Ran Grushkowsky is CEO of MassPay, a global payout orchestration platform specializing in instant, real-time payouts worldwide.
For most of the past decade, stablecoins lived at the edge of payments conversations—interesting in theory, speculative in practice and often dismissed by enterprise finance teams as something for Web3 companies to sort out.
Having built payout infrastructure across more than 180 countries, I’ve watched that hesitation dissolve recently, and for specific reasons: the understanding of stablecoins as payment infrastructure and evolving regulations.
How Adoption Has Changed
According to research from analytics firm Artemis, the volume of B2B payments using stablecoins grew from around $100 million per month in early 2023 to over $3 billion by 2025. Stablecoins also processed over $33 trillion in on-chain volume globally, exceeding Visa and Mastercard combined, according to research from Blockchain provider Morph.
This is no longer a digital asset investment story, as investment stories are about price and speculation. This is now a payments infrastructure story based on understanding who gets paid, how quickly and at what cost.
More telling than raw volume is where that activity originates: McKinsey found that B2B stablecoin payments reached $226 billion in 2025, which is 60% of global volume, which is a 733% year-over-year increase.
In other words, the companies driving the shift are technology firms, e-commerce platforms, importers and exporters and financial services companies paying suppliers, distributing earnings to global workforces and managing treasury positions across borders.
How The Regulatory Environment Has Changed
While the technology has been available for years, the changing legal framework has played a major role in B2B adoption.
Most notably, the GENIUS Act—the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act—was signed into law on July 18, 2025. It is the first comprehensive federal regulatory framework for payment stablecoins in the United States.
The law takes effect on January 18, 2027, though this date could be earlier once implementing regulations from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the U.S. Treasury are in place.
In practical terms, the Act creates a licensing pathway for stablecoin issuers, establishes reserve and redemption requirements to ensure assets are genuinely backed and brings issuers under Bank Secrecy Act obligations for anti-money laundering (AML) and sanctions compliance.
Before the GENIUS Act, businesses had no defined compliance pathway. This led to common issues like treasury teams unable to get sign-off, compliance officers unable to map stablecoins to existing AML frameworks and CFOs unable to explain reserve backing to auditors.
The act can help resolve much of the ambiguity, allowing organizations to evaluate other aspects of how they are positioned to use them as part of their payment infrastructure.
What This Means For Different Kinds Of Businesses
For domestic businesses, the near-term opportunity is treasury efficiency and supplier payments. Stablecoins settle 24/7, including holidays, without the cutoff windows and batch processing that define bank wire infrastructure.
For small and mid-sized businesses operating across borders, stablecoins represent access to infrastructure that was previously out of reach. The global average cost to send a cross-border payment remains above 6%, according to the World Bank, well above the G20’s stated target of 1%. Stablecoins can compress that cost by eliminating correspondent banking hops. With a stablecoin-enabled payout layer and a compliant issuer, a small business paying contractors in 10 countries does not need banking relationships in each market.
For large enterprises, the opportunity is treasury consolidation and FX exposure management. Stablecoins allow businesses to hold a single, dollar-denominated position and execute payouts in local currency at the point of transaction rather than moving capital into place weeks in advance.
For global marketplaces paying thousands of recipients across many countries, stablecoins address a problem traditional rails have never solved cleanly: How do you pay anyone, anywhere, quickly, at predictable cost? Coverage that does not depend on bilateral banking relationships, combined with settlement measured in seconds, can be a structural improvement over the correspondent banking model.
Understanding The Adoption Gap
Despite this, adoption is not happening uniformly.
In my experience, many decision-makers still overestimate settlement complexity and underestimate how much cost and speed advantages have improved.
However, there are legitimate integration questions. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software often has no field for a wallet address and no way to reconcile a blockchain transaction ID. This requires a workflow fix before stablecoin payouts scale.
Compliance teams typically need to rewrite internal policy, since many blanket “no digital assets” rules don’t distinguish speculative holdings from regulated payment stablecoins, a distinction the GENIUS Act now makes easier to argue internally.
Finally, not all providers are equal: Direct on-chain settlement is meaningfully different from a legacy system with a stablecoin label on it.
The underlying message is the same as in any payment infrastructure evaluation: Spend the time to understand how this will impact your organization, not only the headline.
Stablecoins And Multi-Rail Payouts
The framing I find most useful is to stop thinking about stablecoins as a separate asset class and start thinking about them as a rail: one option in a multi-rail environment alongside bank transfers, card networks, mobile wallets and real-time payment systems.
That shift matters because it changes the decision. The question is not whether to “invest in digital assets” but how stablecoins can impact your payment infrastructure mix.
Meanwhile, as I’ve seen leading a global payout platform, orchestration platforms are incorporating stablecoin settlement as one of those rail options. As the GENIUS Act’s implementing rules take hold and more issuers enter the regulated framework, that optionality will likely expand.
The Bottom Line
Adoption of stablecoin rails does not mean abandoning existing infrastructure but building on top of it intelligently.
Understanding stablecoins as payment rails—not speculative assets—and re-evaluating their impact based on the new regulatory framework can have a structural impact on managing global payments. The companies waiting for the technology to feel more familiar may miss the window to optimize their stacks, leaving them to play catch-up on the modern global payment rails.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
