Stablecoins five years ago represented a new form of money looking for a reason to exist. This week offered a different picture. The reason for stablecoins as a cash alternative is emerging precisely as the technology itself becomes harder to see.
Across payroll, merchant acquiring, card networks, creator payouts and corporate treasury, stablecoins are being inserted into payment flows without necessarily requiring the payer or recipient to behave like a crypto user. At the same time, U.S. regulators are moving toward a framework that could make the issuers behind those tokens look more like supervised financial institutions.
While much of the early stablecoin debate assumed adoption depended on persuading merchants to accept a new asset, infrastructure providers are today solving a different problem: how to let customers fund transactions with digital assets while allowing merchants to receive the currency and settlement experience they already expect.
See also: Why Stablecoins Are a Money Story, Not a Consumer Story
The Most Valuable Stablecoin Company May Not Issue a Stablecoin
The report, “From Asset to Everyday Money: Making Digital Currencies Spendable,” the July edition of the Payments Innovation Tracker® Series from PYMNTS Intelligence and Paymentology, found consumers show growing interest in using cryptocurrencies and stablecoins for purchases, but acceptance, trust and uneven payment experiences still limit their choices.
The industry is trying to fix that by attacking the problem from the other side. Consider the merchant. Rain CEO Farooq Malik said this week that more than 100,000 merchants receive payments involving stablecoins without necessarily knowing stablecoins are part of the transaction. Rain itself facilitates stablecoin-funded payments through Visa’s network, allowing the merchant experience to remain largely conventional even when digital dollars sit somewhere upstream in the payment chain.
Kraken’s newly launched U.S. Krak Card illustrates the same architecture from the consumer side. Customers can hold more than 600 currencies and assets and spend from them at checkout. The complexity of converting the asset into something usable by the existing merchant network happens behind the transaction.
For payment networks, the competitive question becomes less about whether consumers will select “stablecoin” beside credit and debit and more whether embracing a stablecoin liquidity layer can improve funding, conversion, cross-border settlement or treasury operations somewhere inside an otherwise familiar payment.
After all, stablecoin proponents have traditionally hung their hat on the efficiencies that that blockchain provides when money crosses borders.
See more: The GENIUS Act Gives Stablecoins a Corporate Cash Audition
The marketplace played those efficiencies out this week. Deel and Mesh announced Thursday (Aug. 20) that workers selecting stablecoin payouts through Deel will have wallet ownership verified through Mesh before funds move. Mesh supports verification across more than 300 wallets and exchanges, while Deel operates across 150 countries and serves more than 40,000 customers. The partnership shows that the infrastructure around stablecoins is beginning to absorb the operational problems that previously made them difficult to use at enterprise scale.
Blockchain transactions can be unforgiving: send money to the wrong address or network and reversing the transaction may be impossible. Mesh’s verification layer addresses that problem before payment execution. In effect, the industry is building controls around stablecoins that make them behave more like enterprise payment instruments and less like raw crypto transactions.
The same economics explain why X is reportedly considering stablecoin payouts for creators and influencers. Cross-border creator payments combine many of the conditions where stablecoins have their strongest theoretical advantage: fragmented banking access, multiple currencies, large numbers of relatively small recipients and payment intermediaries extracting fees along the way.
Read more: Italy’s Central Bank Finds Stablecoins Still Can’t Beat Traditional Payments
Card Networks See Infrastructure as the Moat to Defend
Stablecoins solve only part of a payment. Someone still has to manage acceptance, identity, compliance, fraud, currency conversion, liquidity, dispute processes and connections to billions of existing accounts and merchant endpoints. The card networks already play this role in existing commerce environments.
Even seemingly peripheral developments point in that direction. Kroger, for example, expanded availability of Fold’s bitcoin gift card following a pilot, giving consumers another familiar retail wrapper through which to acquire a digital asset without first navigating the conventional crypto onboarding process.
Elsewhere, Visa is reportedly searching for a new stablecoin settlement partner with multi-regional licensing capabilities after Mastercard acquired BVNK, underscoring how quickly stablecoin infrastructure is becoming strategically relevant to established payment networks.
At the same time, “Waiting for Certainty: Why Most CFOs Are Holding Back on Crypto and Stablecoins,” the March installment of PYMNTS Intelligence’s 2026 Certainty Project, showed that most middle-market companies remain cautious about digital assets. Usage is limited, with 13% of firms using stablecoins and 5% employing other cryptocurrencies.
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