Stablecoins have moved from a crypto niche to an institutional priority, but the next phase of adoption will depend on real-world infrastructure, privacy and usability, executives from MoonPay, Ripple and Paxos said at Consensus Miami 2026.
Richard Harrison, MoonPay’s vice president of banking and payments partnerships, said traditional financial companies are gaining faster access to stablecoins because regulation has made the market easier to navigate.
“What GENIUS has given us is clarity,” Harrison said. “It was like permission for companies to enter stablecoins.”
Harrison said stablecoins are also a natural evolution of payments, where speed and convenience have long been limited by existing rails. Cross-border transfers can still take days and remittances can incur high fees, he said, while stablecoins allow near-instant transfer of value.
Still, Harrison said stablecoins represent only a small share of global remittances today and could reach around 10% within five years. Business-to-business payments are already an obvious use case, he said, but consumer adoption remains more difficult.
Jack McDonald, senior vice president of stablecoins at Ripple, said institutional clients need regulated products, strong counterparties, and trusted custody agreements before moving significant volume on-chain.
“For institutions to actually be able to meet the full demand… you have to be regulated at the highest level,” McDonald said.
He said Ripple is less focused on stable market capitalization and more on utility, including payments, corporate cash flow and the use of collateral in capital markets. McDonald said Ripple’s stablecoin complements XRP rather than competing with it, as transactions on the XRP Ledger still use XRP as the native token.
Brent Perrault, senior software engineer at Paxos, said new regulated stablecoins can compete with a focus on trust, distribution and user incentives. He cited the growth of PayPal USD and large institutions such as Charles Schwab using Paxos infrastructure as signs of demand for sophisticated financial companies.
But Perrault said the privacy issue remains unresolved. Public blockchains expose transaction amounts and flows, and partial privacy is insufficient if users end up moving between private and public environments.
Harrison compared stablecoins to electric cars: the base product works, but its adoption depends on the supporting infrastructure.
“How do you use stablecoin to pay your rent? he said. “How do you use it to buy a cup of coffee?” »
