The infrastructure underpinning global money movement is undergoing a quiet but decisive transformation, and according to one voice at a recent London payments summit, most institutions are still misreading what’s actually happening.
According to Entrepreneur United Kingdom, Pavel Kashuba, a strategic leader at Coinspaid Solutions, told an audience of banking executives and fintech operators at the Payments Leaders’ Summit that stablecoins have already crossed the line from experimental technology to functioning payment infrastructure — and that the next 18 months will determine which institutions understand this in time.
A Cost Problem That’s Getting Harder to Justify
Kashuba’s argument starts with plain economics. Traditional correspondent banking still routes cross-border payments through multiple intermediaries, a process that can take two to five business days and rack up combined costs — FX spreads, banking fees, reconciliation overhead — exceeding 3.5% in many emerging markets. Stablecoin settlement, by contrast, offers finality in seconds or minutes, transaction costs under 1.5%, near-zero failure rates, and a fully auditable trail. He was explicit that this wasn’t a sales pitch but a structural cost gap that enterprise-scale payment providers can no longer treat as marginal.
Three Converging Signals
Kashuba pointed to three developments happening simultaneously that, together, are pushing stablecoin adoption from niche to mainstream. Regulatory frameworks are finally solidifying, with the EU’s MiCA rules already in force, US legislation advancing, and the UK’s cryptoasset regime close to implementation — giving large institutions the compliance certainty they typically wait for before committing serious capital. At the same time, volume has reached a scale that’s hard to dismiss as speculative: stablecoin transactions hit an estimated $33 trillion in 2025, more than double Visa’s annual payment volume, with the bulk of that now coming from real commercial use — cross-border transfers, treasury operations, and B2B settlement. And perhaps most tellingly, the payment industry’s biggest players are acting rather than watching. Mastercard’s $1.8 billion acquisition of BVNK and Stripe’s $1.1 billion purchase of Bridge suggest that incumbents are choosing to buy blockchain settlement capability outright rather than build it internally, particularly for payment corridors where legacy infrastructure remains slow and expensive.
Where the Real Opportunity Sits
A recurring theme in Kashuba’s talk was the gap between consumer demand and merchant capability. He cited estimates that more than 741 million people globally now hold digital assets, with markets such as India, Nigeria, Indonesia, and Vietnam among the fastest-growing for digital asset adoption. Yet the number of merchants actually equipped to accept and settle blockchain-native payments remains comparatively small — a gap he framed as the real commercial opening, especially across Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa, where correspondent banking remains fragmented and costly.
Why So Many Pilots Stall
Kashuba was candid that the technology itself is largely solved; what trips up most enterprise blockchain initiatives is governance. He laid out four requirements for infrastructure built to handle institutional volume: real-time compliance screening embedded directly into transactions rather than added afterward; liquidity management across multiple pre-funded corridors; redundancy across several blockchain networks — Coinspaid, he noted, runs across 22 — so transactions can reroute if one network stalls; and a proven operating history, pointing to Coinspaid’s eleven years in production as evidence that longevity itself becomes a competitive edge.
Looking Toward Autonomous Commerce
He ended by tying payment rails to the next wave of AI-driven transactions, arguing that traditional banking was never built for machines executing payments autonomously, which demands programmability, instant settlement, and minimal human involvement. He singled out the x402 protocol — which attaches stablecoin payments directly to web requests — as a likely building block for that future. For Kashuba, the underlying message was simple: this isn’t a bet on crypto trends, but a long-term wager on how settlement economics will evolve, and the world’s largest payment networks already appear convinced the shift is underway.
