Cross-border payments have run on the same correspondent-banking model for decades — slow, costly, and full of intermediaries. One speaker at a major payments summit in London argued that model is now being displaced, and the shift has little to do with crypto speculation.
As noted by Entrepreneur United Kingdom, Pavel Kashuba, strategic leader at Coinspaid Solutions, opened his keynote at the Payments Leaders’ Summit with a pointed correction for the room: stablecoins aren’t a crypto story, they’re a payment infrastructure story, and the institutions that grasp that distinction over the next year and a half will shape how money moves for the next decade.
The Numbers Behind the Shift
Rather than lead with theory, Kashuba built his case on comparative economics. Standard correspondent banking rails take two to five business days to settle a cross-border transfer, with total costs — FX spreads, fees, reconciliation — regularly topping 3.5% in emerging markets. On-chain stablecoin settlement, he said, compresses that into seconds or minutes, drops costs below 1.5%, virtually eliminates failed transactions, and leaves a fully auditable record. He described this deliberately as a structural cost differential rather than a pitch — language aimed squarely at CFOs and treasury teams rather than crypto enthusiasts.
What’s Different About This Moment
Kashuba identified three forces arriving together that, in his telling, explain why adoption is accelerating now rather than five years ago. Regulatory ambiguity — long the biggest obstacle to institutional participation — is dissolving, with the EU’s MiCA framework operational, US stablecoin legislation moving forward, and the UK’s regime nearing rollout, giving large enterprises the governance clarity they need before committing capital. Meanwhile, the scale of activity has shifted the conversation: stablecoin volume reached an estimated $33 trillion in 2025, more than doubling Visa’s yearly payment flow, driven increasingly by real settlement activity — cross-border transfers, treasury functions, B2B payments — rather than trading. And the clearest signal may be who’s buying: Mastercard’s $1.8 billion deal for BVNK and Stripe’s $1.1 billion purchase of Bridge show major payment networks acquiring on-chain settlement capability rather than building it themselves, particularly for corridors where legacy rails are weakest.
An Underserved Market
Kashuba also highlighted a mismatch between demand and supply: over 741 million people globally now hold digital assets, with adoption growing fastest in markets like India, Nigeria, Indonesia, and Vietnam, yet relatively few merchants in those regions can actually accept or settle blockchain-native payments. He framed that gap — not the technology itself — as the real business opportunity, especially across Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Governance, Not Technology, Is the Hard Part
According to Kashuba, the technical side of blockchain payments is largely solved; what fails most enterprise pilots is inadequate infrastructure governance. He named four essentials: compliance built directly into every transaction rather than layered on afterward; liquidity management spanning multiple pre-funded corridors; multi-chain redundancy — Coinspaid runs across 22 blockchains — so payments reroute automatically around disruptions; and demonstrated operational longevity, citing Coinspaid’s eleven years of continuous uptime as a trust signal for institutional partners.
Setting Up for Machine-Driven Payments
He closed by connecting stablecoin rails to the emerging world of autonomous, AI-executed commerce, arguing traditional banking infrastructure can’t support machine-to-machine transactions that demand instant, programmable, deterministic settlement. He pointed to the x402 protocol, which ties stablecoin payments to web requests, as an early building block for that future — positioning today’s infrastructure bets as the foundation for tomorrow’s automated transaction volume.
