“People hold their assets in crypto, but ‘pay with bitcoin’ is so 2019. Merchants don’t want to accept it, they want to accept stablecoins,” Mesh CEO and Co-founder Bam Azizi told PYMNTS during an interview at Stablecon. “The crypto market cap is $3 trillion, and the stablecoin market cap is $250 billion, meaning it’s less than 10%. if you want to build a payments network, you need to solve the divide so shoppers can walk in and pay with their assets, while merchants receive the payment as stablecoin.”
Touted for their price stability and rapid transfer capabilities, stablecoins like USDC and USDT have become fundamental instruments in global trade, remittances and decentralized finance (DeFi). But beneath their apparent simplicity lies a complex network of operational, technical and security frameworks.
At first glance, sending stablecoins appears deceptively simple: input a recipient address, confirm the amount and submit. However, this transaction traverses a layered ecosystem involving wallet infrastructure, smart contracts, off-chain data integrations, compliance tools and blockchain networks. Each layer is a potential point of failure or attack.
“The biggest problem in crypto is not adoption, it’s the user experience,” Azizi said. “You need to make payments so simple that even a grandmother will use it one day, maybe without even knowing that the mechanism behind the scenes is a stablecoin … to do that, you need to do a lot of heavy lifting.”
See more: Why Stablecoins Are Stuck at the Acceptance Hurdle
Unpacking the Stablecoin Proposition for Everyday Payments
Trust is everything in payments. And for stablecoins to gain mainstream traction, their back-end infrastructure needs to inspire the same confidence that people have in their credit card or banking systems.
Imagine you’re a customer buying a coffee using a stablecoin. You scan a QR code at the register, approve the transaction on your wallet and the payment clears in seconds. Simple, right?
Not quite.
Underneath that smooth user experience is a complex choreography of actions. First, the transaction is likely initiated by a wallet and signed with private keys, ensuring only the authorized user can send the funds. The transaction is submitted to a blockchain (like Ethereum or Solana), where nodes verify and record it in an immutable ledger. Then, the stablecoin’s smart contract debits the sender and credits the merchant, instantly updating balances on-chain.
In some cases, a third-party provider, which could be a firm like Fireblocks or BitGo, acts as a custodian, helping businesses manage funds securely through application programming interfaces (APIs), vaults and access controls. The entire process may take seconds, but behind the scenes, dozens of risk mitigation and verification checks are triggered to protect both users and businesses.
“The new generation might not have a Bank of America account,” Aziz said. “But they’ll have MetaMask. They’ll hold assets there, and the next step is paying with those assets.”
Read also: FinTech Partnerships Look to Crack Stablecoin On- and Off-Ramp Challenges
How Stablecoin Transactions Stay Safe
Despite the technological advances, stablecoins are not immune to threats, and their rise has attracted new classes of digital fraud. For consumers, one of the biggest risks is fake apps or phishing links that mimic real wallets or payment interfaces. Merchants need to educate their customers — and themselves — on how to verify wallet addresses and look for security indicators like hardware wallet support and ENS (Ethereum Name Service) domain names.
Consumer friendly also doesn’t mean compliance light. Merchants accepting stablecoins must ensure they comply with local know your customer/anti-money laundering (KYC/AML) laws, especially for higher-value transactions.
“Even if stablecoins are the preferred medium for a lot of criminal activity, creating a regulated environment where these companies can operate in conjunction with law enforcement is probably a positive,” Dan Boyle, partner at Boies Schiller Flexner, told PYMNTS in April.
The bottom line is that, for consumers and merchants, the potential shift stablecoins represent isn’t just technological — it’s psychological. Trust, familiarity and education are critical. And while today’s stablecoin experience is faster and cheaper than legacy systems, the true breakthrough will come when it becomes invisible.
It may already be happening in other regions. Currency.com CEO Konstantin Anissimov told PYMNTS that there has been “a big shift in terms of adoption of stablecoin payments that is being driven by uncertainty in geopolitics.”
“I am personally seeing a big increase of small to medium enterprises utilizing stablecoin payments because banking rails are harder and harder to use,” Anissimov said.
