Becoming The Backbone Of Finance

The concept of using stablecoins in the financial system

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Stablecoins processed $9 trillion in payments in 2025, an 87% jump from the year before. September alone hit $1.25 trillion. The numbers are striking, but they’re still just a sliver of the $2 quadrillion that moves through the global payments system every year. Stablecoins are roughly 2.3% of total flows. But they’re winning where it actually matters: remittances to families overseas, invoices between corporations, and payroll for international contractors. Seconds instead of days. Pennies instead of dollars.

Why? Stablecoins operate 24/7 with instant settlement and cost a fraction per transaction. That speed advantage is now backed by institutional-grade infrastructure. The payments flow through three layers—interface, connectivity, and settlement—all anchored by issuers’ reserves, primarily Treasury securities and cash, ensuring liquidity and stability.

The impact is tangible and immediate: A Filipino nurse now sends money home in seconds, paying $0.20 instead of waiting days and losing $13 to fees. A Mexican worker transfers earnings in minutes at a fraction of traditional costs. In the Philippines and Mexico—$105 billion combined in annual remittances—workers are increasingly bypassing banks. Platforms like Bitso processed $6.5 billion last year, capturing 10% of the US-Mexico corridor.

What changed in 2025 wasn’t the technology—it was regulatory clarity. The GENIUS Act—introduced in February 2025 and passed with bipartisan support in June—established the first federal framework for stablecoin issuers. The industry moved fast. Within weeks, Visa rolled out stablecoin prefunding, embedding blockchain rails into card networks. Mastercard rolled out stablecoin support across its Move network. These aren’t pilots. They’re operational. The Fed now projects the market could reach $3 trillion by decade’s end. That optimism is shared. 88% of banks and payment firms now see regulation as a catalyst, not a barrier—up from just 25% two years ago.

Europe moved in parallel. The EU’s MiCA regulation brought long-awaited clarity across member states. By September, nine European banks announced a euro-backed stablecoin. Canada followed suit, adding a national framework for fiat-backed stablecoins to its 2025 budget. The regulatory clarity unlocked infrastructure that’s been years in the making.

Interface: Where Users Access the Rails

The first component is what people see and interact with — checkout pages, invoicing dashboards, and mobile wallets where payments begin. When a customer initiates a transaction, payment processors handle the initial routing.

Stripe, which processes hundreds of billions of dollars in transactions each year, began accepting USDC for U.S. merchants in October 2024 across Ethereum, Solana, and Polygon. Within 24 hours, customers from more than 70 countries used it — proof that global demand for blockchain payment rails already existed. A year later, Stripe expanded that functionality to include subscription payments on Base and Polygon, designed for the 30% of its merchants with recurring-revenue models.

The economics are compelling. The top 20 AI companies on Stripe earn about 60% of their revenue internationally, making cross-border fees a direct margin hit. Merchants now report transaction costs dropping by roughly 50% using stablecoins compared with card networks, and some process up to 20% of their payment volume through stablecoins.

The cost advantage is pulling in established players. In September 2025, PayPal expanded PYUSD from four blockchains to thirteen, including Tron, Avalanche, and Aptos, broadening accessibility as it competes for share in a landscape dominated by USDC and USDT. Western Union, which handles 70 million remittances quarterly for 150 million customers, sees the same cost imperative. The company is piloting blockchain settlement to eliminate correspondent banks, cutting days of delay and multiple intermediary fees in high-friction corridors.

Retail platforms are scaling adoption. In June 2025, Shopify integrated USDC payments on Base—Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2—for merchants across 34 countries, offering zero FX fees and instant fiat settlement for Shopify Payments. WooCommerce, which powers over 4.5 million online stores globally, expanded USDC acceptance to more than 1,000 merchants in Q3 2025 through plugin integrations supporting Base, Solana, and Polygon—targeting the small and medium-sized businesses that dominate e-commerce.

Beyond general-purpose processors, specialized providers are targeting specific verticals with tailored infrastructure, addressing pain points and making adoption frictionless. ForumPay, for example, enables businesses to accept cryptocurrency with instant fiat conversion, eliminating volatility exposure. The platform processes online, point-of-sale, and in-app transactions across hospitality, gaming, real estate, e-commerce, and luxury retail.

The Connectivity Layer: The Invisible Routing Between Systems

Every time someone hits “pay,” a chain of decisions unfolds behind the scenes.

Which rails should carry the money? Which compliance checks apply? Which currency needs converting?

In the old system, correspondent banks passed payments hand to hand, taking days and fees at every stop. Stablecoin infrastructure collapses that process into milliseconds — but the complexity hasn’t vanished. It’s just moved deeper into the stack.

That’s the connectivity layer: the fabric linking banks, blockchains, compliance systems, and currency converters so a single payment can move from any origin to any destination.

Finastra—whose software powers operations at over 8,000 financial institutions globally—has embedded stablecoin capabilities into its banking platforms, letting institutions add blockchain settlement without ripping out their core systems. Fireblocks, which processed over $1.5 trillion in stablecoin transactions in 2024, handles 10-15% of all global USDC and USDT flows—acting as critical middleware between traditional finance and blockchain rails.

Meanwhile, legacy processors are building their own stablecoin infrastructure. Fiserv is testing a state-backed stablecoin with the state-owned Bank of North Dakota. FIS and Plaid are building API bridges that hide blockchain complexity while letting banks access stablecoin settlement directly.

The front end looks effortless because the middleware absorbs the chaos. This is the layer turning stablecoins from crypto jargon into the connective tissue of global payments.

ACH or automated clearing house as electronic money transfer

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Settlement: Where Seconds Replace Days

ACH vs. Stablecoins (2025)

• Settlement time: 1–3 business days → under 1 second
• Cost per payment: about $0.29 → less than a cent
• Operating hours: banking hours → 24/7/365
• Annual volume: $10 trillion (U.S.) → $9 trillion (global)

The stablecoin market reached $312 billion in October 2025. Circle’s USDC jumped 72% to $74 billion — outpacing Tether’s 32% growth—as regulatory clarity drew institutional money off the sidelines. In April 2025, Circle launched the Circle Payments Network with Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank, and Société Générale, giving banks direct access to USDC rails in a limited rollout by May. Five months later came Arc, a new Layer-1 blockchain built for finance and backed by BlackRock, Visa, Goldman Sachs, and AWS — an institutional settlement layer built for regulated finance.

JPMorgan’s Kinexys platform already clears more than $1.5 trillion in settlements for corporate treasuries worldwide. Its JPM Coin, launched in 2019, moves cash between subsidiaries in real time. In June 2025, the bank unveiled JPMD, a deposit token built on Coinbase’s Base blockchain — its first foray into public blockchain infrastructure for B2B payments.

Visa now treats stablecoins as prefunding liquidity for cross-border disbursements—tokenized treasury tools that settle instantly while recipients still receive fiat. Mastercard is piloting similar tokenized settlement logic.

Japan is going a step further. The country’s three biggest banks — Mitsubishi UFJ, Sumitomo Mitsui, and Mizuho — are developing a regulator-approved joint stablecoin for corporate and inter-company payments, slated for launch by March 2026. Incumbents aren’t just adopting blockchain rails — they’re building them.

As settlement infrastructure matures, institutions are moving beyond payments to treasury management. Banks, funds, and corporate treasuries are putting stablecoin holdings to work. Institutional demand for stablecoins offering predictable and risk-mitigated yield has accelerated over the past year. “Given our experience running staking infrastructure for institutions now adopting stablecoins, supporting integrations for exchanges, funds, DAOs, and protocols managing on-chain treasuries was a natural next step,” says Damien Scanlon, Chief Product Officer at Chorus One, a staking infrastructure provider since 2018.

The settlement layer is where blockchain’s infrastructure promise is becoming operational: programmable, instant, borderless value transfer.

Backbone: The Treasury Foundation

Beneath the new payment rails lies a $200 billion foundation — U.S. Treasuries and cash reserves held by stablecoin issuers. Tether alone holds $135 billion, making it the 17th-largest holder of U.S. government debt, ahead of nations like South Korea and Germany.

That anchor changes everything. Stablecoins are no longer speculative tokens; they’re instruments backed by the deepest, most liquid market in global finance. Every USDC or USDT in circulation is backed dollar-for-dollar by Treasury bills or cash — directly tying digital payments to U.S. sovereign debt.

BlackRock manages Circle’s reserves, with roughly 90% of non-cash assets in the Circle Reserve Fund, a money market portfolio of short-dated Treasuries. BNY Mellon, America’s oldest custody bank, safeguards those assets within the same institutional infrastructure that holds trillions for pension funds and governments.

When redemptions surge, issuers don’t unwind crypto trades — they sell Treasuries through the same custody chains used by the world’s largest banks. That’s what gives payment platforms confidence to build on stablecoin rails: the liquidity is real, not theoretical.

And here’s the twist: assets once built to bypass the financial system have become one of its biggest buyers. Stablecoins didn’t burn down the old system — they plugged directly into it. Now, they’ve become part of the plumbing.

The implications haven’t been lost on Washington. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said stablecoins will drive demand for U.S. Treasuries and reinforce dollar dominance.

Convergence

The financial system isn’t being displaced—it’s being rewired. What took three days now takes three seconds. What cost $13 now costs pennies. What required banks, correspondent networks, and business hours now happens peer-to-peer, 24/7, globally.

Crypto didn’t replace Wall Street. It became Wall Street’s operating system.

Disclaimer: Companies mentioned are illustrative examples only. The author has no affiliation with any companies referenced. This does not constitute investment advice. Readers should conduct independent research.