Stablecoins have moved from crypto-niche to an institutional priority, but the next phase of adoption will depend on infrastructure, privacy and real-world 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 firms are moving more quickly into stablecoins because regulation has made the market easier to navigate.
“What GENIUS brought us was clarity,” Harrison said. “It was like a permission slip for companies to get into stablecoins.”
Harrison said stablecoins are also a natural evolution of payments, where speed and convenience have long been limited by legacy rails. Cross-border transfers can still take days, and money transfers can incur high fees, he said, while stablecoins allow near-instant, one-to-one value transfer.
Still, Harrison said stablecoins represent only a small portion of global transfers today and could reach about 10% within five years. Business-to-business payments are already a clear use case, he said, but consumer adoption is still more difficult.
Jack McDonald, Ripple’s senior vice president of stablecoins, said institutional clients require regulated products, strong counterparties and trusted custodians before moving meaningful volume on-chain.
“For institutions to really unlock the full demand … you have to be regulated at the highest level,” McDonald said.
He said that Ripple is less focused on stablecoin market value than on utility, including payments, moving corporate finances and using collateral in the capital markets. McDonald said that Ripple’s stablecoin complements XRP rather than competes with it because transactions on the XRP Ledger still use XRP as the native token.
Brent Perrault, senior software engineer at Paxos, said newer regulated stablecoins can compete by emphasizing trust, distribution and user incentives. He cited PayPal USD’s growth and large institutions like Charles Schwab using Paxo’s infrastructure as signs of demand from sophisticated financial firms.
But Perrault said privacy remains unclear. Public blockchains reveal transaction amounts and flows, and partial privacy is insufficient if users eventually move between private and public environments.
Harrison compared stablecoins to electric cars: the core product works, but adoption depends on supporting infrastructure.
“How do you use stablecoin to pay your rent?” he said. “How do you use it to buy a cup of coffee?”
