Stablecoins Have a Checkout Problem, Not a Tech Problem

Stablecoins have the infrastructure they need to scale. And the landscape keeps building more of it.

What’s missing is a payment experience people can trust, WalletConnect CEO Jess Houlgrave told PYMNTS.

“We’ve gotten to this stage, predominantly actually over the last 18 months, where the technology is ready,” Houlgrave said. “Liquidity is deep. I can move in and out of different assets between fiat and stablecoins easily. The enablers are there.”

Transaction volumes have surged, major financial institutions have entered the market, and regulatory clarity has improved across several jurisdictions. What stablecoins don’t have, at least not yet, is the kind of frictionless experience consumers already expect from modern payments.

“About 76% of users had abandoned a crypto payment in the last six months,” Houlgrave said, citing new research. “They’ve tried to pay with crypto and couldn’t.”

The reasons consumers give for failed payment attempts sound less like financial objections and more like product design failures. Users reported confusion around gas fees, wallet setup, transaction errors and settlement delays. In many cases, they held the correct payment token but lacked the separate token required to pay blockchain transaction fees.

“It’s a horrible user experience,” Houlgrave said.

The Disconnect Between Stablecoin Volume and Real-World Payments

The abandonment rate illustrates a broader reality in the stablecoin economy. Transaction volume does not necessarily translate into practical consumer payments activity. Much of today’s stablecoin usage still revolves around trading, treasury management or cryptocurrency-native transfers rather than ordinary retail spending.

“We are all used to what I call the web-2.0 payments experience,” Houlgrave said. “I just tap my phone, or I click one button. And to make consumers want to pay with crypto, not just once, but to keep doing it again and again, it’s got to be as easy as a web-2.0 payments experience.”

That expectation creates pressure across the entire payments stack, from wallets and merchant integrations to settlement systems and compliance workflows. Historically, many payment service providers attempting to support crypto transactions had to assemble those components independently. That complexity has slowed adoption among merchants and PSPs.

“Accepting a crypto payment is not super simple,” Houlgrave said. “You’ve got to have the connectivity, the user experience, the wallet infrastructure, the settlement infrastructure, the conversion and liquidity infrastructure. There’s a lot of pieces there.”

The industry’s challenge, then, increasingly resembles the evolution of FinTech rather than the scaling of blockchain infrastructure. The question is no longer whether stablecoins can move value efficiently. It is whether crypto payments can become invisible enough for consumers to use repeatedly without thinking about the underlying mechanics.

“The majority of merchants don’t want to change their accounting processes,” Houlgrave said. “They want it to be a switch-on in a dashboard or an email saying, ‘Switch on my crypto payments.’”

That simplicity extends beyond the payer. Retail staff, checkout systems and customer support teams also need workflows that require little to no crypto-specific training.

“The one-tap experience is the holy grail,” Houlgrave said. “That’s why things like Apple Pay are so popular. Crypto needs to get this from five clicks to one.”

Fragmentation Becomes the Crypto Industry’s Hidden Scaling Problem

For now, stablecoins occupy an unusual transitional moment. The infrastructure is increasingly mature, institutional participation is accelerating, and demand appears genuine. But the industry still faces a challenge familiar to every payments innovation before it. Consumers only embrace new financial technology when it becomes easier than the old system.

“When you think about why some of these brands are so successful today in payments, what they do is they convey trust,” Houlgrave said. “The end user knows if something goes wrong, I can call my bank and they’re going to look into it.”

That trust infrastructure includes things like dispute mechanisms, refunds, fraud protection and merchant vetting.

Another obstacle is fragmentation. Consumers now routinely manage multiple wallets, chains and stablecoins simultaneously, creating a fragmented ecosystem that merchants cannot realistically navigate manually.

“You don’t want someone walking out of your shop because you can only accept USDC and you can’t accept PYUSD,” Houlgrave said.

Rather than attempting to standardize the ecosystem, payment providers will increasingly abstract the complexity away from merchants and users entirely, up to the point where the orchestration layer becomes the product, she said.

Once the usability is solved, crypto payments will need to find their breakout use case.

“Cross-border B2B makes total sense,” Houlgrave said. “The settlement can happen in seconds or minutes instead of days, and it can cost you basis points or basically zero instead of percentages.”

Tourism-heavy retail environments may also become early proving grounds. Airports, train stations and global travel hubs expose merchants to customers carrying incompatible payment methods or high foreign transaction costs.

“The beauty of crypto and stablecoins is that it’s so global,” Houlgrave said. “It doesn’t matter where that person has come from, what wallet they have, they’re going to be able to spend at your store really, really cheaply with really fast settlement.”

The WalletConnect State of Stablecoin and Crypto Payments 2026 report is now live. Click here to read it.