Stablecoins were pitched as a way around traditional banking. In practice, according to a Decrypt opinion piece, the companies that are actually scaling them are moving deeper into bank infrastructure instead.
The article points to several examples: Stripe paid $1.1 billion for Bridge, whose core product centers on bank orchestration; Citigroup is launching crypto custody; and Standard Chartered is testing stablecoin settlement in Singapore. In the author’s view, operators handling institutional volume keep landing on the same architecture.
Stablecoins handle the middle leg, not the full payment stack
The piece divides an enterprise cross-border payment into three legs. On the payer side, money moves in local currency over local rails, such as a Brazilian importer paying in BRL through Pix. On the recipient side, the payee receives local currency into its own account, such as a supplier collecting dollars.
Between those endpoints sits the cross-border transfer of value from one institution to another. That leg traditionally ran through correspondent banking, with SWIFT messages passing across intermediary banks, each one holding accounts with the next and each one adding time and cost. When both institutions accept a stablecoin, the article says, that middle leg can settle on-chain in seconds. Banks still control the other two.
That, in the article’s framing, is the labor split. Stablecoins settle the middle leg. Payment flows still start and end in fiat, and that is where banks remain indispensable: the on-ramp, the compliance anchor, and the local rails in every market a payment touches. The companies scaling on stablecoin rails, the author argues, have built into the banking system corridor by corridor.
Enterprise payments still begin in fiat
The article says every enterprise payment flow starts in a bank account. Payroll, vendor invoices, customer revenue, and capital distributions all live in fiat and move through regulated financial infrastructure. The businesses sending and receiving those funds do not discard that infrastructure because a payment provider would prefer otherwise.
To show the size of the gap, the piece cites FXC Intelligence, which said the cross-border payments market reached $208 trillion in 2025. It also cites McKinsey and Artemis, which estimated genuine stablecoin payments at roughly $390 billion annualized as of late 2025. The article says that works out to about 0.02% of global payment volume across both cross-border and domestic flows.
It also challenges the much larger stablecoin volume numbers often cited in headlines. Figures of $30 trillion or more in annual stablecoin volume, the author writes, mostly reflect bots, exchange flows, and automated trading rather than actual payments. A hedge fund treasury desk, an enterprise running payroll across 30 countries, and an exchange settling institutional withdrawals all still start in fiat.
From there, the real question for operators is not whether a blockchain can move value. The question is which banking infrastructure connects reliably to which settlement rails, and who has built those connections deeply enough to support institutional throughput. The article says most stablecoin companies struggle to answer that.
The jump from $50 million to $10 billion changes the problem
The piece lays out a scaling curve. At $50 million in annual payment volume, one banking relationship, one stablecoin issuer, and one compliance layer may be enough. At $500 million, flows begin to outgrow that setup. At $10 billion, the issue is no longer how good the technology is. It becomes a question of how many corridors a company’s banking, FX, and licensing stack can actually carry. In the author’s words, volume follows infrastructure.
Brazil is used as a case study. The article says Pix, the country’s instant payment system, moved more than R$35 trillion in 2025, roughly $6.3 trillion. Based on the central bank’s breakdown, 47% of that value came from B2B transactions. At that level, BRL settlement, local rail access, and FX infrastructure become mandatory for institutional operations.
Each of those layers, the article says, takes years of relationship-building with banks, regulators, and local counterparties. The stablecoin mechanism itself works cleanly. Growth tends to stall at the regulated fiat-to-crypto bridge, the multi-corridor banking stack, and the FX infrastructure needed to handle multi-currency conversion at scale. Companies that hit a ceiling in the mid-market are almost never blocked by the crypto layer, the author argues. They are blocked by the banking layer they never built.
Single-bank dependence remains a major operational risk
One of the most underestimated operating risks in crypto payments today, according to the article, is dependence on a single bank. Many companies using stablecoin rails still lean on one primary banking partner.
Banks can leave fintech and crypto programs with little warning. They can exit certain corridors after a regulatory shift. They can also change their risk appetite after management turnover or a difficult compliance review. The article cites several examples: the Silvergate wind-down, the Signature Bank receivership, and the FDIC “pause letters” that Coinbase later obtained through public-records requests.
The piece also says that in March 2026, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission sent formal warning letters to PayPal, Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard over debanking practices, as part of a broader federal effort that traces back to an August 2025 executive order.
For a company with only one banking counterparty, losing that relationship can mean an immediate shutdown. The answer, in the author’s framing, is enough banking depth to survive the loss of any one partner. That means multiple regulated connections, redundant rail access, and compliance architecture that satisfies every jurisdiction in the corridors where the company operates. Building that base takes time and money, the article says, but it is what holds up when demo-grade systems break under production volume.
Compliance, not crypto alone, becomes the moat
The article says crypto-native operators often treat compliance as friction and banking as legacy overhead. That view can hold at small scale when retail users are the main counterparties. It breaks down when the buyers are multinational CFOs, treasury teams at global funds, and compliance leads at tier-one exchanges. Those buyers evaluate infrastructure partners against the same regulatory standards they face themselves.
Regulation is now reinforcing that point. The article says the GENIUS Act, signed in July 2025, ties compliant stablecoin issuance to bank-grade reserve, disclosure, and licensing requirements. Even where nonbank issuers are still permitted, the rules push serious volume toward bank partnerships and bank-custodied reserves.
The piece also cites an EY-Parthenon survey that found 13% of financial institutions and corporates currently use stablecoins, while 80% of non-users are actively exploring adoption.
Demand is building, the article argues. The bottleneck is the supply of regulated, institutional-grade infrastructure that enterprise buyers trust. A stablecoin company that cannot demonstrate licensing depth, banking connectivity, and defensible compliance will lose institutional business to one that can.
Durable infrastructure is built with banks, not apart from them
The article closes by arguing that the payment infrastructure that survives at enterprise scale is integrating with banks rather than pulling away from them.
In that model, companies combine regulated banking connectivity across several counterparties, local rail access in the corridors that matter, FX infrastructure for multi-currency conversion, and stablecoin settlement as the programmable layer on top. The article says B2B stablecoin payments reached a roughly $226 billion annualized run-rate by late 2025, up 733% year over year, and that growth concentrated in companies that solved the banking layer first.
Stablecoins add speed, programmability, 24/7 settlement, and less correspondent friction. Those advantages become usable once the banking foundation is in place underneath them. If a product works in a demo but fails at production volume, the author writes, it was never fully built.
The article was written by Bernardo Brites, co-founder and CEO of Trace Finance, which builds regulated banking and stablecoin settlement infrastructure for Brazil, the U.S., and emerging markets. A note at the end says the views reflect his own commercial vantage point in that market.