become a kind of mental account: treat part of the assets as 'structured yield dollars', allocate them to USDf/sUSDf, and accept that this is a position with CeDeFi risks, but with explainable yield sources; leave some of the balance in the Binance wallet to use as 'liquid' for daily payments and transfers through AEON Pay, which can be switched back from treasury state to consumable state whenever needed. You do not need to hang every expenditure in life on Falcon, but you can let a portion of 'cash flow that remains on-chain and doesn’t want to convert to fiat immediately' have liquidity under the USDf model without being completely idle.
From a cyclical perspective, this step locks in a long-term role for Falcon Finance / USDf / sUSDf / FF—**not the wildest farm, nor the most simplistic USDT, but a 'dollar layer that can be paid in the Binance ecosystem, circulated in the AEON network, and simultaneously linked to a CeDeFi yield curve'.** If stablecoins really become, as investment banks and consulting reports suggest, the main vehicle for global payments and treasury management after 2025, then this layer of 'interest-earning settlement dollars' has the potential to occupy a significant piece of the puzzle long-term; if this narrative ultimately breaks down, Falcon at least tried once on a path with real cash flow, real merchants, and the backing of the Binance ecosystem, rather than remaining in a short-cycle game of 'I can offer you a higher APY'. As for whether you want to give it a place, that returns to the simplest question: how much risk budget are you willing to wager on the idea that 'yield dollars can make it to real-world cash registers'.
Disclaimer: The above content is the personal research and opinion of 'Kezhou Qiujian', intended for information sharing only, and does not constitute any investment or trading advice.@Falcon Finance $FF #FalconFinance
