My Summer of Stables

When you work in payments for a couple of decades, your list of people to catch up with gets long. At the beginning of the year, after my break from the bumpy road of Open Banking (currently in the “time-out” corner along with the CFPB), I started down the list: PayPal, eBay, Western Union, Veem, Nium, and recent Trustly alums. We talked about life, family, and colleagues. We talked about fintech trends. And invariably, we talked about stablecoins. A lot. By the time the summer hit, it had become the new center of my universe and where, given my many years in global payments, the bulk of my new advisory work has been centered.

I’m a payment veteran. I’ve had the chance to witness several payment revolutions. Early PayPal was the first alternative payment method to catch fire. Mobile money got big a few years later, as did dongles to bring card services to SMBs. My time at Western Union was during the transformation of remittances to the digital age. Nium and its competitors brought real-time B2B global payments to the world. But it was back in the fall of 2016 when I joined Marwan Forzley as the first CRO of Veem that the seed of the biggest fintech revolution was planted.

Veem was changing the SMB service landscape with easy payouts to global vendors with great rates to boot. Once again, bank wires were the enemy. I was fascinated by the speed and the price we could send to difficult (at the time) countries like the Philippines and Brazil.

“How can it get there so quick?” I asked.

“Crypto rails. It’s a butterfly trade,” Marwan replied.

“You said a bunch of words that shouldn’t make sense together,” said 2016 me.

But Veem was the first company I knew of that grasped the early tech of crypto and found a way to meld it together with the reality of fiat. Like many things in fintech, Veem had the right idea but was ahead of its time. The lack of stablecoins and the whimsical liquidity of Bitcoin eventually made fiat exchanges more practical. So while Veem persists and thrives today, the early age of one of the first commercial uses of crypto rails for fiat delivery became a minor part of their story.

Let’s fast forward to my summer networking visit to New York this year. The fintech world was looking for the miracle of crypto all over again to cure the disease of slow, border-confined, stuttering fiat. In my conversations, stablecoin pure-plays, mega-merchants, big fintech, and little fintech were all scrambling to figure out where the play is. Consumers? Wallets? Rails? Defi plays?

At the start of the year, it felt like the noise was around a global consumer shift about to take place, where we all spoke stablecoin to each other. P2P transfer - here’s some stables. Birthday gift - here’s some stables (on a prepaid card). Check-out at your favorite store - here’s some stables. Financing for your next big supplier payment - yup, more stables. The numbers seemed to back it up with volume and transactions doubling in 2025. It was mostly from trading, but a lot more users nonetheless. The question was on whether we in the US would be trading the eyebrow-raising USDT or the more audited and compliant USDC. Or would a dark-horse third player rise?

But now I see the noise of consumer adoption fade (for now) a little as the focus has turned to the reality that we need rails and rules to use stablecoins. AND we need consumers to actually want and use them (a common plague to good fintech ideas). The US passed the GENIUS act, and big chunks of the world, from the Middle East to Latin America to Asia, either passed or advanced rules for stablecoin usage this year. With that, the rush was on for more infrastructure. Banks and merchants started announcing their own stablecoin or tokenized deposit coins one after another. Now scores of different stablecoins are coming our way. And now there’s a rush on introducing specific L1 crypto rails custom-made for the speed and KYC requirements of payments. [I’m skipping over the use of stablecoins for on/off-boarding for crypto purchases as that’s another bundled topic altogether. In short, let's keep this essay brief.]

Yet on the consumer front, there seems to be a slowly growing acceptance that, for most parts of the world, their local currency works just fine, thank you. And yes, there’s Argentina. Like mobile payments had Kenya’s Safaricom as the reason we’d globally all store value on our phones, not our banks, Argentina’s shaky currency keeps being listed as the reason the entire world will move to USD-dominated accounts. No doubt there’ll be more USD-backed stablecoin investors from the coins’ global availability. But most of the world is trying to buy bread next door at the market in their local currency. From a revenue-generating perspective, the vision of wallets domestically and internationally bursting with specified USD-coin balances goes into the “not quite yet” bucket. [Again, crypto purchases are a topic for another day.]

So, where is the current stablecoin innovation push most visible to everyday consumers? It’s not. Outside of pure infrastructure, the use cases I find gaining traction in the real world is where fiat gets better with the programmability and speed of crypto rails. It’s the tech, not the coin itself. It will be the stablecoin revolution you, the consumer, might not even see. There is a huge overhaul of the entire global financial system underway, on a tech that was finally built in the 21st century. Your transfers will happen faster. Remittances arrive in seconds. Financing will become better with a global audience vying to invest in your ideas or assets. Home buying less laborious. But you, as a consumer, won’t need to adapt anything new or be forced to splinter your holdings into multiple stable-wallets. It will happen better because the rails your financial services use all got better. It’s 2016 all over again - but in a good, and lasting, way.

It’s a Stablecoin Summer - Viva la (Technical) Revolution!