Utila CEO: ‘Everyone Will Enter the Stablecoin Era’

Multinational corporations, FinTech platforms and even banks are increasingly eyeing blockchain solutions for cross-border payments, liquidity management and programmable finance.

But many can hit a wall when it comes to integrating stablecoin infrastructure that is secure, compliant, scalable and actually usable by corporate finance teams.

The issue isn’t just technical; it’s strategic. Enterprises demand more than a crypto wallet with a few layers of abstraction. They need multi-user access, audit trails, governance controls and seamless compliance tooling.

“When you think about the needs of every FinTech or payments company, or a bank that wants to enter the space, they need secure infrastructure, from the creation of assets, such as tokenizing them, to holding them, and of course moving them,” Bentzi Rabi, co-founder and CEO of Utila, told PYMNTS.

After all, in traditional finance, a corporate treasury system integrates with banks, tracks permissions, logs every transaction and supports full auditability. Yet when enterprises want to interact with the blockchain, whether for stablecoin vendor payments, on-chain settlements or moving money across borders, there’s a stark absence of such tooling.

Read more: Making Sense of Public Versus Private Blockchains for Financial Services

Building Institutional Grade, From the Ground Up

Meeting the rising demand for a secure institutional crypto architecture is the very same challenge that Utila last week (March 19) raised an $18 million Series A to tackle.

Rabbi said Utila isn’t a crypto custodian, and it doesn’t aim to be. The company is a tech provider: acting as a layer that enables companies to build custody, exchanges, tokenized marketplaces or cross-border payment rails on top.

“You can think of Utila more like LEGO blocks,” said Rabi. “We give you all the basics when it comes to blockchain connectivity, key management, user management, and institutional-grade security.”

Perhaps the most interesting inflection point for enterprise blockchain is where the infrastructure and product come together in line with market momentum. The conversation today around digital assets has shifted from speculative trading to practical value, especially stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets (RWA).

“Tokenizing money, e.g. stablecoins, is clearly the best use case today,” Rabi said. “But we’re also seeing demand for tokenizing everything. It’s clear these things are solving a real problem.”

“Everyone will enter the stablecoin era in the end,” the Utila CEO predicted, highlighting marketplace and regulatory tailwinds. “And everyone will need utility behind it.”

Infrastructure for a Post-Trading Era

Attention to both security and usability is becoming a necessary, if still rare, balance in enterprise crypto tooling. Solving for that problem of streamlined experience with enterprise-grade requirements, particularly in cross-border payments, includes the growing need for interoperability, regulatory compliance and gas management across chains.

“You’ll get [a stablecoin] on one blockchain, but then need to convert or bridge it to another geography, in a different stablecoin, on a different chain,” Rabi said. “We’re trying to solve as much of that complexity as possible … by getting the secret sauce of making things easy while maintaining institutional-grade security standards.”

And “Security awareness is not just in the product, it’s in how your systems are protected, how your teams operate,” he added. “When you look at the numbers, the friction, the compliance headaches, especially moving money across borders, it’s clear that everyone will adopt this in the end.”

Another major hurdle is compliance. Most enterprises operate in highly regulated environments. That means needing transaction monitoring, know your business (KYB) processes, anti-money laundering (AML) controls, and seamless integration with existing ERP or treasury systems.

This also highlights a broader maturation of the blockchain space, where infrastructure, not speculation, is the new battleground.

“Our vision is to be the leading wallet provider or infrastructure provider for any payments or tokenization-related use case in crypto,” Rabi said. “The same way you go to Stripe when you want to accept payments, you’ll come to Utila when you want to work with digital assets.”

As large enterprises finally move from pilots to production, infrastructure players like Utila could be the connective tissue making it all work.