Start with a simple question. When a company in California pays a software vendor in Bangalore, what actually happens between the moment someone clicks send and the moment the vendor’s bank account shows a number?
The answer, if you have spent any time in the payments industry, is that a lot happens. The bank in California sends a message through SWIFT, the global messaging network that banks use to talk to one another. That message travels through one, two, sometimes three or four correspondent banks, each of which holds pre-funded accounts in foreign currencies, checks the transaction against sanctions lists, applies its own anti-money laundering filters, and passes the payment along. At each hop, time passes. A fee is charged. By the time the payment arrives in Bangalore, anywhere between one and five business days have elapsed. Three to five percent of the original amount may have disappeared in fees and foreign exchange spreads. The vendor’s treasury team has reconciled the payment against an invoice that was sent weeks ago. Everything worked. It just worked slowly and expensively, in a way that businesses in the twenty-first century have largely accepted as normal.
Stablecoins are the most credible challenge to that normal that has ever existed. Not because they are newer or more sophisticated than previous alternatives, but because for the first time the pieces needed to make them work at institutional scale — regulatory frameworks, infrastructure, compliance tooling, liquidity, and merchant-facing products — are all arriving at roughly the same time.
This is a tour of where things stand right now, as of May 2026. What stablecoins actually are, how the money flows, what specific companies are doing with them today, where the plumbing still leaks, and what the next few years look like for anyone running a business or a financial institution that touches international payments.
What a stablecoin is, and why that matters
A stablecoin is a digital token designed to hold a fixed value relative to a traditional currency. The most widely used ones are pegged to the US dollar. The mechanics that maintain that peg vary by issuer, but the most trusted and most heavily adopted version is straightforward: the issuer holds real dollars, or dollar-equivalent assets like short-term US Treasury bills, in a segregated reserve. For every one USDC in circulation, Circle holds one dollar in reserve. For every one USDT in circulation, Tether claims equivalent assets. These tokens live on public blockchains — Ethereum, Solana, TRON, Avalanche, and others — and can be transferred between wallets in seconds, at any time of day, on any day of the year, for a cost measured in fractions of a cent.
The key insight is that a stablecoin transfer is not a message between banks asking each other to move money. It is an actual movement of value on a shared ledger that every participant can read. When you send USDC from one wallet to another on Ethereum, the transaction finalises in about fifteen seconds. On Solana, it is closer to four hundred milliseconds. There is no correspondent bank waiting for a message. There is no nostro account somewhere that needs to be pre-funded. There is no cut-off time after which payments must wait until tomorrow morning. The settlement is the transaction.
The outstanding supply of dollar-backed stablecoins crossed $280 billion by the end of 2025, up from roughly $7 billion at the start of 2020. That represents a forty-fold increase in just six years. That is a forty-fold increase in five years. Adjusted for the trading and automated flows that constitute most on-chain activity, actual real-world stablecoin payment volume doubled in 2025 to reach around $400 billion, sixty percent of which is estimated to be business-to-business. On-chain transaction volumes approached $12 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2025 alone. These are no longer experimental numbers.
The regulatory moment that changed everything
For years, the stablecoin industry operated in a legal grey area, particularly in the United States. Issuers were regulated under a patchwork of state money transmission laws. There was no federal clarity on reserve requirements, consumer protections, or the rights of stablecoin holders in the event of an issuer insolvency. Banks and large payment companies that might otherwise have moved quickly into stablecoins moved slowly, because legal uncertainty is expensive and the consequences of getting it wrong are severe.
In July 2025, that changed. President Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law, the first federal legislation governing payment stablecoins in the United States. The law is not perfect and it has critics, but what it did was essential: it gave the industry a set of rules to build around. Issuers must hold reserves of one-to-one in high-quality liquid assets. They must publish monthly disclosures of reserve composition. CEO and CFO certifications are required. Stablecoin holders get priority over all other creditors in an insolvency. The law draws a clear line between payment stablecoins and securities or commodities, ending a years-long debate about regulatory jurisdiction.
Within months, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency granted conditional national trust bank charters to five companies: Circle, Paxos, BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets, and Ripple. These are not full bank charters, but they are federal recognition that stablecoin issuance is a legitimate financial activity deserving of federal oversight. MoonPay’s vice president of banking and payment partnerships described the GENIUS Act as “a permission slip” at Consensus Miami in May 2026. That characterisation is accurate. The law did not create the stablecoin market. It made it safe for the institutions that had been watching from the sidelines to finally participate.
In Europe, the MiCA framework reached full implementation in December 2024, making Circle’s USDC the first stablecoin to achieve full MiCA compliance. Singapore’s Monetary Authority of Singapore has its own framework. Canada announced legislation following the US lead. The regulatory picture is not uniform globally, but the major jurisdictions are moving in the same direction, and the direction is toward accommodation rather than prohibition.
How the money actually moves — the mechanics underneath
Understanding what happens under the hood is essential for any executive making decisions about stablecoin adoption. The mechanics are not complicated, but they are specific enough that hand-waving over them creates real strategic errors.
The simplest version of a stablecoin cross-border payment has three stages. The sender converts local fiat currency to stablecoins. The stablecoins travel across a blockchain to the recipient’s wallet. The recipient converts the stablecoins to their local fiat currency. The first and third steps are called the on-ramp and the off-ramp. The middle step, the blockchain transfer, is the easy part. The first and third steps are where most of the complexity and most of the remaining cost lives.
On the sending side, the on-ramp typically works through a licensed institution — a bank, a payment service provider, or a regulated exchange — that accepts local currency and mints or purchases the corresponding stablecoin on the sender’s behalf. This institution needs money transmission licences in the relevant jurisdiction, banking relationships to receive fiat, and the operational infrastructure to mint or source stablecoins efficiently. Companies like Circle, Coinbase, and increasingly a range of fintechs provide this service.
Once the stablecoins are in the sender’s wallet, or more typically in a wallet controlled by the sending institution on the sender’s behalf, they move across the blockchain. This is where the technical advantage is most obvious. A USDC transfer on Ethereum costs a fraction of a cent and settles in seconds. A USDC transfer on Solana costs almost nothing and settles in under a second. There is no SWIFT message. There is no correspondent bank. There is no processing window. The transaction either succeeds or it does not, and the outcome is visible to anyone who reads the public blockchain.
On the receiving side, the off-ramp is the harder problem. The recipient’s institution receives the stablecoins, sells or burns them, and credits the recipient’s account in local currency. In major currencies — euros, sterling, Singapore dollars, Australian dollars, Japanese yen — this conversion is reasonably straightforward because liquid local banking relationships and exchange infrastructure exist. In Philippine pesos, Kenyan shillings, Nigerian naira, Ghanaian cedis, or Indonesian rupiah, the off-ramp is genuinely hard. Local banking relationships are required. Licences are required. Liquidity is required. The local institution needs to be able to take USDC and deliver cash in the local currency, sometimes to someone who does not have a bank account at all.
This is the bottleneck that the entire industry is currently racing to solve. The blockchain part works. The on-ramp in developed markets works. The off-ramp into the long tail of currencies and the last mile into cash is where the largest remaining friction lives, and solving it is where the most interesting competitive action is happening right now.
Circle’s Payments Network: the new plumbing
In April 2025, Circle announced the Circle Payments Network, known as CPN, and followed it in April 2026 with CPN Managed Payments. Understanding what CPN is and how it works is important because it represents the most complete publicly available blueprint for how institutional stablecoin payments are being structured.
Think of CPN as an intelligent switchboard. Financial institutions — banks, fintechs, payment service providers, digital wallets — connect to CPN through a single integration and gain the ability to transact with each other in near-real-time without needing to negotiate bilateral agreements with every counterpart. Each participating institution on the sending side is called an Originating Financial Institution. Each on the receiving side is a Beneficiary Financial Institution. Circle sits in the middle as the network operator and orchestrator, but crucially, it is not holding or moving the funds itself.
Here is what a concrete CPN payment looks like. A fintech in the United States needs to send a thousand dollars to a bank in the Philippines. The sending fintech requests competitive FX quotes through CPN from partner institutions that can deliver Philippine pesos. It selects the best quote. The sending institution then converts the dollars to USDC — in the managed version, Circle does this on the institution’s behalf — and sends the USDC to the receiving institution’s wallet on the blockchain. The transaction settles in seconds. The receiving institution in the Philippines, which holds a licence to operate in that market and maintains relationships with local banks, converts the USDC to pesos and credits the ultimate recipient’s account. End to end, the payment that might have taken three to five days through correspondent banking has completed in minutes.
The compliance layer runs throughout. CPN requires all participants to meet strict eligibility standards, including appropriate licences, AML and CFT compliance, financial risk management, and cybersecurity protocols. The Travel Rule — the international standard requiring that sender and recipient identity information accompany wire transfers above certain thresholds — is enforced on the network. This is not a workaround of existing financial regulation. It is a reconstruction of cross-border payment infrastructure on a faster, cheaper technical layer while maintaining the compliance obligations that regulated institutions are required to meet.
CPN Managed Payments, launched in April 2026, takes this a step further for institutions that are not ready to manage digital assets directly. Partners interact entirely in fiat. Circle manages the entire digital asset lifecycle — minting USDC on the sending side, routing it across the blockchain, burning it on the receiving side — while the partner institution simply sends and receives in the fiat currencies it is already comfortable with. This is the most important commercial insight in Circle’s recent product strategy: most financial institutions that want the efficiency of stablecoin settlement do not want to be in the crypto business. They want the outcome without the operational complexity. CPN Managed Payments is designed to give them exactly that.
Partners in the CPN launch include Flutterwave, Onafriq, Yellow Card — all significant Africa-focused payment networks — along with Coins.ph for the Philippines, dLocal for Latin America, TazaPay for Southeast Asia, and dozens of others across the corridors where cross-border payment friction is highest. USDC has supported over $70 trillion in cumulative on-chain settlement. On-chain transaction volume approached $12 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2025 alone. These are the real-world scale numbers that Circle brings to every conversation with a prospective banking partner.
Stripe and Bridge: bringing stablecoins into the mainstream developer world
The most consequential stablecoin acquisition in payments history to date was Stripe’s purchase of Bridge in late 2024 for $1.1 billion. Bridge was founded by alumni of Coinbase and Square and had built the most developer-friendly stablecoin orchestration infrastructure available: easy on-ramps, virtual USD accounts denominated in stablecoins, programmable payouts, and an off-ramp product available in nearly a hundred countries.
Stripe completed the acquisition in February 2025. By May 2025, at its annual Sessions event, Stripe announced what it called its largest effort yet in money management: stablecoin-powered accounts available to businesses in 101 countries. Using Stripe Treasury, a business in any of those countries can hold a balance in USDC or Bridge’s own USDB stablecoin, receive funds on both crypto and traditional rails including ACH and SEPA, and send stablecoins almost anywhere in the world. Patrick Collison, Stripe’s CEO, described AI and stablecoins as the two “gale-force tailwinds” reshaping the economic landscape, and framed Stripe’s job as pulling those technologies forward so businesses can benefit immediately.
This is a significant move. Stripe serves half of the Fortune 100. When Stripe adds stablecoin functionality to its treasury product, it is not launching an experiment. It is putting stablecoin infrastructure in front of the engineers and finance teams of some of the world’s largest companies, wrapped in the same developer experience and compliance framework they already use for everything else.
Separately, Bridge partnered with Visa in early 2025 on what may be the most practically significant stablecoin product yet: a global card issuance product that makes stablecoin balances spendable anywhere Visa is accepted. Fintechs including Ramp, Squads, and Airtm can issue Visa cards linked to stablecoin wallets. When a cardholder makes a purchase, Bridge deducts funds from the stablecoin balance and converts them to the local currency in real time. The merchant gets paid in their local currency exactly as they would from any other card transaction. The cardholder is spending digital dollars without any of the friction that stablecoin spending would otherwise require. Stablecoin card issuance grew 673% in 2025, reaching $4.5 billion. That number will look small in 2027.
Also in 2025, Stripe and the crypto venture firm Paradigm jointly incubated Tempo as an independent company, building a new Layer-1 blockchain specifically optimised for stablecoin payments. The move signals Stripe’s recognition that the existing public blockchains — with their variable fee markets and occasional congestion — are adequate for current stablecoin payment volumes but may not serve the scale Stripe has in mind at the cost levels that mass-market payment use cases require.
Mastercard buys BVNK: the incumbent response
On March 17, 2026, Mastercard announced a binding agreement to acquire BVNK, a London-based stablecoin infrastructure company, for up to $1.8 billion. This is the largest stablecoin acquisition yet, surpassing Stripe’s Bridge deal, and it tells you everything about how the incumbent card networks are now thinking about this space.
BVNK was founded in 2021 by Chris Harmse, Jesse Hemson-Struthers, and Donald Jackson. It built a platform that enables companies to accept, hold, and settle payments in stablecoins across more than 130 countries, agnostically across major blockchains, with fiat connectivity through banking partners including Barclays, BBVA, Deutsche Bank, and Santander. Clients include Worldpay, Deel, Flywire, and Rapyd. In 2025, annualised volume in the US market alone grew from $100 million to $10 billion. Overall volume grew 2.3 times year over year. BVNK processes, by some estimates, over $30 billion in annual stablecoin payment volume.
The deal’s history is instructive. In October 2025, both Mastercard and Coinbase had been in advanced acquisition talks with BVNK, with valuations discussed between $1.5 billion and $2.5 billion. Coinbase reached exclusivity and then walked away from a roughly $2 billion deal in November 2025. Mastercard ultimately secured the deal at a ceiling of $1.8 billion, including $300 million in contingent performance-based payments. Notably, Visa Ventures had invested in BVNK in early 2025 but did not pursue a full acquisition. Citi Ventures invested in October 2025. The competitive dynamics around this one company illustrate how urgently the major financial institutions view stablecoin infrastructure ownership.
Jorn Lambert, Mastercard’s Chief Product Officer, framed the acquisition in terms that are worth quoting directly: “We expect that most financial institutions and fintechs will in time provide digital currency services. Adding on-chain rails to our network will support speed and programmability for virtually every type of transaction.” The language is careful — on-chain rails as an addition to existing fiat infrastructure, not a replacement. This is the strategic position that Mastercard has staked out: hybrid networks, where stablecoins become one more rail alongside cards and traditional transfers, all of it accessible through the Mastercard relationship that millions of banks and merchants already have.
Days before the BVNK announcement, Mastercard had launched its Crypto Partner Program, bringing together more than 85 collaborators including Circle, Ripple, Fireblocks, Binance, Crypto.com, Gemini, and PayPal. The program is not a product. It is a coordination mechanism for the digital asset ecosystem to work together with Mastercard’s existing network. The combination of the BVNK acquisition and the Crypto Partner Program gives Mastercard both the infrastructure capability and the partner network to offer stablecoin-powered cross-border settlement to its existing client base without requiring any client to deal with blockchain complexity directly.
Nium: building the stablecoin bridge from the infrastructure side
Nium, the Singapore-based global payments infrastructure company, has made two specific stablecoin moves in late 2025 and early 2026 that are worth examining in detail because they illustrate a different strategic approach.
In November 2025, Nium joined Visa’s stablecoin settlement pilot, enabling it to settle with Visa using stablecoins — specifically USDC — across supported blockchains. This is significant because it connects stablecoin settlement directly to Visa’s existing infrastructure, allowing Nium to use USDC as a settlement asset within the card network’s settlement flows rather than solely in the blockchain-native payment world.
In March 2026, Nium launched a dual-network stablecoin card issuance platform. Through a single API integration, companies holding stablecoins can issue spending cards on both the Visa and Mastercard networks. The cards work at hundreds of millions of merchant locations globally. Stablecoin holders — whether they are gig economy platforms holding worker earnings, crypto companies holding treasury assets, or businesses managing working capital in digital dollars — can spend their stablecoin balances in any currency at any merchant that accepts Visa or Mastercard, with the stablecoin-to-fiat conversion happening in real time at the point of purchase.
In April 2026, Nium integrated Coinbase’s USDC settlement infrastructure, enabling customers to fund cross-border payouts in USDC and settle in local fiat, eliminating pre-funding requirements. This last point is operationally important and not obvious to those outside the industry. Under the traditional correspondent banking model, payment companies must pre-fund accounts in the destination currency before they can make payouts. This is expensive — the capital sitting in nostro accounts earns minimal return — and it constrains the speed at which a company can enter new markets. Stablecoin settlement removes the pre-funding requirement because the settlement asset is stateless. USDC is USDC whether it is sitting in a wallet in Singapore or one in Brazil. You do not need to pre-fund a local account with pesos before you can pay someone in Mexico. You send USDC, and your local partner converts it.
Airwallex: building the capability, waiting for the moment
Airwallex, the Melbourne-founded global payments company valued at over $6 billion and serving businesses across 150 countries, has not yet launched a public stablecoin product as of May 2026. But it has been building one.
In July 2025, Airwallex posted 22 stablecoin engineer positions, disclosing that the company is building infrastructure to enable customers and internal systems to buy, hold, send, and settle tokens globally, supporting near-instant global payments, and enabling on-chain liquidity management and seamless conversion between fiat and stablecoins. The planned applications include cross-border settlement in emerging markets, on-chain liquidity management, and programmable payments with fiat-to-stablecoin conversion services.
The absence of a launched product from Airwallex at this stage is not a failure. It is a deliberate position. Airwallex’s strategic advantage lies in its own banking licences and infrastructure across major markets — it has built proprietary local rails in Europe, the US, the UK, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australia — which already give it speed and cost advantages over companies relying entirely on correspondent banking. The stablecoin layer it is building will sit on top of this existing infrastructure. When it launches, it will be integrated into what Airwallex already offers rather than positioned as a separate product.
The strategic question for Airwallex is the same one facing Wise: whether the proprietary fiat infrastructure these companies have built represents a durable advantage in a world where stablecoins can, in theory, route around it. The honest answer is that in the corridors where Airwallex and Wise have deep local integration, their advantage remains real. In the corridors where neither has deep infrastructure — the long tail of emerging market currencies — stablecoins arguably provide a faster path to coverage than building local banking relationships from scratch.
Wise: the honest disruptor faces its own disruption
Wise is one of the payments companies most worth watching in the stablecoin era, because its strategic position is unusual. For years, Wise built its competitive advantage on a simple insight: instead of actually sending money internationally through the correspondent banking system, it maintained pools of local currency in major markets and matched payments going in opposite directions, netting them out and only moving the residual through traditional rails. This gave Wise most of the speed and cost advantage of a new rail without requiring a new rail. It worked spectacularly. Wise processed £118 billion in transactions in its last fiscal year and has over ten million customers.
The stablecoin question for Wise is whether its proprietary matching infrastructure remains an advantage when stablecoins can settle cross-border in seconds at near-zero cost. In the major currency pairs — US dollar to euro, pound to dollar — Wise’s matching efficiency is hard to beat because the bilateral flows are large enough to offset reliably. In less liquid currency pairs, Wise still relies on a version of the correspondent banking infrastructure it was designed to circumvent.
Wise has not made major public stablecoin announcements, and analysts who cover the company have noted that stablecoins represent both a threat and an opportunity. The threat is that the core technology Wise built, which made it the disruptor, could itself be disrupted. The opportunity is that Wise’s compliance infrastructure, its regulatory licences across dozens of jurisdictions, and its established customer base are exactly the assets a stablecoin payment network needs on both the sending and receiving end. Whether Wise becomes a stablecoin rail operator, a stablecoin liquidity provider, or something else is a strategic question its leadership will have to answer in the next twelve to eighteen months.
Ripple: institutional payments, real infrastructure
Ripple’s position in 2026 is substantially different from its position three years ago. A settlement with the SEC in 2025 resolved years of legal uncertainty, the GENIUS Act created clarity around its RLUSD stablecoin product, and a conditional OCC trust charter added federal recognition. Ripple has spent over $2.7 billion on acquisitions in recent years, including Hidden Road, Rail, and GTreasury, building out capabilities across payments, settlement, and treasury services.
RLUSD, Ripple’s US dollar stablecoin, is positioned specifically for institutional and enterprise use. It is available on global exchanges including Revolut, LMAX, and Zero Hash. Ripple customers like BKK Forex and iSend are using it to streamline global payment flows. Ripple’s approach is less about the consumer remittance market and more about the treasury and capital markets flows where its institutional relationships and XRP Ledger infrastructure can carry large-value transactions at settlement speeds that traditional wire transfers cannot match.
Ripple is also notable as a case study in the difference between the stablecoin market’s headline numbers and its commercial reality. Total on-chain stablecoin volume is enormous. Actual commercial payment volume — the invoices settled, the payrolls paid, the supplier payments cleared — is a much smaller slice. Ripple’s Jack McDonald, speaking at Consensus Miami in May 2026, said the company is focused less on stablecoin market cap than on utility: payments, corporate treasury movement, and collateral use in capital markets. That focus on specific institutional use cases rather than total addressable market is a useful corrective to some of the more expansive claims made about stablecoin adoption.
Western Union: the cash network as the off-ramp
Western Union may be the most counterintuitive stablecoin story of 2026. The company, which is over 170 years old, operates in 200 countries through 500,000 physical agent locations. For most of its history, it has been the thing that modern fintech was supposed to replace. In the first half of 2026, Western Union announced plans to launch USDPT, a US dollar-backed stablecoin on Solana, with Anchorage Digital as custodian.
The strategic logic is elegant. Stablecoins solve the middle of the cross-border payment journey beautifully. But in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia, where many remittance recipients do not have bank accounts and the local currency infrastructure is fragmented, the on-ramp from fiat into stablecoins and the off-ramp from stablecoins into cash require physical infrastructure. Western Union’s 500,000 agent locations are that infrastructure. For a digital wallet or a blockchain-native remittance app trying to serve someone in rural Kenya or rural Mexico, connecting to Western Union’s physical network for the last-mile cash disbursement is not a defeat. It is the solution to the hardest part of the problem.
By issuing USDPT, Western Union also captures interest income on the reserve assets backing its stablecoin — a new revenue stream that did not exist in the traditional remittance business. The company that looked like the obvious casualty of the fintech revolution has found a way to become the bridge between the blockchain world and the physical cash economy. That is a striking strategic pivot.
The emerging market reality — where adoption is actually happening
Latin America leads global stablecoin adoption for cross-border payments by a significant margin. A 2025 Fireblocks survey found that 71% of Latin American firms already use stablecoins for cross-border payments. The drivers are structural and not easily reversed.
Brazil’s real depreciated 18% against the dollar in 2024. Businesses that need to pay dollar-denominated suppliers or receive dollar-denominated revenue have a practical reason to hold dollar-pegged stablecoins rather than converting immediately to a currency that is losing value. Brazil’s Pix infrastructure, which processed 42 billion transactions worth $1.2 trillion in 2024, provides the on-ramp infrastructure that makes conversion between stablecoins and local banking practical. Mercado Pago launched USDC support in the second quarter of 2025. Mexico’s $42.8 billion remittance market — the fourth largest globally — is increasingly served by stablecoin rails. Analysis of the US-Mexico corridor by Mizuho found that stablecoin fees in that corridor already sit below 1%, compared to the 3-6% charged by traditional remittance operators.
India, the world’s largest remittance recipient at $129 billion annually, presents a different picture. B2B adoption is ahead of consumer remittance adoption. Indian IT companies receiving payments from US clients report 67% faster cash flow when using stablecoin settlements. UPI, which processed 131 billion transactions worth $1.8 trillion in 2024, provides the domestic infrastructure on which stablecoin integration can build.
In Southeast Asia, BVNK reported that its annualised US market volume grew from $100 million to $10 billion in 2025, reflecting the speed with which enterprise adoption moves once the regulatory and product pieces are in place. Nium’s stablecoin products are designed specifically for the B2B payment flows across Southeast Asian corridors, where pre-funding requirements have historically been a significant operational burden.
Africa remains the most complex picture. Yellow Card, which had been a significant stablecoin infrastructure player for the continent, shut down its consumer app in January 2026, a reminder that infrastructure alone does not create adoption if the user experience and regulatory environment are not ready. At the same time, Circle’s CPN launch included Onafriq and Yellow Card as partners, and Visa expanded its stablecoin settlement pilot to Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa through a partnership with Yellow Card in June 2025, settling over $225 million in stablecoins across the region. Sub-Saharan Africa’s remittance costs remain the world’s highest at over 6% on average. The structural pressure for a better solution is acute. The infrastructure to deliver it at scale is still being built.
The off-ramp problem: what is still genuinely hard
The industry talks a great deal about the speed and cost of stablecoin transfers. It talks less about the off-ramp, and this asymmetry in the conversation reflects the asymmetry in where the hard problems actually sit.
Wallet-to-wallet stablecoin transfers are instant and nearly free. This is true. Converting stablecoins to local fiat in major currencies — dollars, euros, sterling, yen, Hong Kong dollars — is straightforward and well-served. Converting stablecoins to local fiat in the currencies where cross-border payment friction is highest is genuinely difficult, and the difficulty is not primarily technological.
To operate as a stablecoin off-ramp in the Philippines, you need a licence from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. In Nigeria, you need to navigate a regulatory environment that has had a turbulent relationship with crypto, restrictions on naira conversion, and a parallel exchange rate system. In Argentina, capital controls complicate any mechanism by which dollars in stablecoin form become pesos in a bank account. In Pakistan, the formal remittance infrastructure is supplemented by informal channels that stablecoins could in principle replace but struggle to reach. Each of these markets requires local expertise, local relationships, local licences, and local liquidity. The blockchain does not solve these problems. It gets you to the border. Getting across requires local infrastructure that takes years and capital to build.
This is why the Circle Payments Network, with its design partners including Flutterwave, Onafriq, dLocal, and Coins.ph, is structured as a network of local operators rather than a single global platform. The stablecoin infrastructure does the cross-border hop. The local operators do the domestic delivery. This is also why BVNK’s 130-country coverage is competitively meaningful — it represents banking relationships and operational infrastructure that is genuinely hard to replicate quickly.
For a global company building a stablecoin payment strategy today, the practical question is not whether stablecoins can move money across borders. They can. The question is which corridors are adequately served by existing off-ramp infrastructure, which corridors are partially served, and which are not yet served at all. The answer varies significantly by region, by currency, and by payment type.
The M&A wave and what it signals
The acquisition activity of the last eighteen months has been the clearest possible signal from incumbents that stablecoin infrastructure is not a peripheral technology to be monitored from a distance. It is core infrastructure to be owned.
Stripe spent $1.1 billion on Bridge. Mastercard is spending up to $1.8 billion on BVNK. Ripple spent over $2.7 billion across Hidden Road, Rail, and GTreasury. Polygon acquired Coinme and Sequence. Western Union is building USDPT. PayPal expanded PYUSD to Tron and Avalanche. Fiserv entered the stablecoin business. SoFi launched an enterprise stablecoin. YouTube began allowing creators to receive payment in PayPal’s stablecoin. Klarna partnered with Coinbase and enabled institutional investors to provide short-term funding denominated in USDC.
What all of these moves have in common is that they are being made by companies that understand the following: the value in payments infrastructure comes from owning the rails and the relationships. In the existing world, Visa and Mastercard own the card rails and license them to everyone else. In the emerging stablecoin world, ownership of the on-ramp and off-ramp infrastructure — the ability to convert reliably between fiat and stablecoins across dozens of jurisdictions — is the equivalent strategic asset.
The companies that have moved fast to own that infrastructure will have advantages that compound over time. Their cost structures will be lower because stablecoin settlement is cheaper than correspondent banking. Their liquidity management will be better because stablecoin settlement eliminates the pre-funding requirement. Their product velocity will be higher because programmable money, money embedded with rules and conditions via smart contracts, enables payment products that are impossible on traditional rails. And their network effects will strengthen because every new corridor they add to their off-ramp coverage makes them more useful to every existing client.
This is why the Mastercard-BVNK deal is not simply an acquisition of a stablecoin company. It is an acquisition of network connectivity across 130 countries, of banking relationships with Barclays and BBVA and Deutsche Bank and Santander, of operational infrastructure for compliant stablecoin settlement at institutional scale. These assets do not exist in the abstract. They were built transaction by transaction over the four years since BVNK was founded. Buying them is faster than building them. Mastercard understood that, and so did the other bidders.
What programmable money actually changes
One aspect of stablecoins that receives less attention than it deserves in the commercial payments conversation is programmability. Smart contracts — code that runs automatically on a blockchain when predefined conditions are met — enable a new category of payment products that are not possible on traditional rails.
Consider escrow for international trade. Currently, when a manufacturer in Vietnam ships goods to a retailer in Germany, the payment typically involves either the buyer paying before the goods arrive, which creates risk for the buyer, or the buyer paying after inspection, which creates risk for the seller. Traditional escrow arrangements require a third-party intermediary, documentation, and manual verification, all of which adds cost and delay. With a programmable stablecoin, the payment can be locked in a smart contract that releases automatically when a specific condition is met — a shipping confirmation recorded on a shared ledger, a quality inspection result submitted through a verified oracle, a customs clearance record from a government system. No escrow agent needed. No manual verification. The contract executes when the condition is satisfied.
Consider milestone-based payments for professional services. A consulting firm in India contracted by a company in the US to deliver a project in three phases could structure the payment as a smart contract that releases one-third of the USDC upon verified completion of each phase. Both parties can see the contract on the blockchain. Neither party needs to trust the other’s word about whether a milestone has been completed.
Consider payroll for gig workers. A platform like Deel — which uses BVNK to pay thousands of contractors worldwide in USDC — can structure payments that release automatically based on work completion data, without manual payroll processing, without delays caused by banking hours, and without the foreign exchange risk that comes from workers having to convert dollars to local currency several days after the payment was initiated.
These are not theoretical use cases. They are being used in production today, by real companies, in real payment flows. The volume is still small compared to traditional payment flows. The growth rate suggests the volume will not be small for long.
Looking at the horizon: what happens next
The stablecoin story in payments is moving fast enough that any specific prediction about twelve months from now carries meaningful uncertainty. What is more reliable is the direction of travel and the structural forces that are shaping it.
Off-ramp infrastructure will be the defining competitive battleground of the next three years. Every major stablecoin payment company — Circle, BVNK, Bridge, Ripple, Nium, and the others — knows that the quality of its local currency delivery capability in emerging markets determines its total addressable market. The companies that build or acquire superior off-ramp networks in Asia, Africa, and Latin America will capture a disproportionate share of the cross-border payment volume that is shifting onto stablecoin rails.
The dollar’s dominance in stablecoins will face increasing pressure. USDC and USDT denominated in dollars account for the overwhelming majority of stablecoin supply today. As MiCA-compliant euro-backed stablecoins scale, as Singapore and other Asian jurisdictions develop their own frameworks, and as other national currencies seek stablecoin representation, the stablecoin ecosystem will diversify. EURC, Circle’s euro stablecoin, is already in production. This diversification matters for payments because euro-denominated cross-border payments within Europe don’t need to touch dollars at all if a robust EURC infrastructure exists.
Agentic commerce — AI systems making purchases autonomously on behalf of users and businesses — will create stablecoin payment volumes that do not exist today. Programmable, API-native money is a better fit for AI-initiated payments than card rails designed for human interaction. The stablecoin infrastructure being built now will be the infrastructure on which machine-to-machine payments run at scale.
Consumer adoption will lag institutional adoption by several years, and that is fine. The value being created right now, in cross-border B2B payments, in payroll, in treasury management, in supplier payments, is real and growing rapidly. Consumer remittances are following, driven by the emerging market adoption dynamics described above. The 10% remittance market share that MoonPay’s Richard Harrison projected for stablecoins within five years would represent tens of billions of dollars annually.
The correspondent banking model will not disappear. Banks have built that infrastructure over decades and it serves purposes that stablecoins are not designed to replace — credit, complex structured finance, large-value securities settlement through regulated clearing systems. What will happen is a gradual migration of the payment flows where stablecoins offer clear advantages: cross-border B2B, payroll, freelancer payouts, supplier payments in corridors with high traditional costs, and treasury operations where settlement speed and 24/7 availability matter. As that migration accelerates, the fee structures that have sustained the correspondent banking model for retail and business cross-border payments will face competitive pressure they have not faced before.
What a CXO should actually be doing about this right now
The question that matters most for any executive reading this is what to do with it. Several things are worth being specific about.
If your company makes cross-border payments of any kind — supplier payments, payroll, customer refunds, marketplace payouts — it is worth doing an honest analysis of which of those payment corridors are adequately served by stablecoin infrastructure today and which are not. For US-to-LATAM flows, the infrastructure exists and is mature enough to use in production. For US-to-Southeast-Asia flows, the infrastructure is developing rapidly and several solid providers are operational. For US-to-Sub-Saharan-Africa flows, the infrastructure is patchy and requires careful provider selection. The analysis is corridor by corridor, not categorical.
The companies that are best positioned to help businesses move onto stablecoin rails are not always the ones with the biggest marketing budgets. Bridge, now inside Stripe, offers the most developer-friendly integration path for companies already using Stripe infrastructure. BVNK, pending its Mastercard acquisition, has the deepest banking connectivity across emerging market corridors. Circle’s CPN Managed Payments is the right choice for financial institutions that want stablecoin settlement outcomes without the operational complexity of managing digital assets. Nium’s stablecoin card issuance platform is the right choice for companies that need to turn stablecoin balances into spendable currency at merchant locations globally.
The pre-funding question deserves specific attention. If your treasury team is currently managing nostro accounts in multiple currencies to support cross-border payment operations, the working capital release from moving to stablecoin rails is significant and quantifiable. A company making $50 million in emerging market payments annually is potentially carrying $15 to 25 million in trapped transit capital. Stablecoin settlement removes that float.
The compliance infrastructure matters more than the blockchain infrastructure. The biggest risk in stablecoin adoption is not technology failure. It is compliance failure. Choose providers that have demonstrated regulatory engagement, that hold appropriate licences in the jurisdictions where they operate, and that have compliance architectures built for the GENIUS Act and MiCA frameworks. The difference between a compliant stablecoin payment network and an informal crypto transfer service is not visible at the surface but is consequential in the event of a regulatory examination.
Finally, the horizon. The stablecoin infrastructure being built right now is being built for a payments world that does not yet fully exist. The companies investing in it are betting on specific structural changes: the continued globalisation of business, the growing expectation of speed and efficiency in financial operations, the regulatory frameworks that are maturing globally, and the declining cost of maintaining global payment infrastructure as stablecoin rails reduce dependence on correspondent banking. These are durable bets. The infrastructure being acquired and built today is the infrastructure that will process trillions of dollars of cross-border payment volume over the next decade.
The companies that understand this early enough to act on it now will not simply save money on payment fees. They will have access to payment capabilities — speed, programmability, 24/7 availability, global reach without pre-funding — that their competitors who stay on traditional rails will not. In a world where payment infrastructure is becoming a source of competitive advantage rather than a commodity cost, being early to the better infrastructure is strategically meaningful.
The technology is ready. The regulation is arriving. The infrastructure is being built. The question for every executive in this space is not whether stablecoins will matter to your payments strategy. It is whether you will have built the capability to use them before your competitors have.
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