During the last two major crypto market booms in 2017 and 2021, stablecoins have been just a footnote.
But now, they’re on the agenda at Amazon and Walmart board meetings. They are central to new financial regulations and legislations.
Some of the world’s biggest retailers, tech giants, and payments companies are betting that stablecoins will not just complement money, but replace how it moves.
This is a development that’s unfolding way quicker than initially thought, and the end goal is to rewrite the rules of global commerce.
Is the payments system broken?
Yes. And not in abstract terms but in hard numbers.
International B2B payments still take 3 to 7 days to settle. That’s before factoring in delays from compliance checks, bank holidays, or mismatched banking hours across time zones.
Costs are the second. Moving $1,000 across borders can incur $14 to $150 in fees, depending on the corridor. Global remittances average a 6.62% fee, according to 2024 data.
Then there’s the architecture. A single cross-border payment can involve five or more intermediaries.
The sender’s bank, the acquiring bank, correspondent banks, FX providers, and clearing systems like SWIFT. Each one takes a cut and introduces new points of failure.
Inclusion is another blind spot. Roughly 1.4 billion people remain unbanked, and billions more have limited or no access to efficient digital finance.
In emerging markets, even accessing US dollars is difficult or restricted.
This system wasn’t built for a connected world. It was designed in the 20th century to move paper, not software. And it shows. In a world where files move instantly, money doesn’t.
That gap isn’t just inefficient but it’s become a drag on economic potential.
Are stablecoins really just ‘crypto for payments’?
Stablecoins are digital tokens tied to fiat currencies, usually the US dollar.
The pitch is that they offer the stability of cash, with the speed and programmability of software.
But their real promise lies not in theory, but in numbers.
Last year, stablecoins processed $15.6 trillion in transactions, almost identical to Visa’s global volume.
Yet most of this flow didn’t touch mainstream commerce. It moved between crypto wallets, trading desks, and treasury tools. But that’s changing.
Companies like Stripe, Shopify, and PayPal are already building consumer interfaces for stablecoin payments.
Stripe charges just 1.5% on stablecoin checkout. That’s half the cost of credit cards. That could double net income for a low-margin retailer.
At the same time, firms like SpaceX and ScaleAI use stablecoins to repatriate funds or pay international workers faster and with lower friction.
Why are Amazon and Walmart suddenly interested?
A Wall Street Journal report last week confirmed it: Amazon and Walmart are actively exploring launching their own stablecoins.
And they’re not alone. Meta is preparing a second stablecoin initiative, three years after regulators halted its first attempt.
Ant Group has filed applications in Singapore and Hong Kong to issue its own token.
Why the sudden race? Because the economics are clear.
Credit card processors charge merchants 2 to 3.5% per transaction. For a retailer with $100 billion in revenue, that’s up to $3.5 billion annually that’s lost to payments infrastructure.
Stablecoins change that. They allow merchants to issue their own digital dollars, keep transactions internal, settle instantly, and eliminate fees entirely.
These aren’t vague ambitions. PayPal’s stablecoin (PYUSD) has already reached a $1 billion market cap.
Shopify merchants now accept USDC. And the USDC issuer, Circle, went public this month and hit a $30 billion valuation in days. The market is voting with its feet.
In the meantime, Visa and Mastercard lost more than $60 billion in market value in a single day after the Walmart-Amazon story broke.
Why B2B payments are the real prize
The most powerful use case for stablecoins isn’t consumer payments. The real use case is inside the financial stack, where global businesses move trillions in capital every day.
B2B payments are large in volume, frequent in nature, and notoriously inefficient. Global B2B payments exceed $125 trillion annually.
Even a 1% efficiency gain is worth more than the entire annual profit of some major banks.
A Juniper Research report projects that stablecoins could save businesses up to $26 billion per year in transaction costs by 2028.
Those savings don’t even account for the knock-on effects: better cash flow visibility, fewer reconciliation headaches, and lower working capital needs. At scale, speed becomes strategy.
Stablecoins aren’t just cheaper. They’re structurally better suited to how businesses operate today. They are real-time, borderless, and software-based.
That’s why the biggest change is starting in B2B. It’s where the pain is highest and the payoff is immediate.
A favorable regulatory environment
For years, the biggest roadblock to stablecoin adoption was regulatory uncertainty. But positive signs are emerging thanks to two major bills: GENIUS and STABLE.
These bills would require stablecoin issuers to hold 1:1 reserves in high-quality liquid assets, like 90-day Treasury bills.
Issuers with more than $50 billion in tokens would need to submit regular audits and reserve disclosures.
Interest-bearing stablecoins would likely be banned, to prevent competition with money market funds or bank deposits.
Circle already complies with most of these standards. PayPal too. Even Tether, historically criticized for opacity, now publishes real-time reserve reports.
As regulation tightens, it will likely drive consolidation and credibility.
Banks, by contrast, only keep a fraction of deposits as cash and lend out the rest. Stablecoins with full reserve backing may soon be viewed as safer than traditional bank deposits, especially in countries with weaker institutions.
Still, stablecoins do carry systemic risks. A BIS paper found that $3.5 billion in redemptions could raise short-term Treasury yields by 8 basis points. That’s roughly equivalent to a small-scale central bank action.
A mass move from bank deposits to stablecoins would strain traditional banking models and shift liquidity to non-bank entities.
How stablecoins might rewrite finance
This is no longer a question of “if” or even “when.” The migration has begun. The question now is scale and who controls the rails.
As of Q1 2025, stablecoin circulation amounted to $208 billion, with Tether (USDT) and Circle (USDC) accounting for 90% of that.
But Bernstein Research forecasts that this number could 13x up to $2.8 trillion in just 3 years due to a real use case.
Retailers want to protect their margins. Treasury departments want liquidity. Startups want speed. Consumers want simplicity.
Stablecoins deliver all of it, and the supporting infrastructure is maturing fast.
This isn’t about Bitcoin or speculation anymore. It’s about programmable dollars moving in real time, on open networks, at near-zero cost.
The future of money is not a new currency. It’s a better transmission system.
And that future is being built. Not by governments or even risky crypto projects.
It’s being built by the largest global retailers and payment processors.
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