Five payments firms told Payment Expert at Money20/20 Europe stablecoins move real money, but dollar dominance and split rules divide the market
For years, stablecoin volumes rose and fell with the price of Bitcoin. The link broke over the past two years, and the coins kept growing regardless, a sign people now use them to move money rather than speculate.
The coins’ growth has pulled in the card networks, with Mastercard paying up to $1.8bn for the infrastructure firm BVNK, Visa running more than 160 stablecoin card programmes, and stablecoins still settling under 1% of cross-border payments but growing fast.
At Money20/20 Europe in Amsterdam, executives from six payments, infrastructure, and consultancy firms – Bain & Co, Standard Chartered, Orbital, Mambu, Tribe Payments and OpenPayd – told Payment Expert the debate has moved on from whether stablecoins work to how the market shakes out.
The coins now divide three ways, by the currency they are pegged to, the rules they answer to and the infrastructure they run on, and while everyone expects consolidation, no one agrees on what forces it, or when.
Laurent Marochini, CEO of Standard Chartered in Luxembourg, sums up the trajectory as a move “from fragmentation to frameworks”.
A dollar market, and the scramble to escape it
Of roughly $300bn in stablecoins outstanding in early 2026, close to 99% are pegged to the US dollar, with euro coins a few hundred million between them. Chris Mason, Co-founder and CEO of Orbital, puts the dollar’s dominance down to correspondent banking.
“If you’re operating in certain emerging markets, your payments may be deemed higher risk, so either you or your counterparty gets choked out of US dollars, or your transactions get held up while another six parties look at that transaction.” he said.
By his reckoning, about 80% of world trade runs on dollars. “SEPA is super efficient, but I don’t see a euro-denominated coin solving a global problem today,” he added.
The dollar’s grip is also political, because dollar stablecoins deepen the dollarisation of economies whose citizens have given up on their own currency. Mason pointed to Argentina, where long-running economic instability has facilitated “a distrust in the peso”, and Turkey.
Victor Mithouard, VP of Payments and Strategy at Mambu, adds: “The GENIUS regulation introduces indirect oversight from Treasury over stablecoins by construct, so you understand why the European institutions are fighting back with the weapons they always have, which is regulation,” he said.
“For the past year or two it was a conversation we were having between fintechs at conferences like this,” said Robin Anderson, Head of Product at Tribe Payments. “Now it’s become a story about monetary sovereignty, and that’s where it gets really interesting.”
Europe’s answer is taking shape as Qivalis, an Amsterdam-based consortium of 37 banks across 15 countries, seeking a Dutch licence to issue a MiCA-compliant euro stablecoin in the second half of 2026.
Marochini argued the consortium spreads risk a single issuer would carry alone, its exposure “diluted between the banks and not just one”. Escaping the dollar is harder than launching a coin, as Lux Thiagarajah, OpenPayd‘s Chief Commercial Officer, pointed out. A non-dollar coin needs deep liquidity before institutions touch it, and a euro market in the hundreds of millions starts far behind a dollar market near $300bn.
Three regulators moving at three speeds
The US GENIUS Act, signed in July 2025, bars issuers from paying yield. The Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) is live in the EU and has pushed non-compliant coins such as USDT off regulated exchanges. The UK has now joined them, the last of the three to act. Three regimes, and no two alike.
On the yield ban, Anderson said it “reduces the risk that stablecoins put competitive pressure on deposits, but it also changes the commercial model. If stablecoins can’t compete on yield, they’re going to have to compete on utility and capability.”
Thiagarajah, whose firm cannot pay interest on fiat balances as an e-money institution, went further. “Everyone thought it was going to hurt Circle. It hasn’t, because stablecoins aren’t there for the yield, they’re there as a medium of exchange,” he said. “We see record volume growth month on month, because people just want to move money.”
Of the thousands of firms which registered as crypto providers in Europe, independent trackers say only about 17% completed full authorisation once MiCA arrived. “Some are just selling,” Marochini said. “It’s too hard for them to go to the next stage.”
Anderson expects the survivors to be “regulated issuers, custody providers and digital banks, anyone moving quickly on compliance and control.”
The UK’s rules landed on 30 June 2026, when the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published its final cryptoasset rulebook, setting reserve, redemption and capital requirements for stablecoin issuers, with the FCA supervising smaller issuers and the largest, systemic coins falling to the Bank of England, which has proposed a temporary £40bn cap on any single one.
The regime does not become mandatory until October 2027, and the FCA has pointedly declined to copy MiCA, cutting its stablecoin capital requirement to 1% after industry feedback, half its original proposal and below the EU’s 2%. It is a third rulebook, not converging on an existing one.
The divergence cuts against the global reach stablecoins were meant to have, and it worries Anderson most. The idea is “meant to be a global thing”, he said, but it is being diluted by regulation designed at a country or regional level.
“Once you get regulatory harmonisation across those key jurisdictions, the UK, US, Japan and Australia, that’ll be a big unlocker,” said Ricardo Correia, partner at Bain & Company and global expert of Digital Assets.
Until then, a coin business has to “set up market infrastructure that’s costly, a licence here, a licence there”, running parallel dollar and euro coins and burning, minting and switching between them.
The networks move in, and bet on consolidation
“If we’re not going to be the settlement layer for this stuff going forward, at the very least we can be a trusted orchestration player at the heart of it all,” Anderson said of the networks’ move into stablecoin infrastructure. Mithouard calls the same deals proof stablecoins are now “one rail among others”, with Mambu building to route between them and pick the cheapest at settlement.
Correia says the networks’ move is a change of kind, not just of vendors. “All the payment systems we have today are messaging systems,” he said, with card rails “just messages bouncing between different counterparties”. Stablecoins turn that into “a value network versus a messaging network”, though he expects it to stay behind the light switch.
“No one’s asking for a stablecoin,” he said. “What people are asking for is cheaper, faster, more transparent, predictable payments.” The edges stay the same while the plumbing in the middle changes, and he puts the full transition at “five, 10, 15 years before we all move, if we ever do, because there’s so much spaghetti there”.
“It’s a payment instrument, and it thrives on network effects,” Mithouard added, which is why he expects the coins to consolidate. “The value of networks only grows if you have everybody on the same one, like Facebook and Instagram. So you would expect this to consolidate.”
Mithourad is more agnostic on which coin ends up dominating, he says: “Circle is in the game, but others are trying to launch this year,” he said. “It’s going to be an open race for the next 12 months.” Marochini agrees, doubting the market sustains its sprawl.
“I don’t expect that in the future you will have 1,000 stablecoins,” he said, arguing regulation will do much of the winnowing.
Correia says the pattern is similar in older industries, “like cars when they were invented, it’s a Cambrian explosion – the market diverges, loads of people get in, and then over time it consolidates,” he said. For now, “everyone’s a stablecoin, and everyone’s screaming about it”, he said, before the field narrows and the also-rans “get subsumed or die”. It is the one point all five share, and none will name a winner.
What stablecoins still can’t do
At present, the card networks – particularly in Western markets – retain their edge through the machinery they have entrenched around a payment. “One of the reasons cards are still prevalent globally is that they provide so many ways to manage commerce, chargebacks and all these things,” Mithouard said. “That agility is what makes the card system so sticky.”
Mason noted the same rules have kept whole sectors off cards, because high chargebacks make them uneconomic. He sees room to rebuild it through escrow or non-guaranteed transactions, and Circle has moved this way, publishing a refund protocol for on-chain disputes and floating reversible payments on its Arc chain, which both welcomed as a useful if derivative-style layer on something built to be final.
Figures Mithouard cited put 98% to 99% of stablecoin volume with traders and market makers, so the coins have barely left the trading floor, and it is hard to claim regulation has unlocked everyday payments, which means the money-movement story for stablecoins is still in its early stages.
Correia added: “You peel the onion and you start to understand where the true value lies.” Even cross-border payments, the flagship case, are already efficient in the currencies that matter most.
CLS settles about $8tn a day across 18 major currencies, and by its own figures its netting cuts the cash members must fund by roughly 96% to 99%. “The more you look at where instant money makes sense, the more you realise it’s quite specific,” he said, down to non-CLS currencies “on these corridors, in only one direction”.
The rail is built and the networks have bought in, but which currency it runs on, whose rules govern it, and whether it can do the ordinary things cards do all remain unsettled.
Marochini’s fragmentation-to-frameworks describes the direction of travel, not the current state. He says tokenisation gives the industry “a beautiful car, like a Ferrari or a new Tesla”, but a beautiful car is useless without electricity, and the electricity here is a common set of rules.
“You need to ensure that the car you drive in the US, in Europe and in Asia has the same electricity,” he concludes.
