While stablecoins command only a tiny fraction of annual global payments value, interesting use cases for the digital assets are beginning to emerge, according to two recent panel discussions.
Among them: foreign remittances conducted via mobile app; airlines’ payments to passengers for disrupted flight or baggage delays; retail and creative marketplaces that pay sellers or content creators with stablecoins instead of their local currency.
In the discussions this month, professionals in the crypto field explained the nascent and growing use of stablecoins and where they’re gaining traction.
Flagship Advisory Partners, a consulting firm with dual headquarters in Prague and Annapolis, Maryland, had a webinar on the topic earlier this month. Likewise, the Conference of State Bank Supervisors had a podcast discussion with Yevgeny Shrago, the organization’s senior director of regulatory policy, on how stablecoins are likely to expand, slowly, into the U.S. economy.
About $300 billion of stablecoins are currently in circulation, and their supply is expected to grow in coming years given the coins’ doubling over the past 18 months, said Ben Brown, a partner at Flagship, who advises fintechs.
“There’s a huge ocean of electronic payments that happen out there and stablecoins are just starting to eke out a tiny bit of them but in really, really interesting ways,” Brown said.
About 58% of companies, including banks, are considering applications for stablecoins, and 13% have already used them, according to Flagship data. About half of current usage involves cross-border payments.
MoneyGram has been among stablecoin adopters, with a new mobile app the company introduced in September, with the first payments two months later. MoneyGram uses stablecoins for remittances to Colombia via the app.
The company chose Colombia as its initial stablecoin market because of the large volume of remittance flows from the U.S. and inflationary volatility challenges for the Colombian peso, said Ali Heiring, MoneyGram’s head of corporate strategy at the Flagship event.
People in Colombia receiving funds can keep their balance in stablecoin within the app, which also functions as a wallet. MoneyGram has partnered with Circle Internet Group and uses that company’s USDC coin for customer balances.
“We still have the same on and off ramps, largely on both sides of that transaction,” Heiring said. “The cost advantage really comes when you’re able to build end-to-end stablecoins.”
Dallas-based MoneyGram declined to reveal user data for its app, but “adoption and engagement have exceeded initial expectations,” a spokesperson said Monday in an email. The company plans to expand such stablecoin payments to other markets via its app “in the near future,” the spokesperson said.
The evolution of digital wallets to enable stablecoin storage and payments will be important for the asset’s growth, McKinsey & Co. consultants said last year in their Global Payments Report.
“For stablecoins to achieve widespread adoption, end-user perceptions of them must change from that of a temporary bridge between fiat currencies to a form of money to be held,” the report said.
One industry investigating stablecoin use has been airlines, which have identified them as a potential payment mechanism for delayed and canceled flights or to pay for lost and damaged baggage, said Nabil Manji, senior vice president of enterprise growth and partnerships for Worldpay, which is now part of payments processor Global Payments.
“It was totally surprising to me but actually it kind of makes sense,” he said. “If you’re an international airline you’ve got passengers from almost every country in the world that have bank accounts with almost every currency in the world.”
As a result, “it can be quicker and cheaper to disburse” funds via stablecoins, Manji said. He did not identify any carriers testing stablecoin payments.
The digital currency industry, in general, has done itself a “disservice” by focusing too heavily on the technical aspects of their solutions, Manji said.
“They make it about the tech over everything else,” he said. “The vast majority of the users don’t care about the underlying tech or the coding.”
One primary reason for the rapid growth of stablecoins has been the regulatory regime change in Washington, noted Brown and Kyle Thomas, a CSBS senior policy advisor who hosts the agency’s podcast.
While the Biden administration viewed cryptocurrency with suspicion, the second Trump administration has promoted digital assets ardently, most notably through the passage of the Genius Act to provide a framework for stablecoin regulation. Trump’s family is also part of the industry through World Liberty Financial, its cryptocurrency firm.
“We went from this place in 2024 [that] it was a topic that many people didn’t want to touch to a topic that had regulatory clarity and people were starting to invest and explore,” Manji said.
The Genius Act set a variety of mid-2026 deadlines for implementing rules by different executive branch agencies, said Shrago. As those come into force, more players will move forward with stablecoin tests or wider use — with many in the public likely to be unaware of their use, he said.
“I think most consumers couldn’t tell you today what is an ACH versus a wire versus FedNow as a payment method,” Shrago said. “I think we’ll probably see a similar thing with stablecoins and tokenized deposits and whatever other wild payment innovations we might come up with in the future.”
