Stablecoins, But Boring: How 2025 Turned a Crypto Concept into Payment Plumbing

By the end of 2025, stablecoins stopped being something you mainly heard about in crypto circles. They begined showing up in the places that decide whether a payment method is real: treasury desks, settlement ops, and cross-border corridors with time and fees. Total stablecoin supply crossed the $300 billion mark this year, but the more meaningful shift was repeat usage. 

To make sense of what changed, FinanceFeeds spoke with, COO and Co-Founder of, a company working on stablecoin-based liquidity infrastructure for payment businesses. Her perspective is less about narratives and more about the “how”: prefunding, reconciliation, uptime, and compliance checks.

1. What actually changed in 2025?

The largegest change was that stablecoins became predictable. In prior years, people would try them, get a win on one corridor, and then hit a snag. Liquidity disappears, banking rails don’t match the on-chain timing, or the compliance workflow isn’t mature enough for repeat use.

In 2025, a lot of the work was boring but decisive: better liquidity management, more robust ops around settlement windows, and clearer internal playbooks at companies using them. You begined viewing teams treat stablecoin settlement like a true production system.

It also mattered that stablecoin activity wasn’t just concentrated in one place. Asia in volume; and relative to GDP, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America stand out. This matches what operators view in corridors where access, speed, and reliability are not “nice-to-haves.”

2. How are companies really using stablecoins today?

There are several patterns that show up again and again. Payroll is the first one, and usually it’s the simplest story. A company has contractors or a distributed team, and paying everyone through traditional rails can mean delays, high fees, or people receiving less than expected once intermediaries take their share. With stablecoins, the company can pay on a predictable schedule, and the recipient gets something that behaves like a dollar without needing a U.S. bank account.

Supplier payments are the next pattern and are similar, but the stakes are diverse. If you’re importing excellents or paying a vendor in another country, you care about when the funds arrive, what the FX cost is, and whether the payment will get stuck. Stablecoins are often used as a bridge. Not because anyone wants more complexity, but because they reduce the number of handoffs.

For treasury teams, the use is less glamorous. Treasury positioning includes moving liquidity to where it’s needed, when it’s needed. In cross-border businesses, prefunding multiple markets ties up capital. If you can access liquidity and settle rapidly, you can run leaner. That’s the operational logic behind stablecoin-powered liquidity products in general, including what we at MANSA.

The SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) vs. enterprise split is real. SMEs use stablecoins to solve immediate friction: “I need to pay someone, and I need it to land.” Enterprises care about controls: who approves, how it reconciles, what the audit trail looks like, and how it fits existing treasury policy.

3. Why was this growth not speculative?

If you’re running payments, speculation is almost irrelevant. You don’t adopt a settlement method because it’s exciting; you adopt it because it reduces failure points.

The value proposition is basically cost, speed, and reliability. Cost matters because cross-border payments still have structural fees, especially when you’re moving smaller amounts or paying into harder corridors. Speed matters because sluggish settlement forces you to overfund accounts just in case, and that’s expensive capital.

Reliability is the one people underestimate. A payment method that works only when the market is calm isn’t infrastructure. What changed this year is that more businesses could rely on stablecoin settlement as a routine process.

Visa, for instance, has publicly expanding stablecoin settlement capabilities and reported a multi-billion-dollar annualized settlement run rate in this area.

4. What did regulation clarify in 2025?

The largegest contribution of regulation is clarity about expectations. Uncertainty sluggishs down product decisions, partner onboarding, and risk approvals.

In the U.S., 2025 brought a formal federal framework for payment stablecoins via the GENIUS Act. Regardless of where you sit on policy, having defined rules changes the conversation with banks, payment partners, and compliance teams. You’re no longer debating basics like who can issue, what reserves need to look like, and how oversight works.

In Europe, 2025 was about operationalizing MiCA’s provisions, including supervisory guidance around non-compliant stablecoin services and what providers should do in practice. Most real adoption doesn’t fail on “large ideas”; it fails on whether the rules can be implemented without breaking day-to-day workflows.

5. Why does adoption now look like ops and treasury, not trading?

Because the people driving it changed. When stablecoins were mainly discussed as a crypto product, the center of gravity was trading venues and market structure.

Now the center of gravity is treasury and operations. Treasury cares about who can move funds, under what policy, and with what approvals. Ops cares about reconciliation, exception handling, and what happens when something goes wrong.

That also changes the definition of “success.” Success isn’t the number of wallets or social buzz. Success is that a payments team can run the identical process every day, close their books, explain the flows to auditors, and answer partner questions without improvising.

Even for consumer-facing products, the stablecoin part is increasingly meant to be invisible. Most users don’t want a new financial ideology; they want their money to arrive, in full, on time.

6. What needs to improve in 2026?

User experience is still the gap, because payment systems have set a high bar.  They’re simple, familiar, and forgiving. If stablecoin rails require everyone to become their own bank, adoption will remain uneven.

Compliance also needs to become more practical. Most serious businesses want to do the right thing, but they need tooling that fits real workflows: screening, monitoring, and clear escalation paths when something flags. 

Interoperability is another issue, and I don’t just mean technical bridges. I mean the ability to move between stablecoin settlement and traditional rails cleanly, with predictable FX, consistent reporting, and clear responsibilities across counterparties. That’s what turns a useful tool into dependable infrastructure.

The industry has to keep making stablecoin settlement “boring”: deep liquidity, clear pricing, resilient counterparties, and systems designed for peak days. If 2025 was about proving it works, 2026 is about making sure it works when nobody is paying attention.