As stablecoins look to gain ground in mainstream finance, maturing from the fringes of crypto into regulated financial instruments, they are chasing a pole position across payments, particularly cross-border transactions, as infrastructure, not necessarily innovation.
The promise of digital assets, after all, has always been to shift finance from a trust-based system to a code-based one. Instead of relying on correspondent banks, clearinghouses, and card networks to reconcile trust, stablecoins promise programmable, instantaneous and borderless settlement. In that sense, they aim to become the HTTP of money, a universal protocol for value transfer.
But this ambition carries a disruptive edge: As stablecoins move from speculation to plumbing, they may begin to erode the margins of the very intermediaries that built the financial world we know.
Read more: Stablecoin Orchestration Becomes New Blockchain Battleground
Does Digital Money Movement Need Blockchain?
Before HTTP, every network was a walled garden. Today, before stablecoins, every payment network such as Visa, Swift, ACH, SEPA, etc., operates primarily within its own silo, stitched together by a costly web of correspondent relationships and reconciliation delays. Stablecoins claim they can replace those stitched seams with code, using blockchain’s shared ledger as the neutral substrate for global settlement.
Advertisement: Scroll to Continue
Circle’s USDC and PayPal’s PYUSD, for example, are being referenced not as volatile digital tokens, but as settlement rails compatible with the compliance frameworks of traditional finance. Still, these entities are looking less like FinTech startups and more like shadow banks, issuing private money backed by sovereign currency and held in treasuries.
Payment giants, meanwhile, are not sitting idle. Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and others like Stripe are experimenting with blockchain settlement. Visa’s integration of USDC on Solana is a quiet acknowledgment that even incumbents see the inevitability of programmable money. Their goal is not to be disintermediated, but to ensure that if the rails are changing, they remain the tollkeepers.
Regional banks and FinTech processors face an even more complex calculus. For decades, their value has been in facilitating access by enabling remittances, payroll and card issuance where global banks wouldn’t tread. Stablecoins flatten that terrain. When a digital dollar can move directly between wallets in Lagos and London, what happens to the foreign exchange spread, the interchange fee, the compliance gatekeeping that underwrote those models? Infrastructure, by design, compresses margins.
Ultimately, the emerging architecture of stablecoin payments is looking less like DeFi’s dream of an open monetary network and more like a regulated, interoperable settlement layer supervised by traditional oversight. Still, the landscape is in its early days.
Continuing the HTTP metaphor, in 2000, Yahoo! was worth more than Nvidia, Apple, Amazon, and Google combined. That’s where the payments space is with stablecoins.
See also: Making Sense of Where Stablecoins Fit in the Issuer-Merchant-Acquirer Stack
Stablecoins Find Footing in Cross-Border Payments
As stablecoins move deeper into the financial plumbing, the first casualties will be margin structures built on friction. The cross-border market is the most glaring weak point of traditional finance, and the most natural beachhead for stablecoins.
“The encouraging part is that there’s been a real kind of product market fit around payments and stablecoins,” Bryce Jurss, vice president, head of Americas, digital assets at Nuvei, told PYMNTS. “The real opportunity isn’t about chasing the buzzwords, but it’s more about being disciplined, identifying where stablecoins truly outperform a so-called legacy payment system.”
Correspondent banking fees, foreign exchange spreads, cross-border settlement costs. All are relics of a trust-based architecture. When settlement is instantaneous and global, the justification for those fees may erode.
“Moving $10 [million] to $30 million across borders into exotic corridors typically takes three to five business days,” Stable Sea CEO Tanner Taddeo told PYMNTS in a July interview. “With stablecoins, it can settle in four to eight hours.”
“Every business has a stablecoin use case,” Taddeo added. “Whether it’s internal payroll, contractor payments or capital markets access. Form a tactical SWAT team to identify the right pilot.”
The paradox is that the more stablecoins succeed as infrastructure, the less visible their innovation becomes. Users won’t care whether a transaction rides on a blockchain any more than they care whether an email uses SMTP. What will matter is cost, reliability and interoperability. The quiet virtues of infrastructure.
