More money is moved through cross-border payments than most people realize, and the speed at which it happens is slower than anyone would like.
The banking network that supports most international money transfers is designed for a different era of transaction volumes, speed expectations, and capital costs. Sure, it works, but at a price: business one- to five-day payment windows, where money is always in transit, generate costs without generating value. All the while, payment processors must maintain funded accounts in all currencies and markets to keep money flowing. High-value, low-value transactions – such as remittances, cross-border remittances, and the SME trade agreements that form the backbone of emerging market economies – are quickly compounded.
This problem has persisted for a very long time because no reliable alternative has been available at scale. That is now changing.
Stablecoins – dollar-denominated digital assets that live on the chain – directly solve this inefficiency. By converting fiat currencies into stablecoin at the point of origin, completing the cross-border leg on-chain, and then converting back to the local currency at the destination, payment operators can shrink payment times from days to minutes. Capital that has been sitting in transit is released almost immediately, reducing the pressure to keep accounts funded across corridors to reduce cash flow, resulting in lower financing costs all around. Last year, the value of stablecoin transactions worldwide increased by 72% to $ 33 trillion, and that activity is increasingly focused on cross-border payment channels where communication banking is not efficient.
Stablecoins spent years suspended between credibility and suspicion, acknowledged by institutions that may have accepted them but never did.
That changed dramatically in 2025. The US GENIUS Act, passed in July, established the first government framework for stablecoin payments – setting reserve requirements, redemption standards, and disclosure obligations that gave institutional operators a compliance foundation to continue. The EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation (MiCA) brought stablecoin issuers under a binding framework of reserve requirements and disclosure standards from June 2024, with its broad provisions fully implemented across the board in December of that year. Hong Kong’s Stablecoin Ordinance followed in August 2025, expanding that base into one of the most active digital asset markets in Asia. Among them, these bodies addressed the main concern that had kept the treasury and related teams aside: not that stablecoins would work from a technical point of view, but that they would ever satisfy the risk appetite of a regulated institution.
The market response was swift. A June 2025 EY-Parthenon survey of 350 corporate and financial services executives found that 13% are already using stablecoins, while 54% of non-users expect to adopt them within six to twelve months. Cost savings and speed of payment were cited as key drivers. Among current users, 41% reported cost savings of at least 10%, focusing on B2B cross-border payments.
The corridors and use cases where stablecoin-native settlement brings the most clear benefits have things in common: high transaction frequency, low average rates, and geographic access that makes contact banking expensive or slow.
Cross-border income in markets with strong inflows of funds, capital flows to Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, SME trading areas in the corridors of emerging markets – these flows where the working capital debate is more focused, and where faster payments translate directly into lower costs for businesses and individuals at both ends of the transaction.
The long-term case for stablecoin infrastructure extends beyond institutional payment flows. For an immigration professional whose remittances arrive in hours rather than days, or a small shipper whose exposure is transparent before financial charges are collected, immediate payment has immediate and tangible value. Currently, that opportunity is still far ahead of the market as current acquisitions are focused elsewhere.
McKinsey estimates that Asia will account for 60% of all stablecoin transactions by 2025, driven almost entirely by flows from Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. B2B payments dominate, having increased by 733% year-over-year and accounting for nearly 60% of the global stablecoin payment volume. Efficiency gains are first captured when institutional costs are high and the cost of delay is most apparent. The wider inclusion issue is still in its early stages.
The case for the efficiency of stablecoins in cross-border payments is not evenly distributed. Where many providers are competing to convert stablecoins into local currency, the model has proven itself at scale. In the US-Mexico corridor, for example, stablecoins now account for 5-10% of total remittances, while fees on stablecoin rails have dropped to less than 1%.
Elsewhere, the picture is more complicated. The conversion infrastructure that determines whether the user really gets the speed and cost benefits of stablecoin settlement is still small in all markets where those benefits would be most important: parts of Africa, South Asia, and small trade channels where supplier competition is limited and conversion costs remain high. Closing that gap requires regulatory and operational work as much as it is technical: establishing a compliant foothold in each new market, creating the local currency needed to pay compensation, and extending the governance frameworks where regulated payment businesses already operate. That process is ongoing in some markets and has not yet begun in others. Its speed will determine that the advantages that work well stablecoins have already been brought to the established channels to reach the most people the most important is the cost of sending money across borders.
Barriers to scale are well understood, if not resolved. Regulatory frameworks remain underdeveloped across much of Africa and South Asia – precisely where most of the high-impact corridors operate – and each new market needs its own compliance map. The banking sector’s skepticism includes this: many institutions see stablecoin flows develop without being involved in core operations, and their participation will have a major impact on how quickly the on-ramp and off-ramp banking infrastructure reaches the markets that need it. Liquidity depth and interoperability across blockchain networks present related challenges, especially in emerging market corridors where the local infrastructure to reliably convert stablecoins into domestic currency is still being built, and where patchy coverage can undermine the speed and cost benefits that make the model compelling in the first place.
Bloomberg Intelligence projects that the flow of stablecoin payments will reach $56.6 trillion by 2030, a figure that does not reflect the current volume of issuance but an assessment of how much of the existing cross-border infrastructure can, in principle, be replaced by a faster and cheaper railway.
That trajectory is not guaranteed, and the distance between the current focus on institutional flows across APAC and the wider global opportunity is real. But the direction is clear, the infrastructure is being built, and the regulatory framework is in place in the markets enough to support the momentum. The remaining question is whether stablecoins have a role in the future of cross-border payments. It is how equally, and how quickly, that future comes.
Sanjeev Gupta, Head of Treasury, TerraPay
“The problem stablecoins are designed to solve” was originally created and published by Electronic Payments International, a product owned by GlobalData.
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