Stablecoins Are Laying the Rails for the Next Generation of Global Finance, Experts Declare

 

 

From crop insurance in Africa to remittances in Bolivia, stablecoins are proving their real-world utility — and a wave of regulatory clarity is opening the door to institutional adoption at scale.

 

Stablecoins have moved decisively beyond their origins as tools for cryptocurrency trading and are fast becoming the foundational infrastructure of the next global payment stack — a shift that panellists at Money20/20 Asia 2026 in Bangkok argued on Thursday is now irreversible.

 

Speaking on the closing day of the three-day conference, four industry leaders dissected the evolving roles of stablecoins, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and tokenised deposits – and reached a striking consensus: the future of finance will not be defined by any single form of digital money, but by how well these instruments work together.

 

"Stablecoins are proven to work," said Rahul Advani, Global Co-Head of Policy at Ripple. "We haven't seen a production-grade CBDC used for cross-border purposes. It's very much in the experimental stages. Stablecoins, on the other hand, are working in all the use cases we've discussed – and that's a significant distinction."

 

 

 

 

Clearing up the confusion

Moderator David Birch of Consult Hyperion opened by drawing sharp distinctions between terms that have become muddled in public discourse. 

 

Bhau Kotecha, co-founder of Paxos Labs, offered the clearest framework: a stablecoin is a tokenised representation of fiat currency issued by a private entity, pointing to a real-world asset such as a bank deposit or treasury bill.

 

 

A CBDC, by contrast, is issued by a central bank and carries the full weight of sovereign backing. Cryptocurrency, meanwhile, is native to the blockchain itself — not a representation of anything that exists off-chain.

 

Advani built on this by adding tokenised deposits to the picture. "We're not talking about a one-size-fits-all approach. Each form of digital money will coexist with the others – it comes down to use case. For interbank settlement, you need central bank money. For retail payments, stablecoins fill the gap. For a bank's own customers, tokenised deposits have their role too."

 

 

 

 

Where stablecoins are already working

The panel was emphatic that stablecoins are not a future proposition — they are solving real problems today, particularly in markets where traditional banking infrastructure is slow, expensive, or simply unavailable.

 

Maria Oldham, chief operating officer of Yellow Card, described supporting a major remittance player moving funds from the United States to Bolivia via stablecoin rails, where payouts to recipients were 30 per cent higher than through conventional channels.

 

"For workers in the US sending funds to their families in Latin America to buy medicine or pay school fees, that has been a dramatic impact," she said.
 

 

Lissele Pratt, founder of Capitalixe, pointed to the endemic friction of correspondent banking as the primary driver of stablecoin adoption among her clients – remittance companies, foreign exchange brokers, and investment platforms that have long struggled to access the SWIFT network at all.

 

 

 

"A lot of them do tend to struggle to get access to the Swift Network — and that's how my business started," she said. "Now they are asking for stablecoin solutions because it's much cheaper, much quicker, and more efficient."

 

Oldham added a striking statistic to illustrate the scale of the problem that stablecoins are solving: an estimated 120 billion US dollars is lost from Swift rails every year — not through fraud, but through incorrect payment codes that trigger protracted recovery processes lasting up to 25 days.

 

For Advani, stablecoins also carry a financial inclusion dimension that is often overlooked. Ripple, the issuer of RLUSD — a US dollar-backed stablecoin regulated by the New York Department of Financial Services — has partnered with an African agricultural platform to offer crop insurance settled in RLUSD.

 

"That is a financial inclusion benefit that is seen immediately," he said. "No bank is going to approach that because it's extremely risky. But through a stablecoin, we can do it efficiently and effectively."

 

 

 

 

 

More than a payment rail: a developer platform

One of the sharpest observations of the session came from Kotecha, who argued that framing stablecoins solely as a faster payment mechanism fundamentally undersells their potential.

 

"I think the bigger ambition is that it's a developer platform," he said. "It's a platform for people to build on top of — and that's where the stablecoin conversation often gets lost."

 

Drawing a parallel with the early internet, Kotecha suggested the open, permissionless nature of blockchain infrastructure was its most transformative feature — not just the speed or cost benefits.

 

"When the internet came out, it was a more efficient way of sharing data. But it was an open platform that people built unique products on over years and decades. I think we now have that with stablecoins and blockchains."

 

Oldham extended the analogy to payments history: 'Think of how you'd make an international call 20 years ago — very expensive through traditional telephone rails. Today you use WhatsApp. I think that's the parallel. We're moving from correspondent banking to stablecoin infrastructure through the blockchain.'

 

The panel agreed that payments, while the most visible use case, represent only the beginning.

 

Kotecha described a live example in which Paxos partnered with Franklin Templeton in Singapore to issue a tokenised money market fund, with holders then able to use that fund as collateral in a repo transaction to receive USDL in return.

 

Advani added that atomic settlement — the ability to exchange assets and payments simultaneously with no counterparty credit risk — represented the breakthrough that would eventually reshape capital markets more broadly.

 

 

 

AI and the machine-to-machine economy

A forward-looking segment of the discussion addressed what several panellists described as the most consequential future driver of stablecoin adoption: artificial intelligence.

 

Birch noted that AI agents — not human users — may ultimately be the dominant consumers of stablecoin infrastructure, requiring programmable, instant, machine-readable settlement in ways that conventional payment systems cannot support.

 

Oldham envisioned a near-term future of machine-to-machine transactions, in which AI systems autonomously manage ad spend, supplier payments, capital allocation, and treasury operations for global businesses without human intervention.

 

"That's where the future of payments and AI is going," she said.

 

Kotecha was more cautious on timing, noting that most enterprises are still building comfort around humans managing digital assets in corporate treasury — let alone delegating that authority to autonomous agents.

 

"I have a very hard time seeing a near-term world where enterprises are allowing agents to manage large sums of money on-chain," he said. "We're still a ways away from that."

 

Advani, meanwhile, argued that for end users the underlying technology would increasingly become invisible.

 

"At the end of the day, a user just wants that payment to arrive faster, more efficiently, and at a cheaper price — with certainty. They don't care whether it's a stablecoin in the background. They just want it to go from A to B in the easiest way possible."

 

 

 

Regulation: progress, but mutual recognition remains the missing piece

On the policy front, the mood was cautiously optimistic. Advani mapped out a rapidly evolving global landscape: the US GENIUS Act has for the first time established a federal licensing framework for stablecoin issuers; the EU's MiCA regime has been operational since 2024 and allows compliant issuers to passport across the entire single market; Hong Kong announced its first two licensed stablecoin issuers just last week; and Singapore is expected to finalise its single-currency stablecoin legislation later this year.

 

Thailand, where the conference was held, sits at a crossroads, Advani noted. US dollar stablecoins fall within existing digital asset regulation, but Thai baht stablecoins remain in a sandbox phase, with the Bank of Thailand actively engaged in CBDC pilots through the BIS Innovation Hub.

 

"It'll be interesting to see what path Thailand takes," he said.

 

Despite the progress, Advani identified one critical gap that no single jurisdiction can solve alone.

 

"What is missing is mutual recognition of regulatory regimes. Right now you have multiple different licensing frameworks that are very much siloed. If I'm regulated in one jurisdiction, can I get some sort of mutual recognition in another? Otherwise, we're just recreating the same siloed system we have today."

 

Kotecha framed the regulatory moment bluntly: "If we are saying stablecoins are going to be a two-trillion-dollar asset class and everyone's going to use them, we need regulation. The largest companies in the world aren't going to touch these things until there are clear rules of the road."

 

Birch brought the session to a close with a pointed summary.

 

"Stablecoins are laying down the rails that will be the next generation's financial market infrastructure," he said—a conclusion that, judging by the panel's collective testimony, was stated not as aspiration but as observed fact.