Every November, the dictionaries tell us what kind of year we’ve had. In 2025, Collins reached for “vibe coding” – the idea you can talk to an AI and have it handle the hard work of writing code, a neat shorthand for how quickly natural language has become a programming interface.
From the editor’s chair at Payment Expert, though, another term has quietly dominated the inbox: stablecoin. If Collins captured the mood of AI, then for payments professionals, ‘stablecoin’ has been the word which would not leave the room.
What is striking is not that stablecoins exist – they have been around for a decade – but how their meaning has shifted. Once, ‘stablecoin’ conjured up offshore entities serving crypto exchanges, something between a market utility and a regulatory headache. In 2025 it became a boardroom word: the stuff of RFPs, central bank speeches and product roadmaps, rather than Telegram chats and token pumps.
This year has given the word new weight because it finally attached to scale. Monthly B2B stablecoin volumes for activities such as vendor payments and invoices hit around $3 billion by February, according to Deutsche Bank research, signalling treasurers were no longer just kicking the tyres. Stripe, Wise and others leaned into the narrative that tokenised dollars and euros are less about speculation and more about cutting costs from cross-border flows.
That was reinforced by who entered the arena. Fiserv’s FIUSD launch positioned a fully reserved, institution-friendly stablecoin inside a network of roughly 10,000 financial institutions and six million merchant locations, promising “instant scale” by design rather than by crypto-native luck. In the eurozone, AllUnity’s EURAU set out a MiCA-aligned path for euro stablecoins, backed by reserves at multiple European banks and progressively deployed across major Ethereum Layer 2s, before being pulled further into the mainstream via a custody tie-up with Deutsche Börse’s Clearstream.
By the time Klarna joined with plans for KlarnaUSD on a blockchain developed by Stripe, openly framing it as a way to bypass some of the costs of the correspondent banking model, it felt clear ‘stablecoin’ was no longer an outlier term. It had become part of how big retail and payments brands talk about strategy.
Regulation is the other reason the word has been everywhere. The EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) moved from concept to implementation, with the dedicated regime for asset-referenced and e-money tokens applying from mid-2024 and national transposition work continuing into 2025. MiCA does something subtle but important to the word “stablecoin”: it refuses to take “stable” on trust. Issuers are pulled into capital, governance, disclosure and reserve requirements, and, crucially for payments, face explicit limits on using certain tokens as a means of exchange inside the EU when they reach systemic thresholds.
In other words, 2025 is the year when stablecoin stopped being a loose marketing label and started becoming a regulated category of money-like instruments. For an industry that once blurred the lines between algorithmic experiments and fully backed tokens, that semantic tightening is overdue.
But if stablecoin is our word of the year, the harder question is whether it deserves to be. There is a risk the sector’s obsession with tokenised cash crowds out other, less shiny but equally important words: instant payments, account-to-account, request-to-pay, digital identity. The danger is not that stablecoins succeed, but that we treat them as an inevitability rather than one design choice among many for modernising money.
There is also the awkward fact ‘stablecoin’ still hides a lot of variety. Fully reserved e-money tokens, tokenised bank deposits and global USD stablecoins used for offshore dollarisation all sit under the same linguistic umbrella, even though they raise very different questions for prudential supervisors, AML teams and consumer protection. Policymakers have spent much of 2025 parsing those differences. Ordinary users have not. When the label is this broad, it is easy for confidence in one corner of the market to be undermined by failure in another.
From a payments perspective, the most interesting shift this year has not been the innovation itself, but who is accountable for it. When a Fiserv client uses FIUSD or a European bank plugs into a EURAU-powered settlement flow, responsibility sits with familiar names who already hold licences, not offshore issuers chasing trading volume. That may be the real story behind our word of the year: stablecoins are no longer a way around the financial system, but a new way through it.
So yes, if Collins gave 2025 to ‘vibe coding’, then in the pages of Payment Expert we can fairly say the year belonged to stablecoins. Not as a victory lap for crypto, but as a reminder that language moves faster than infrastructure. The word has raced ahead into policy papers, product decks and press releases. The work of the next few years is to make sure the reality catches up; that when we say “stable”, we mean not just price-pegged, but well governed, transparent and genuinely useful for the people moving money every day.
