Stablecoins have moved from the crypto niche to an institutional priority, but the next phase of adoption will depend on infrastructure, privacy and real-world usability, executives from MoonPay, Ripple and Paxos said at Consensus Miami 2026.
Richard Harrison, vice president of banking and payment partnerships at MoonPay, said traditional financial companies are getting into stablecoins faster because regulation has made the market easier to navigate.
“What GENIUS brought us was clarity,” Harrison said. “It was like permission for companies to get into stablecoins.”
Harrison said stablecoins are also a natural evolution of payments, where speed and convenience have long been limited by legacy rails. Cross-border transfers can still take days and remittances can carry high fees, he said, while stablecoins allow for near-instant one-to-one transfers of value.
Still, Harrison said stablecoins account for only a small proportion of global remittances today and may reach about 10% within five years. Business-to-business payments are already a clear use case, he said, but consumer adoption remains more difficult.
Jack McDonald, senior vice president of stablecoins at Ripple, said institutional clients require regulated products, strong counterparties, and trusted custody arrangements before moving significant volume up-chain.
“For institutions to really unlock all the demand… they have to be regulated at the highest level,” McDonald said.
He said Ripple focuses less on the market capitalization of stablecoins than on utility, including payments, the movement of corporate treasuries and the use of collateral in capital markets. McDonald said that Ripple’s stablecoin complements XRP rather than competes with it, because transactions on the XRP Ledger still use XRP as the native token.
Brent Perrault, senior software engineer at Paxos, said newer regulated stablecoins can compete by emphasizing trust, distribution and incentives for users. He cited the growth of PayPal USD and large institutions like Charles Schwab using Paxos infrastructure as signs of demand for sophisticated financial firms.
But Perrault said privacy remains unresolved. Public blockchains expose transaction amounts and flows, and partial privacy is insufficient if users eventually move between public and private environments.
Harrison compared stablecoins to electric cars: the core product works, but adoption depends on the supporting infrastructure.
“How do you use stablecoin to pay rent?” said. “How do you use it to buy a cup of coffee?”
