For years, payments innovation was defined by a single goal: make moving money faster.
By that measure, the industry has largely delivered. Global card networks have expanded their reach, real-time payment systems have matured, and stablecoins now move value across borders in close to real time.
Which raises an obvious question. If the technology works, why haven’t stablecoins displaced the systems they were built to improve on?
The headline numbers point to momentum. Stablecoin transaction volume passed $10 trillion over the past year, according to data cited by Visa. But a large share of that activity is crypto-native: trading, arbitrage, and settlement between protocols rather than companies paying suppliers, contractors, or staff. The technology can clearly move money at scale. Whether it has become a payments rail in any everyday business sense is a separate question, and one the raw volume tends to flatter.
For Ray Yang, CEO and Co-Founder of Wasabi, the gap between capability and adoption is not one problem but two.
“At the current stage, both technological and regulatory challenges still exist,” Yang says. “From a technical perspective, enabling the transfer of funds is no longer the core issue. The more critical factors are licensing, compliance, risk management, and banking capabilities.”
That holds for large, well-resourced enterprises, for whom moving money quickly is now table stakes. It holds less at the edges. For small businesses and for companies operating in emerging markets, the cost, access, and reliability of transfer are still real constraints. The point is not that moving money is solved everywhere. It is that for the firms driving global commerce, the hard part has moved somewhere else.
Global Commerce Is Raising the Bar
Cross-border business is now the norm rather than the exception. Companies hire globally, serve customers across multiple markets, and manage suppliers and partners around the world. Expectations have shifted accordingly.
“Both enterprises and consumers now expect cross-border payments to be as seamless and efficient as domestic transactions, with true point-to-point settlement capabilities,” Yang says.
The infrastructure underneath has grown more capable in response. Card networks such as Visa, Mastercard, and UnionPay have expanded their acceptance footprints, and their scheme standards are now adopted worldwide, while local payment systems and settlement frameworks continue to mature across major markets. The reach is enormous. Mastercard alone supports roughly 3.7 billion cards across more than 210 countries and territories.
For many enterprises, the challenge is no longer reaching a payment rail. It is connecting to many of them efficiently, across regions, while meeting each market’s regulatory requirements.
The Real Infrastructure Gap
Despite the advances in payment technology, scaling globally is still difficult. Every market brings its own compliance standards, licensing requirements, banking relationships, reporting obligations, and network rules. What works in one jurisdiction often needs substantial rework in another. This is especially visible in stablecoin-linked card programs, where issuing in a single market is straightforward but doing so across many, each with its own licensing, banking, and card network requirements, is where most issuers stall.
The pain points are concrete.
“The most significant pain points in traditional cross-border settlement remain high transaction fees, slow settlement times, and limited transparency,” Yang says. Licensing, compliance, risk management, and banking capabilities, in his words, are “the key foundations required to achieve large-scale, real-world adoption.”
There is a tension worth being honest about here. Building localized compliance, market by market, is slow and expensive. It runs in the opposite direction to the speed and simplicity stablecoins are usually sold on. A provider that promises instant global settlement still has to sit behind a patchwork of licenses, banking partners, and local reporting that takes years and capital to assemble. The providers gaining ground in this layer tend to be the ones willing to absorb that complexity rather than route around it, so their customers do not have to.
Stablecoins as a Settlement Layer
Much of the conversation around stablecoins has historically centered on crypto markets. Increasingly, the discussion is shifting toward payments infrastructure. With the stablecoin market now above $320 billion, financial institutions, fintechs, and payment providers are testing how stablecoins can improve settlement efficiency and liquidity management.
“The primary use case for stablecoins today is improving settlement efficiency and enhancing liquidity and monetary utility,” Yang says. “Within compliant regulatory frameworks, stablecoins are becoming a high-speed value transfer layer connecting traditional finance and digital finance.”
Yang notes that “when directly embedded into card network settlement systems, stablecoins can significantly accelerate settlement speeds.”
That is why he describes Wasabi as an accelerator and distribution layer built on top of existing card network infrastructure rather than a replacement for it. The more telling shift is in the framing. The question is moving from whether stablecoins will compete with established networks to how they will be embedded within them.
The phrase “within compliant regulatory frameworks” is carrying weight. Stablecoin settlement still introduces exposures that mature card and banking rails have spent decades engineering away, such as questions of reserve quality, counterparty risk, and the possibility of a peg breaking under stress.
Treating stablecoins as a settlement layer means managing those risks deliberately, not assuming the speed comes for free. The opportunity is real, but it comes from pairing faster settlement with the reach, compliance, and familiarity of established networks, not from working around them.
Why Localization Is Becoming the Strategy
There is more than one way to close the gap between global reach and local compliance, and each choice involves real tradeoffs. Some providers pursue full vertical integration, acquiring their own licenses and banking relationships in every market. It offers the most control and the best margins, at the cost of speed and heavy capital requirements.
Others rent regulated infrastructure through banking-as-a-service arrangements, which is faster to launch but cedes margin and regulatory standing to the underlying provider. A third group builds orchestration layers that route each transaction to the cheapest or fastest rail available, whether a card network, a local scheme, or a stablecoin, though that flexibility does not by itself answer the licensing question.
Wasabi is just one example of a fourth path. Rather than rebuilding payment rails or renting regulated infrastructure wholesale, it embeds stablecoin settlement into existing card network infrastructure on a market-by-market basis. The aim is to give businesses access to global payment networks while local compliance requirements are handled within the underlying infrastructure.
The wider pattern matters more than any single company. The market is moving toward infrastructure that simplifies global operations behind the scenes. Businesses want global reach with localized execution, and providers that can absorb the regulatory and operational complexity are becoming more valuable as a result. Whether any single one builds a durable advantage will come down to execution.
What is clearer is that this layer is hard and slow to build, which is why it is where competition is increasingly concentrated.
The Future Will Be Defined by Infrastructure
The next phase of payments may look very different from the last. For years the focus was speed and access. Those are now expected. The harder problem is building infrastructure that supports global commerce across a fragmented and shifting regulatory environment.
Stablecoins will keep maturing as a settlement technology. Networks will keep expanding. Regulation will get clearer in some places and messier in others. The firms best positioned are likely to be those that can connect settlement technology, payment networks, banking infrastructure, and compliance into something a business can actually use without having to understand any of it.
Moving money was the last decade’s problem. Making global payments work at scale, compliantly, across multiple markets is this decade’s challenge.
