Stablecoins Are Going Mainstream – What Do The People Actually Using Them Think?

The infrastructure case for stablecoins has been made – compellingly, by the institutions now building on it. What’s less settled is whether the ground-level commercial reality matches the ambition. The people best placed to answer that question aren’t the ones laying the rails – they’re the ones trying to run businesses on top of them.

The data points in both directions. A BVNK survey of 4,658 stablecoin holders found that 77% would open a stablecoin wallet if their bank or fintech offered one – a number that indicates appetite while also confirming that trust in traditional financial institutions hasn’t been displaced. A PNC survey of treasury leaders found the biggest barrier to adoption wasn’t regulatory uncertainty or unclear ROI. It was a knowledge or skill gap, cited by 29% of respondents. And an EY survey found that 73% of organisations still cite regulatory clarity as a key obstacle, despite the progress made in the UAE and EU.

Where The Optimists And Sceptics Actually Agree

Beneath the competing narratives, there’s a point of consensus: stablecoins work, right now, for cross-border payments in corridors where traditional banking is expensive, slow or unreliable.

Sub-Saharan Africa, LATAM, South East Asia – routes where the World Bank estimates average remittance costs of 6.4%, well above the UN’s 3% target. In those corridors, stablecoin rails that bring costs down to between 0.5 and 1.5% aren’t a theoretical improvement. They’re a structural one.

The harder argument is everything beyond that – domestic transactions in markets with mature card infrastructure, retail merchant acceptance, consumer-facing B2C payments where chargeback rights matter, tax and accounting clarity for businesses not built around crypto. Those are the areas where the ‘revolution’ framing starts to strain – and where the most honest voices in this piece, on both sides, tend to agree that the technology is ahead of the operational infrastructure surrounding it.

We put the questions to seven experts across fintech, payments, legal and operations.

Our Experts

• Vitaly Mikhailov: Founder and CEO, EasyStaff
• Andrew Nalichaev: CEO, HAIA
• Diego Martin: CEO, Yellow Capital
• Mazyar Torkpour: Founder, Paymento
• Safi Ghauri: Managing Partner, Esquare Legal
• Mark Stevenson: Senior Product Manager, Stove Shield
• Eliot Vancil: CEO, Fuel Logic LLC

Vitaly Mikhailov, Founder and CEO, EasyStaff

“Bank transfers to certain corridors have become unreliable. For companies managing contractors in 120 countries, the traditional correspondent banking model creates delays, fees and failures that add up to real operational risk. Stablecoins are becoming mainstream payroll infrastructure not because they’re ideologically interesting but because, in certain corridors, they’re simply more reliable. The MENA, LATAM and parts of the US market have all shown us that stablecoins work – they’re faster, they’re traceable and the costs are predictable in a way that wire transfers often aren’t.”

Andrew Nalichaev, CEO, HAIA

“Where stablecoins can solve an actual commercial problem is in cross-border payments from emerging countries. SME exporters who sell goods and services outside of Nigeria, Argentina, or the Philippines experience an average loss of between five and eight percent of every transaction because of the differences in currency rates, fees and long settlement delays. The World Bank’s most recent report on remittance costs indicates the global average cost is currently around 6.4 percent, with various routes through Sub-Saharan Africa well over eight percent. By using stablecoin rails, the total cost to send cross-border payments can be reduced to between 0.5 and 1.5 percent.

“But the optimist scenario ignores four difficult challenges. The on-chain transaction volume figures relate mainly to exchange-to-exchange settlements, not merchant transactions. Settlement time does not mean the transaction is final at the point of sale. For smaller domestic merchants, when you add a true stack – on and off-ramp friction, KYT screening, reconciliation tools – the total cost of ownership is between 1.5 and three percent, which is Stripe territory. And chargebacks are not natively available in stablecoins, which is a significant barrier for any B2C business.

“What needs to take place is to stop selling stablecoins as an entire payments revolution. Stablecoins are a settlement primitive – one layer below the merchant. The real return on investment will sit in the orchestration layer above the merchant: compliant routing, automated FX, reconciliation and aggregated off-ramps.”

Diego Martin, CEO, Yellow Capital

“A lot of the talk around stablecoins misses how actual businesses operate day to day. For most companies, they are simply trying to solve unglamorous, expensive problems such as settlement delays, brutal cross-border fees, and the friction of moving money between markets.

“At Yellow Capital, we are seeing real interest from businesses and payment providers who want faster, more flexible ways to move liquidity globally, particularly across regions where traditional banking still creates delays and operational friction. LATAM, Africa, and South East Asia come up most often, where remittances and settlement lags cause real pain on the ground.

“Most current financial infrastructure is not built for this shift, so the work begins at integration. The businesses actually winning with stablecoins right now are doing it in the background, for treasury and settlement. They’re keeping it focused entirely on operations, not turning it into a public statement. Most of their customers have no idea stablecoins are even involved. That is exactly what sustainable adoption looks like.”

Mazyar Torkpour, Founder, Paymento

“The stablecoin payment experience is genuinely better than most people expect on the technical side. Fees are low and settlement is fast, especially for cross-border transactions that would normally take days and cost a high percentage of your transaction value. Merchants who switched to stablecoins are usually surprised by how smooth the rails are once everything is set up.

“Many merchants are facing frustrations due to the amount of education their customers need. A majority of customers do not currently have a wallet set up or do not have the confidence to make a stablecoin transaction. Additionally, many merchants do not understand that accounting and tax reporting for stablecoin payments is much more manual than they thought.

“What I would tell a business owner thinking about making the switch: start with a specific use case where stablecoins solve a real problem for you, whether that is cross-border payments, avoiding chargebacks, or reaching a crypto-native customer base. Do not try to replace your entire payment stack on day one. The revolution is real, but it is happening use case by use case, not all at once.”

Safi Ghauri, Managing Partner, Esquare Legal

“Since we’re in the crypto industry, almost all of our payments are in stablecoins. When moving from fiat to stablecoins, the most remarkable feature was the instant nature of transactions and the traceability – just one transaction hash and complete visibility. I’ve never experienced again the previous pains of waiting or confusion about the nature of funds.

“The hard part is the off-ramp to fiat where it’s needed. We’re cross-border and every jurisdiction has different concerns – lengthy KYC in the US, poor order-book rates in Brazil, recording and reporting requirements in Germany. But the UAE makes it extremely easy. For stablecoins to reach peak velocity they need to become part of digital neobank services, and I am certain they would then replace fiat.”

Mark Stevenson, Senior Product Manager, Stove Shield

“The stablecoin payment revolution is not very successful at transaction stability since the conversion values change, which adds hidden operational expenses. Manufacturers need flat pricing to enable consistent supply of materials – many digital assets often move by one percent until they’re deposited in traditional bank accounts. These small differences eat away at margins over thousands of transactions each day.

“Payment networks that support stablecoins are not yet equipped with the necessary infrastructure for scalable business operations. Legacy payment rails scale to process more than 50,000 transactions per second without dropping data packets. Digital asset ledgers are less effective in handling volume during peak shopping hours, and payment processing terminals may be subject to software bugs that can cause them to remain frozen for hours.”

Eliot Vancil, CEO, Fuel Logic LLC

“For the most part, the businesses that are using stablecoins are addressing a payment issue they don’t truly need to resolve. The traditional ACH or card networks settle in one to two business days at a cost that most domestic operators can handle. The stablecoin case really starts to move in places where banking access is low or there’s real cross-border friction.

“Any savings on a back-end accounting, tax reporting and reconciliation load will usually be eaten up before they appear. Dispute resolution systems, which commercial operators rely on, have yet to be established for stablecoins. Traditional card networks handle around $40 billion in disputed transactions annually with a definite programme and a liability structure. Stablecoin transactions are inherently irreversible and if a payment is disputed, the business bears the loss with no official channel to report the transgression.”

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