Cross-border payments have long been defined by delays, fees, and a maze of intermediary banks. Stablecoins are changing that—offering a faster, simpler alternative that cuts out the middleman entirely.
This use case is one of the key drivers behind the stablecoin market’s rapid growth in recent years. However, stablecoins—and digital assets more broadly—have the potential to reshape virtually every payment scenario, from enterprise transactions to retail purchases.
In many cases, the infrastructure to support these applications is already in place, largely due to the rapid proliferation of crypto payment gateways. While early iterations did little more than add a ‘Pay with Crypto’ button at checkout, these crypto gateways have quickly evolved into full-scale payments orchestration platforms.
In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Kate Lifshits, CEO of NOWPayments, and James Wester, Director of Cryptocurrency and Co-Head of Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, discussed the dynamic powers of stablecoins, the remaining regulatory and infrastructure challenges, and how the final barriers to mainstream adoption are steadily falling.
Solving Pain Points
Although they aren’t issued by the U.S. Federal Reserve, leading stablecoins have effectively become a digital representation of the dollar. This makes them a powerful alternative to the existing rails.
“There are some pain points that most merchants that use traditional rails face,” Lifshits said. “Those are speed, availability, costs, and the inability of the traditional rails to meet the rising demand for optimization and innovation. That’s exactly where stablecoins come in because if we’re talking about speed, we are talking about several seconds instead of several days. If we’re talking about costs, we’re talking about several cents or a dollar instead of a lot of dollars.”
Beyond efficiency gains, the modern infrastructure supporting stablecoins can serve as a springboard for innovation. From a liquidity perspective, near-real-time settlement enhances the time value of money, enabling organizations and consumers to deploy funds more effectively.
Together, these advantages make stablecoins a compelling option across a wide range of use cases.
“In the way that business-to-business payments are being looked at, it is just having another option,” Wester said. “For the longest time there were no options in how you paid your bills, or the options you had were limited, expensive, and slow. It’s just having a new rail that has cheaper, faster, and better settlement time and removes some of the intermediaries who are taking a toll to move things along. And there are also friction points in having all of those intermediaries.”
“We’re creating a whole new option that didn’t exist before, especially from a B2B standpoint,” he said. “Even remittances—when you’re talking about consumers paying each other across borders—what you’re seeing now is a new option that is cheaper, faster, better, and begins to drive down costs everywhere.”
The Added Bonus of Crypto
For all the progress in crypto payments, onboarding remains a sticking point. Many merchants are still wary of the perceived complexity of integration, while others lack a clear starting point.
“It’s up to the crypto payment gateways to give them the easiest onboarding flow ever,” Lifshits said. “That would mean that when they start using the payment gateway, they see all the traditional tools they are used to, but with the added bonus of crypto.”
The goal is to make crypto payment gateways as intuitive and seamless as the tools merchants already use, such as those offered by Stripe or PayPal.
Gateways must also address longstanding concerns around crypto acceptance, namely, how digital assets are managed after receipt and the volatility of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and Ethereum.
This makes it critical for merchants to have the ability to convert crypto to fiat at any point, as well as the flexibility to choose how actively they manage digital assets. This optionality helps address another concern: crypto transactions can be unforgiving. For example, sending funds to the wrong wallet can have irreversible consequences.
While the infrastructure to mitigate these risks has improved greatly, silos still exist. Many organizations continue to rely on separate payment stacks for traditional rails and digital assets.
“We’re seeing development along both of those,” Wester said. “There are some nuances to payments the traditional way that we haven’t built into stablecoins yet. But what’s surprising to me is how quickly we are identifying those nuances, how quickly we are beginning to see the traditional rails and the legacy providers look at stablecoins and say, ‘We can do that, we can integrate that, let’s bring that into more traditional bank and financial institution payment rails.’”
Advancing the Crypto Mission
Rising institutional interest is driving new regulatory measures worldwide. These landmark frameworks represent a turning point for an industry rooted in decentralization and long viewed with skepticism by global financial leaders.
“Regulation always lags innovation. You have an innovation, you don’t know what that innovation is going to entail, so regulators don’t exactly know what they’re supposed to be regulating,” Wester said. “Now that we’re seeing that it does provide cheaper rails, faster clearing, and all sorts of innovation, traditional financial services began to say to regulators: ‘We want to be able to do this,’ and regulators finally started coming around and saying, ‘Let’s see what we can do.’”
Recent efforts include Europe’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework and the GENIUS Act in the U.S.—developments that would have seemed implausible just a few years ago. Yet digital assets are proving they can be as compliant, safe, and secure as traditional financial instruments.
They can also align with existing Know Your Customer (KYC), Know Your Business (KYC), and anti-money laundering standards. In some respects, blockchain-based transactions offer even greater transparency than traditional systems.
As these long-awaited regulations take effect, it is critical for digital asset firms to embrace and adhere to them.
“To further the mission of crypto, a payment gateway should be licensed, they should understand each country’s rules, and help businesses to operate with crypto on a regulated and licensed and compliant basis,” Lifshits said. “That would mean not just licenses, but also procedures as KYC and KYB. But here we see an interesting challenge—the KYC and KYB procedures should be out there without breaking the UX.”
“That’s where the conversion usually starts to fail, when businesses are trying to be compliant and safe, but then the UX suffers for it,” she said. “It’s up to the payment gateway to comply with the rules, but to still to be able to provide a better experience than the traditional payment gateway that only works with fiat.”
The Future Is Now
Delivering a strong user experience while maintaining compliance is a difficult balance, but a crucial one. Many users remain hesitant to engage with crypto payments, making trust a decisive factor.
“You can integrate this into consumer payments, remittances, commercial payments—whatever application it is,” Wester said. “It’s all a part of simplifying that user experience and then educating people on just how simple it is.”
Ultimately, ongoing improvements in infrastructure, compliance, and education are all aimed at building that trust—the foundation for mainstream adoption of crypto payments.
“If crypto itself is getting more trust, the same should go for crypto payment gateways,” Lifshits said. “And it’s not just education. There should also be a bit of marketing here because crypto is already here.”
“It’s not just something in the future, it’s here. And you should do it now because while you’re waiting, others are already reaping the benefits,” she said.
