Outside of perhaps AI, few technologies have generated as much curiosity and confusion as stablecoins have within payments and commerce over the past 18 months.
Despite the hype, and their utility across non-U.S. payment landscapes, these digital assets, which are cryptocurrencies pegged to an allegedly stable mix of assets like U.S. treasuries, have yet to enter the mainstream of everyday commerce.
Try buying a Diet Coke from a vending machine with a stablecoin, for example, and you’ll quickly hit a wall. Same with using it to pay for something like school tuition. But that hasn’t stopped both the payments and crypto industries from working to build solutions that can help make stablecoins practical, scalable, and seamlessly integrated into real-world business flows.
“Stablecoins are a great way to transfer value,” Kirill Gertman, CEO of Conduit, told PYMNTS in an interview. “You can send USDC from here in New York to Singapore in seconds, and that’s great. But the challenge happens when you actually need to use USDC or USDT for something.”
For financial institutions (FIs) and payment service providers (PSPs) that are no longer asking if they should engage with blockchain, but how best and most responsibly to do so, stablecoins likely top the list of interest.
But the journey from zero to crypto isn’t plug and play. Institutions face steep learning curves around regulation, compliance and back-end complexity. With consumer trust and regulatory scrutiny on the line, the challenge is to build systems that deliver all the benefits of stablecoins without exposing end-users to the friction or opacity of the underlying blockchain.
The goal, after all, is not to turn everyone into a crypto user. The goal is to give them better payments.
Read more: Crypto Rulemaking Has FinTech Rushing in, TradFi Waiting to See
Abstracting Blockchain by Making Stablecoins Invisible
For stablecoins to achieve mass adoption within mainstream financial services, user experience must be indistinguishable from today’s digital money. This means hiding the complexity of blockchains from end-users and giving institutions tools to manage that complexity behind the scenes.
The most promising models do not require users to hold private keys, manage gas fees, or understand token standards. Instead, users interact with familiar interfaces such as mobile apps, dashboards, payment portals; all while the stablecoin machinery operates invisibly in the back end.
“We sell trust. We take your money and send it somewhere else. You need to trust us that it’s going to land where we say it will,” Conduit’s Gertman said.
His firm, which raised a $36 million Series A last week (May 28), aims to facilitate cross-border B2B and B2B2C flows by letting businesses move money globally using stablecoins as the liquidity rail.
“Our core focus is business-to-business payments,” Gertman said. “We have customers who have consumers, so we can go B2B2C. But we ourselves don’t do B2C directly.”
Traditionally, cross-border B2B trade has leaned heavily on net-30, -60 or -90 payment terms. Buyers delay payments to optimize working capital. But Conduit is seeing this model shift.
“Customers are now saying, ‘I can pay you today. But can you give me a lower price?’ And often, the answer from suppliers is yes,” Gertman said. “There are advantages in instant settlement. You don’t need as much working capital. You’re not exposed to FX gain/loss.”
See also: Making Stablecoins ‘Grandma-Friendly’
Why Emerging Markets Are Leading the Way
The goal of stablecoins, at least in a cross-border context, is to connect the existing vibrant but siloed domestic payment ecosystems — PIX in Brazil, M-Pesa in Kenya, GCash in the Philippines — into a single global mesh.
While the U.S. consumer remains largely unfamiliar with stablecoins, the picture looks different elsewhere. In Kenya, Nigeria, Brazil and across Latin America, stablecoins are already popular and often seen as more reliable than local currencies.
“Imagine sending money from here to Uruguay,” Gertman said. “You open your Venmo, type in the amount, and your friend receives it via PIX in Brazil. You never leave your app. That’s where we’re going … The way to win in payments is to build a network.”
To get there, the backend may look complex — currency conversions, stablecoin burns, bank settlements. But to the user, it just works.
For FIs and PSPs, stablecoins can serve as on-ramps to more sophisticated digital finance use cases, ranging from real-time FX and supply chain finance to smart contract-based credit scoring.
Visa, for example, recently launched a pilot using stablecoins for treasury settlements between subsidiaries. The entire process is automated, fast and invisible to the end customer.
The crypto era once promised to disrupt traditional finance. Today, a more nuanced story is unfolding. Stablecoins are not replacing banks; they’re upgrading them. For institutions that embrace this evolution, the potential is significant: faster settlements, broader reach and programmable financial products that operate at internet speed.
