Digital Dollars Keep Getting Stuck Outside the Real Economy

For millions of people paid in digital dollar stablecoins, the hardest part isn’t getting the money. It’s using it.

When a freelance designer in Buenos Aires invoices a U.S. client in stablecoins, or when a Nigerian importer settles a cross-border supplier payment in digital dollars, the transaction can feel close to miraculous. Funds arrive in minutes, not days. Fees are measured in cents, not percentages. No correspondent banks. No surprise FX spreads. No paperwork explaining why money is crossing borders.

But the magic can typically fade at a crucial moment: cashing out.

The real friction in the stablecoin economy is not sending value, but converting it back into something usable in the fiat world, whether that’s local currency in a bank account, a debit card balance or money that can pay rent, suppliers and taxes.

This final step, known as off-ramping, is where stablecoins are confronting the limits of their real-world integration. The result is a paradox. Stablecoins are increasingly central to global payments, but they remain trapped in a circular cryptocurrency economy unless users can reliably exit into traditional financial systems.

See also: Stablecoins ‘Perform Poorly’ as Money and Could Face Uphill Payments Battle

The Last-Mile Problem of Digital Dollars

In payments, the “last mile” is often the hardest. It’s the same reason international wires move effortlessly between banks but stall at local clearing systems, or why mobile wallets thrive in-app but struggle with interoperability.

Stablecoins face a similar bottleneck. Moving a digital dollar across blockchains via bridging, while technically and compliantly complex, is trivial compared to moving it into a regulated bank account or onto a card that works at a grocery store. Off-ramping requires coordination between crypto-native systems and highly regulated financial institutions. Banks must comply with know-your-customer (KYC) rules, anti-money-laundering (AML) obligations, sanctions screening and local licensing regimes.

A freelancer may receive payment instantly on-chain, only to spend days navigating exchanges, identity checks and withdrawal limits. A merchant may hold digital dollars that cannot easily be converted into local currency at predictable rates.

The friction isn’t accidental. It reflects the fact that stablecoins were originally designed to function inside crypto markets, not to integrate seamlessly with the global banking system.

That legacy still shapes today’s infrastructure. Many of the largest stablecoin rails are optimized for exchange liquidity, arbitrage, and settlement between trading venues. Off-ramps, by contrast, are treated as an edge case rather than a core feature.

The off-ramp bottleneck has not gone unnoticed. A new wave of FinTech infrastructure is emerging to address what might be called stablecoins’ identity crisis: are they speculative instruments, or are they payment money?

The most promising solutions focus on abstraction. Rather than forcing users to think about wallets, exchanges, and withdrawals, these platforms integrate stablecoins directly into familiar financial interfaces. Bank accounts, cards and payment APIs become the exit, not an afterthought.

“The biggest problem in crypto is not adoption; it’s the user experience,” Mesh CEO and Co-founder Bam Azizi told PYMNTS in an interview posted in May. “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.”

Visa, for example, last month announced the launch of its Stablecoins Advisory Practice that serves banks, FinTechs, merchants and businesses of all sizes.

Visa CEO Ryan McInerney also wrote in his annual letter to shareholders, released Dec. 9, that stablecoins are next-generation settlement infrastructure. Visa’s roadmap includes stablecoin-linked cards, settlements in stablecoins such as USDC, stablecoin prefunding for cross-border payouts, and pilots that deliver payouts directly to stablecoin wallets.

Read also: Making Sense of Where Stablecoins Fit in the Issuer-Merchant-Acquirer Stack

From Circular Economy to Financial Infrastructure

If stablecoins can only move value within cryptocurrency, they will likely remain a niche financial instrument. But if they can move seamlessly into bank accounts and everyday commerce, they may become something far more consequential: a new layer of global money movement.

Citi Institute’s Future of Finance think tank, for example, has projected that the stablecoin market could jump to at least $1.6 trillion by 2030, assuming regulatory support and institutional integration continue apace.

Card programs in particular are emerging as a particularly powerful bridge. By linking stablecoin balances to debit, prepaid, or other card formats, users can spend digital dollars anywhere traditional cards are accepted. Conversion happens in the background, at the point of sale, rather than as a separate, painful step.

It was reported last week (Jan. 14) that providers of stablecoin-linked cards are driving demand for Visa’s stablecoin settlement, and global crypto card payment volume reached $1.5 billion per month in August, up from about $100 million per month in January 2023.

Other providers focus on direct bank off-ramps, embedding stablecoin conversion into treasury tools, payroll systems and invoicing platforms. For businesses, this means stablecoins can function as a settlement layer while accounting, compliance and cash management remain unchanged.

For example, Ramp last spring announced an expansion of its issuing partnership with Stripe to launch stablecoin-backed corporate cards designed to facilitate cross-border transactions. The integration will start with select Latin American markets and then expand to countries in Europe, Africa and Asia.

And findings in the January edition of the Blockchain and Digital Assets Tracker® Series, a collaboration between PYMNTS Intelligence and Citi, show that as regulatory postures clarify around the globe, the question of off-ramping is gaining urgency as the traditional financial sector comes to see a compliant way in which to integrate digital asset infrastructure.

After all, at the end of the day, payments that cannot complete their journey are not payments at all.