Stablecoins are increasingly described as payments infrastructure rather than as crypto assets, and the card networks have begun settling in them. What that changes for a business trying to pay a supplier in another country is a narrower question, and it turns on what happens after the transfer lands.
Raj Kamal of TransFi on why stablecoin settlement still runs into local payout networks, liquidity and FX, and what has to change in regulation next.
The Fintech Times put written questions to Raj Kamal, founder and chief executive of TransFi, on where the last mile still breaks, why local payout networks matter more than connecting one blockchain to another, and what has to happen in regulation and infrastructure before stablecoins can carry everyday cross-border commerce.
1. Stablecoins are increasingly described as settlement infrastructure rather than crypto assets. What changed, and what evidence of that shift do you see in TransFi’s own flows?
It’s almost entirely about solving a payment problem. Stablecoins give you a settlement layer that never sleeps, so value can cross a border before it even touches the local banking system.
The numbers back that up. McKinsey and Artemis put genuine stablecoin payments at around $390 billion in 2025. B2B alone was about $226 billion, 60 per cent of the total, growing 733 per cent year on year. Not a niche use case anymore.
We see the same thing at TransFi. We connect businesses across 70+ countries, with 250+ payment methods, 40+ currencies and 130+ digital assets, and the demand keeps coming from companies that just need money to move faster and cheaper, not from anyone chasing crypto exposure.
So the shift in one line: it extends beyond using crypto to the use of blockchain rails to move money globally, faster and with less friction.
2. Access to digital dollars is no longer the hard part. Where exactly does the last mile still break when a business tries to use stablecoins for payments and payouts across different markets?
It breaks right at the point where on-chain value has to meet local financial infrastructure. That’s the part people underestimate.
You can receive USDC almost instantly, sure, but your supplier, your employee, your customer, they don’t want USDC. They need euros in a bank account, local currency in a wallet, or a payout through whatever method they actually use day to day. That’s exactly where FX, compliance, liquidity, and local payout infrastructure become the real work.
So I’d push back a little on the idea that stablecoins replace the traditional payments stack. In my experience, they don’t; they just shift where settlement happens within it. A good example is the Circle Nium partnership. It plugs USDC settlement directly into Nium’s local payout network, which covers 190+ countries and 100 currencies.
This is why I think the opportunity extends further than moving stablecoins faster to connecting on-chain settlement to the rails people already use locally and making sure the business never has to deal with that complexity themselves.
3. Why do liquidity and local payout networks matter so much to making stablecoins usable, and what does it take to build them across more than 70 countries?
Liquidity is what actually turns a stablecoin transfer into a usable payment. Moving a digital dollar takes seconds, but without an efficient way to convert and deliver that value locally, you just pushed the problem downstream rather than actually solving it.
Every market is different. Different banks, payment methods, FX dynamics, regulation, consumer behaviour. So connecting blockchains to each other is simply not enough when the need is to connect them to local financial networks you can actually rely on.
That’s the premise behind TransFi: 70+ countries, 250+ payment methods, 40+ currencies, and 130+ digital assets, each one there because someone needed that specific rail to work.
It comes down to intelligently routing the right liquidity, FX route, blockchain, and payout rail for every transaction. At scale, that’s an orchestration problem. The infrastructure that wins will make it invisible to the business, while staying reliable, compliant, and transparent on cost.
4. Moves by the major card networks put stablecoin rails within reach of hundreds of millions of merchants. What do announcements on that scale actually change for the businesses you serve, and what do they leave unsolved?
These moves are significant because they validate stablecoins as part of mainstream payments infrastructure. When a network of that scale integrates stablecoin settlement, it signals to businesses that this is becoming a legitimate financial rail, not a crypto-native experiment.
Visa is a good example. In April 2026, they reported that their stablecoin settlement pilot had expanded to nine blockchains and reached a $7 billion annualised settlement run rate, up 50 per cent quarter over quarter. That kind of growth reflects genuine institutional adoption, not early-stage experimentation.
That said, I’d be cautious about overstating what merchant reach actually solves. Businesses still need local collection, FX, compliance, liquidity, and payouts. Acceptance on one side of the transaction doesn’t automatically translate into efficient settlement on the other. So the real opportunity, in my view, is the interoperability that underlies the headline announcement: connecting global stablecoin settlement to the fragmented local payment systems that businesses and consumers ultimately depend on.
5. You have led payments strategy at McKinsey and fintech investment at Naspers. Compared with earlier payments infrastructure cycles, what is the stablecoin build-out getting right, and what is it getting wrong?
The build-out is getting one thing fundamentally right: it addresses genuine infrastructure problems, settlement speed, cross-border liquidity, programmability, and fragmented payment rails. Real problems, rather than manufactured ones.
Where the industry can go wrong is confusing technical capability with adoption. Previous payment cycles taught us the same lesson. New infrastructure only scales once it becomes invisible and fits into workflows people already use.
The data backs this up. McKinsey and Artemis estimate genuine stablecoin payments were around $390 billion in 2025, despite far larger headline blockchain volumes. B2B made up roughly $226 billion of that.
The lesson from earlier cycles: the winning layer is the network around the technology, distribution, liquidity, compliance, reliability, interoperability. Stablecoins are getting the technology right. The next challenge is making the infrastructure disappear into everyday commerce.
6. What has to happen next, in regulation or in infrastructure, before stablecoins can support everyday cross-border commerce at scale?
Two things need to happen at the same time, in my view: regulatory clarity and infrastructure interoperability. Neither one gets us there alone.
On regulation, businesses need consistent rules, licensing, reserves, AML/KYC, consumer protection, and cross-border activity. Europe’s already moving on this: in May 2026 the European Commission opened a targeted consultation on the MiCA review, essentially checking whether the framework still holds up as the market evolves.
On infrastructure, what we need is reliable connections between stablecoins, banks, instant- payment systems and local payout networks. And I want to be clear about the goal here: it’s enabling a conversation among pre-existing rails rather than replacing them altogether.
The BIS is thinking the same way. Their Project Agora prototype showed how tokenised central bank reserves and commercial bank deposits could enable atomic, multi-currency cross-border settlement, and there’s more real value testing planned.
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