How Stablecoins can bring cryptocurrency benefits to the treasury mainstream

Stablecoins, a form of less volatile cryptocurrency pegged to the value of a real world asset like the dollar, can speed up up 24x7 cross-border intercompany and external trade payments, aiding liquidity management. 

Frictionless stablecoins, collateralised against an asset, can provide another tool for treasurers to make payments, mitigate foreign exchange (FX) risk and help unlock trapped cash and liquidity thanks to the always-on nature of these blockchain-based coins. With aligned smart contract programmability, they can also help release conditional payments and trade steps to give a more efficient real-time treasury operation.  

Stablecoins can act as an on/off ramp to decentralised finance (DeFi) applications on the blockchain like the Aave platform; interoperate with, or fight against, traditional (TradFi) cross-border payment or trade networks like Swift; or simply act as a bridge to safe fiat currencies.
They are becoming accepted as a cash-like crypto token equivalent in themselves for wholesale and retail end uses as regulation advances – indeed, there are many payment applications coming to market just now, such as the new SaturnX stablecoin-based global platform.

Stablecoins are quicker to market than the failsafe central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) that are currently under development in the form of the digital dollar, pound and euro and so on, and more stable than other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) due to their dollar, gold or other such pegging mechanism. This is why they are fast gaining market traction.  

“Lack of regulatory clarity and design issues were a barrier to widespread stablecoin adoption in the past, especially given high-profile failures such as with Terraform Labs and its failed UST stablecoin peg in 2022, when the since discredited algorithmic pegging mechanism didn’t work,” says Jannah Patchay, Founder & Director of the Markets Evolution consultancy. She extols the steps taken since this crash to improve backing asset composition and custody, transparency, and design. More popular and enduring dollar-backed coins, such as Circle’s USDC and Tether’s USDT, have now become the norm. They constitute the majority of the marketplace, according to the CoinGecko tracker that is commonly used in the industry.

USDT and its main rival USDC dominate issuance – both linked to the real fiat dollar – among a plethora of other coins that will not necessarily all stay the course. This is why S&P has developed its stability grading solution to help users find a suitable coin.     

The key attraction of the popular Tether coin is its reliance on US Treasury Bills and ultimately the dollar (USD) itself to retain its value, as the coin is traded and used around the world. Its pegging mechanism and USDC gives greater off chain certainty of stored value, and reassurance that a dollar is worth a dollar.   

Coins are moving to the financial mainstream  

“The recent EU, US, and UK cryptoasset moves to better regulate stablecoins – and indeed the whole field of digital assets and currencies, spanning from BTC and cryptocurrency trading through to tokenisation in capital markets and other end uses of the underlying distributed ledger technology (DLT) in the financial sector – is also very welcome,” adds Patchay, “as it again provides greater certainty. This is crucial for corporate treasury uptake.” When CBDCs come on stream it should further encourage digital currency usage of all types.  

Patchay cites the European Union (EU) Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework and US Genius Act 2025 as particularly noteworthy regulatory advances, alongside Hong Kong’s new Stablecoins Bill. “The introduction of well thought through and robust regimes in jurisdictions like Japan, Singapore and UAE are also bringing greater confidence, stability and credibility to the stablecoin sector – and indeed the wider digital currency marketplace.”  

“These regulatory moves, and the better modern pegging and reserve design of stablecoins, can positively impact global cross-border payment and trade end uses – and thereby the easy, fast accessibility of working capital for corporate treasurers as faster, cheaper, frictionless and data-centric coins ping around the world. I therefore welcome the move of stablecoins towards the mainstream of finance.”    

According to Alenka Grealish, Principal Analyst, Banking, at the Celent consultancy: “To get mainstream corporates – not just crypto trading natives – to test stablecoin use cases the key thing is to educate treasurers on their choices and the pros and cons of each. Choices include not only stablecoins but also tokenised programmable deposits [which banks can additionally offer –Ed.}. Both are readily available to them today.”

“Once corporates see live transactions on trade – for example, cross-border business-to-business (B2B) payments, intracompany money transfers, and the realisation of real-time treasury and liquidity operations, then you will see corporate treasury uptake.”   

Benefits 

Stablecoins are now seen as a means to transfer value or instructions across borders much more speedily and cheaply on the underlying DLT than existing alternatives that rely on non-blockchain traditional infrastructure rails, which don’t operate 24x7x365.

The efficient low cost, high speed, cross-border, data-rich and always-on availability of stablecoins on a blockchain is a key benefit. It is attractive because there is none of the price fluctuations and volatility of BTC applications of this same technology – and there are no cut off times, so no negative balances, or FX or cash concentration concerns if the tool is integrated well into a treasury. A real-time corporate operation becomes possible. This is vital for:
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• avoiding trapped cash
• helping to deliver better cash management, FX mitigation and liquidity optimisation.

Users can additionally bank the lower operational cost and payment fees obtained by using newer technology and avoid any overdraft or unexpected transaction penalties on traditional cross-border payment or trade platforms when they deploy always-on, trackable and programmable stablecoins.

Dominic Lynch, Co-Founder of the Your Treasury consultancy and a former Director of Group Treasury at Austrian EdTech firm GoStudent and the crypto broker Bitpanda, advises thinking beyond just payments, in terms of liquidity risk and interest optimisation benefits: “Facility fees, which arise due to regional liquidity shortfalls, and the better ability to move excess liquidity for short-term investment are pertinent – these are held back by cut-off time constraints, which fall away.” 

Programmability

Greater speed and constant operation becomes especially interesting when it is aligned with the smart contract programmability features of stablecoins.

This feature can release conditional payments – for example, when a ship docks, passes through customs, a canal, a dangerous waterway and so on. Programmability greases the physical and financial supply chain, enhancing the efficiency and speed of trade, capital and treasury operations, which positively impacts the optimisation of interest income and minimises expense and risk. 

Programmability has been demonstrated by Siemens who used the JPM Coin from J.P. Morgan to power institutional payments. Now rebranded as the Kinexys Digital Payments option on the bank’s new wider Kinexys blockchain offering, formerly Onyx, the coin aids automation and Siemens’ goal of achieving a real-time treasury.   

Other banks are active in the DLT field as well. HSBC has its own Orion platform for asset tokenisation, not yet in payments, and there is the Citi Token Services unit, plus the SocGen Forge more capital markets-focused platform.

Even traditional tech vendors, such as Fiserv, are launching their own stablecoins and integrating it into their systems – in their case FIUSD is aimed at smaller banks and merchants that want to get into the crypto economy, but perhaps cannot develop their own offering. The coin will run on infrastructure from Paxos and Circle and is compatible with the Solana blockchain for developers.

Integration

Digital currencies and assets of all types, on an array of consumer, payment, business and capital market end uses, will all need to overlap and interoperate in the increasingly digitised environment of the 21st century where non-cash payment methodologies and digital marketplaces are emerging.  

Data sharing, technology and interoperability platform providers, such as Chainlink, Adhara or Digital Asset, are prominent technical players in the nascent digital asset and currency marketplace, often collaborating with incumbents like Swift, who have a funds project with the former, to develop real world applications that integrate with existing infrastructure to get scale.

Stablecoins – indeed any form of digital currency, be it self-launched, bank-backed, BTC or central bank controlled (CBDC) iterations – have a raft of different applications across various end uses, but they all rely on DLT. Interoperability across these chains and with existing infrastructure is crucial if they are move to the mainstream in a big way. Avoiding digital islands is a must. 

The auditable and traceable nature of DLT via accessible key platform providers like Partior, which is a cross-bank blockchain-based atomic clearing system, is what makes the fast, frictionless and data-centric vision of 21st century commerce attractive – it unlocks the instant settlement and enhanced liquidity management capabilities so desired by corporate treasuries. Working capital is freed up in this environment if the overlapping end uses for all types of digital currencies on interoperable DeFi and TradFi platforms and across established clearing mechanisms is aligned correctly.

Stablecoin end uses

The real world application of stablecoins is growing apace. Swift, for example, are live trialling digital asset and currency transactions this year in 2025 to protect their incumbent position at the nexus of global trade – in the face of competition from challengers like the Circle Payments Network, which can potentially operate at a lesser cost thanks to its blockchain technology – the same technology that Swift is ultimately pivoting towards accommodating.

The CPN initiative was launched in April 2025 with Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank, SocGen and others collaborating to try to build a rival cross-border payment network that utilises stablecoins – not the traditional message-reliant correspondent banking model of Swift, which can only be replaced in-line with its slowest banking members migration towards newer ways of working.

Project Pax in Japan with its three banks of MUFG, SMBC and Mizuho is another stablecoin-based cross border payment system alternative. But it is integrating Swift payment messages into its offering to allow corporates to make trade payments conventionally. This recognises how hard it is to displace incumbents and aligned, embedded legacy systems at partner banks and corporate treasuries.

However, corporates can go native and launch their own coins themselves and theoretically use DeFi only platforms, if they so wish. ‘New economy’ tech-driven firms, such as Uber, are especially interested in this native coin approach but totally ignoring TradFi platforms is unlikely – particularly as new regulations are emerging that enable coins to sit alongside existing accounting and regulatory frameworks, giving them access to TradFi networks. The Ripple stablecoin unveiled in December 2024 is a good example of a native digital asset that currently already has over $300milion in circulation.           

Interoperability and data sharing are likely to be key for any successful new launches. Fintech collaboration rather than displacement is now an established pattern between newcomers and incumbents, although as ever the threat of disintermediation does exist for the unwary. The marketplace will benefit from fintech-enabled disruption and DeFi players that want to break the TradFi mould, but ‘cooperatition’ is the likely end result.

Consumer & B2B Uses   
  
Stablecoins can be used for institutional, consumer or specifically corporate business-to-business (B2B) end uses. Digital payments trailblazer PayPal is looking to get into this market by targeting B2B. It is developing and testing ways to use its own dollar-pegged stablecoin, PYUSD. This was set up in 2023 initially for investments, but it’s now deployed on B2B end uses. It made two invoice payments in 2024 – one to the EY consultancy and another to Google for cloud services. PayPal also enabled two remittance partners on its Xoom platform last year – Cebuana Lhuillier in the Philippines and Yellow Card in Africa – to settle international transfers by means of its PYUSD stablecoin. 

On the consumer side, Stripe’s acquisition of Bridge earlier this year was quickly followed by a partnership with Visa to offer stablecoin-linked card payments in the emerging support ecosystem that it is building. Stripe has since acquired the Privy crypto wallet as well to further burnish its envisaged payments orchestrator role and in recognition of the important role that such digital wallets will play in future e-commerce and financial networks.  

For Visa the card-issuing product it got via the Stripe / Bridge partnership means that fintech developers can now offer stablecoin-linked Visa cards to their end customers in multiple countries through a single application programming interface (API) integration. Thanks to the technology alignment, cardholders will be able to make everyday purchases from a stablecoin balance at any of the numerous global merchant locations that accept Visa. For example, when a customer in Brazil shops local and uses their Bridge-enabled Visa card to pay a merchant, Bridge deducts the funds from the customer’s stablecoin balance and converts the balance into fiat. This enables the merchant to get paid in their local currency. Customers can add these cards to supporting digital wallets, thereby avoiding FX costs, slow cross-border and high transaction fees, controls and other such impediments to frictionless payments.

A similar offering was unveiled in May 2025 by Mastercard after it partnered with MoonPay. It has also collaborated with Okx and Nuvei, among others, to build out its own rival ecosystem consumer coin capabilities. 

Conclusions
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There are still issues to overcome of course – not the least of which is the need to achieve an IAS7 cash equivalence standard for accounting purposes if you want to put a coin on your balance sheet, although dollar backing means the adventurous can. The prior crash of Terraform Labs and its algorithmic coin in 2022 also did some reputational damage that perhaps still needs to be overcome.
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Nevertheless, stablecoins appear to have a more than stable future – indeed the number of new coins, interoperability projects and other initiatives, only some of which are listed in this article, appears stellar. The next test will likely be how many remain once full CBDC usage rolls out, but there is room for both types of digital currency.