Stablecoin payments: what operators said on The Protocol Roundtable

“The default use case coming in is like, hey, I want to send capital globally instantaneously, right? And that leads to a better prefunding model, which leads to more efficiencies. ... If your competitor has better rates than you, you have to fix your problem, right?”

“If you look at the last 12 months, it's a totally different cohort. It's everything after GENIUS Act. It's people who now say, okay, we've heard a lot about this. It seems that there's some value. Let's say you're a bank. We're not 100% sure, but now we can touch it. Let's do a POC.”

“It's still a thin layer of TradFi, right? It's not huge adoption ... TradFi players see that we already have a legal framework that allows them to go there and to experiment, at least. We see things happening mainly on stablecoin rails for cross-border, and also tokenization of funds and assets distribution onchain, mainly.”

“Cross-border payments is really broken, right? ... Right now stablecoins are really solving a latency issue. I wouldn't say we're getting to the pricing part just quite yet. ... If you can solve for latency, that leads to better prefunding, which leads to better economics for these cross-border money movers.”

“The one thing that we see a lot of people skeptical about is, I guess, saving on capital requirements of prefunding, especially around not just the banks but also remittance companies. And once they start doing it, again, they don't look back, because they realize there's a lot of savings there. ... Again, not because the transfer itself is cheaper.”

“We are actually making money movement more efficient, and we do it in a way that they won't, most of the time, realize that something has changed in the back. They will only realize that transaction times are faster, cheaper and the likes.”

“You can go around and pay on a card terminal, not with a card directly. ... The card terminal there is just the acceptance device. So we also have to start thinking that cards that we are all used to not necessarily need to be in the mix anymore.”

“Getting all of those merchants globally to accept either a local, sort of government-backed payment rail that's real time, or some just native stablecoin payment mechanism ... it may happen. It just may take a really long time. So I think in the timeframe we're talking about, three to five years, cards are still going to be relevant.”

“I didn't say that cards will go anywhere, right? I mean, for the foreseeable future at least, for sure. ... What Visa and Mastercard have built is something that you cannot switch overnight, and actually you don't want to.”

“We talk to a lot of agentic companies who, they come to us because they want to issue agents cards to spend online, just with e-commerce. But increasingly we are starting to see a lot of these companies just thinking about ... machine-to-machine payments and how those will just occur directly over stablecoin rails.”

“Corporate treasurers were looking at how they would hold different stablecoins and essentially saying, well, if we are going to look at holding these at scale, right, on our balance sheet, then we need to be able to risk manage them. Meaning every single stablecoin ... what are the reserves made up of.”

“I think the reality is there's not a lot of appetite today for corporate treasurers to be holding balances onchain, unless you're a Web3 native business. I think that's changing, though. ... I think payments is always gonna be the starting point into holding value onchain and broader treasury management.”

“We're still not at this stage where people are receiving the stablecoins and then just holding it. ... We're taking these stablecoins and still off-ramping them into local fiat ... because again, these different businesses or merchants still want to get paid in their local fiat in order to perform all the transactions they still need to make.”

“I think the bottleneck here we see is only the case of off-ramping, because then we will rely on traditional rails. And this will limit us from offering the instantaneous payout that we might like if, for example, somebody requests that during a weekend.”

“The big concern that folks have had in providing off-ramp services for third parties in the space is just the risk, and how do you get the data you need, especially given that one leg of the transaction is onchain and you don't really know who are the parties that have transacted up until the point of the off-ramp.”

“KYC is something that comes up a lot, especially when partners of ours are working with many different providers. And they think it should be trivial to basically integrate multiple providers into one solution, and that the KYC just magically sort of resolves itself. But that's just not how it works, as I think many of us realize.”

“For corporate use cases, we still haven't yet solved for what does a publicly traded company, who now has balances and money movement being visible publicly onchain somewhere, do? And so I think that's probably one of the next big themes that we've got to solve and figure out how we support.”

“Many are unaware that for retail payments in the UAE only dirham-backed stablecoins are allowed as per the central bank, no other foreign stablecoin or any other crypto token.”

“We need to have every single aspect of the app to be MiCA compliant, including the stablecoins. ... But that doesn't mean that you cannot basically have an integration where you accept multiple other stablecoins and abstractize everything, and basically bridge everything to USDC, for example, in the interface.”

“In certain markets that we are launching in, the regulators that we work with there expect those layers to also be licensed. ... As stablecoins go mainstream, just integrating with the existing guardrails that exist in traditional finance will start to increasingly become very important.”

“What's interesting is today they try to just repeat the first mover steps. ... That's why we see originally, firstly, stablecoins and not tokenized deposits, despite the tokenized deposits [being] a bit more natural thing for banks, for example. But still I would use stablecoins firstly as well, because stablecoins, okay, I've seen the story, it works, nice, it's safe.”

“What's interesting with this is, a client can mint a deposit token, make a transaction, and then very, very quickly off-ramp into their account, and there's no change in the actual liability or the asset that they were holding at all.”

“I think there's too many banks who think that they can have their own stablecoin and it's gonna actually create a lot of value. ... The primary use case for stablecoins today is payments. In order for payments to be effective onchain, you need liquidity at both sides.”