Stablecoin Pilots Keep Stalling on the Road to Scale

Stablecoins seem to have found their winning enterprise narrative. Having evolved past their history as crypto-native instruments, stablecoins are instead becoming programmable financial primitives embedded within institutional workflows.

At least that’s how things appear in the U.S., where dollar-backed payment stablecoins are now legal instruments being leveraged for corporate treasury and settlement infrastructure.

But beneath the surface of high-profile announcements and evolving policy frameworks lies a growing graveyard of initiatives, from banks, Fortune 500 firms, and even nation states, that never ultimately transitioned into scaled production.

These aren’t stories of outright failure. Rather, they are stories of regulatory, institutional and economic frictions that have combined to slow what once appeared to be inevitable adoption.

Mapping these stalled efforts reveals a more sober truth: Stablecoins are not being rejected outright, but they are being selectively absorbed into existing financial architectures, often in ways that can fall short of their original promise to rewire the financial system.

See also: Stablecoin Plans Split as Banks Go Their Own Way

The Potential Illusion of Stablecoin Momentum

For much of the past five years, stablecoins have been billed as the missing link between crypto markets and mainstream finance. They have been positioned as a payments technology that could compress cross-border payments from days to seconds, reduce costs, and modernize the plumbing of global money.

Perhaps the most prominent stablecoin casualty is Diem, the digital dollar initiative launched by Meta (then Facebook). Announced in 2019 as Libra, it aimed to create a global digital currency network. After sustained regulatory pushback from U.S. and European authorities, the project was ultimately abandoned and its assets sold in 2022.

Closely tied to Diem was Novi, Meta’s digital wallet pilot, which launched limited remittance functionality between the U.S. and Guatemala using a third-party stablecoin. Novi was shut down shortly after Diem collapsed, underscoring how dependent even adjacent pilots were on regulatory acceptance.

National Australia Bank launched AUDN in early 2023, an Australian dollar stablecoin designed for cross-border payments and carbon credit markets. Despite initial promise, the project was discontinued in 2024 before full rollout. The reason was not regulatory pushback but something more fundamental: insufficient client demand.

Similarly, Wells Fargo in 2019 conducted internal pilots using blockchain-based “digital cash” for cross-border transfers. These experiments demonstrated efficiency gains over traditional systems yet never evolved into widely deployed products. Still, fast-forward to 2026, and the bank recently filed a trademark application for “WFUSD,” a new digital asset-centric platform.

Even projects that have technically launched can often remain constrained. JPM Coin, developed by JPMorgan, is frequently cited as a success story. But its usage is largely limited to internal settlement between institutional clients rather than the open, interoperable payment ecosystem once envisioned by early stablecoin advocates.

See also: Digital Dollars Keep Getting Stuck Outside the Real Economy

Why Big Promises Never Make It to Market

Beyond banks, a range of private-sector initiatives attempted to build stablecoin-based payment and settlement systems. Many of these efforts demonstrated technical feasibility but failed to achieve meaningful adoption.

IBM’s World Wire, built on the Stellar blockchain, sought to enable cross-border payments using stablecoins issued by partner banks. Despite onboarding several financial institutions, the network failed to gain traction and is now largely inactive. Competing solutions, including newer blockchain infrastructure and traditional payment improvements, outpaced it.

Even payment companies misjudged timing. Stripe, for example, had previously discontinued bitcoin payments in 2018 due to inefficiencies, only to reenter the space years later with stablecoin-focused products once the infrastructure matured.

Across these examples, the pattern is consistent: pilots built on promising technology but lacking either regulatory support, user demand, or both.

And despite the attention given to consumer-facing stablecoins, the overwhelming majority of meaningful pilots from both financial institutions and payment players alike are not retail-oriented. The initiatives that stood the test of time were concentrated in business-to-business environments, corporate treasury operations, and settlement infrastructure.

Growing corporate interest in stablecoins, for example, is apparent in “Stablecoins Gain Ground: Why CFOs See More Promise There Than in Crypto,” a March PYMNTS Intelligence data book that tracks how middle-market finance leaders are evaluating digital assets.

The abandoned pilots of the past five years offer a roadmap of constraints. They reveal that financial innovation at scale may require more than just feasible technology. It very well might just require alignment across regulators, institutions and users.

What is already evident, however, is that the future is likely to be built not by replacing institutions, but by reconfiguring them.