Stablecoin card spending passed $1 billion a month in July and is forecast to reach $50 billion a year by 2028, according to research reported by Reuters in August.
Mahesh Paolini-Subramanya, chief technology officer at fintech infrastructure provider BKN301, argues that the familiar payment card, rather than a new wallet experience, is the most likely route for stablecoins into everyday spending. He joined BKN301 after serving as CTO at Klar, a digital financial services platform in Mexico, and before that at BlockFi.
For Paolini-Subramanya, the trajectory matters more than the total. “I believe it’s the shape of the curve that matters more than the headline number,” he said. “Three years ago, stablecoin card spending was a fraction of where it is today; now, in a single month, it has passed $1 billion.”
He sees the spending coming increasingly from people and businesses for whom a balance pegged to the US dollar “solves a real problem that local banking doesn’t, such as workers and small businesses across Africa and the Middle East facing currency instability, costly remittance corridors, and/or thin banking infrastructure.”
“Tellingly, the fastest-growing markets aren’t necessarily the most crypto-native; they’re often the ones where the payments pain is sharpest and where there is enough regulatory clarity for banks to plug in lawfully,” he said. In his view, regulation “has been as important to this growth as the technology itself.”
Why the card rail
Cards, he argues, have already solved two of the hardest problems in payments: merchant acceptance and consumer trust. “Tens of millions of merchants already accept cards, and consumers understand how they work, including disputes, liability, and loss protection,” he said.
He is careful not to oversell it. “Don’t get me wrong, cards aren’t a silver bullet. But compared with a wallet-native experience, they don’t require merchants, consumers, and regulators to simultaneously adopt something new.”
The question, he says, is where the complexity sits. “It shouldn’t sit at checkout, and it certainly shouldn’t sit with the customer. Instead, it should sit behind the scenes, in a governed orchestration layer that can decide the appropriate funding source and settle the transaction within the rapid authorisation times consumers already expect from card payments.” Visa’s published rules, he notes, require issuers in Europe to respond to point-of-sale authorisation requests within five seconds.
What has to change behind the card
Paolini-Subramanya sets out three requirements for a bank or issuer that wants fiat and stablecoin balances to sit behind the same card. The first is a single, governed view of balance and identity, whether the underlying asset is a deposit, e-money or a tokenised dollar. “Today, these balances typically sit in separate systems with separate ledgers, with different rules around how the data is managed,” he said.
The second is an authorisation and settlement engine that can choose the funding source, run compliance checks and convert value where needed, all within a card network’s standard response window. The third is an audit trail. “If a regulator asks how a transaction was funded and screened, the answer needs to be immediately traceable, rather than reconstructed afterwards from three different systems,” he said.
“Without that foundation, the downstream promises about instant settlement and real-time compliance quickly start to break down,” he added.
Interoperability between wallets, cards, processors and core banking is where he sees the most strain. “It breaks because each part of the ecosystem was built for a different world,” he said. He points to the Bank for International Settlements, which has highlighted that tokenised activity needs to interoperate both across networks and with existing financial systems.
“Bolt these together point-to-point, and you get fragmentation. Then layer automation on top, and you risk making that complexity harder to manage,” he said. His alternative is a common layer for orchestration and data beneath the different systems, so that adding a wallet or network partner becomes a matter of configuring a new connection rather than rebuilding infrastructure.
Where adoption moves first
He expects Africa and the Middle East to move fastest, because they combine “real payments pain with improving fiat on/off-ramps, and, in some markets, clearer regulation.” He cites Nigeria, where the International Monetary Fund has said the country accounts for roughly 60 per cent of stablecoin inflows in sub-Saharan Africa, as households and small businesses look for cheaper and faster ways to move money across borders.
In the Middle East, he says, specific rules for payment-token services have given banks and payment providers a clearer framework to work within. “The common thread isn’t how crypto-native a population is, it’s the alignment of genuine demand, a workable fiat bridge, and a regulator willing to specify rules rather than leave the market guessing,” he said.
Money as a service
Looking further ahead, he considers the children starting school this year, who may grow up treating stablecoins, tokenised money and central bank digital currencies simply as money. “They might get paid in one form of digital money, save in another, and spend in a third, without ever having to think about what sits underneath each transaction,” he said. “In that sense, money becomes more of a service than an account type.”
Whether banks are ready is less clear. “Much of today’s core banking architecture was built for a world of conventional deposits and established payment rails, rather than multiple forms of money moving across programmable networks,” he said. The BIS has made a similar point, warning that emerging tokenised systems need to be interoperable to avoid creating “walled gardens” and trapping liquidity.
“Banks don’t need to predict exactly what money will look like in twenty years, but they do need to build infrastructure flexible enough to support forms of money and transactions that don’t even exist yet,” he said.
His advice for the next twelve months is to treat stablecoin capability as infrastructure rather than a product bolt-on: get data foundations in order, build an orchestration layer that adds new funding sources through configuration rather than multi-year integration, and build in compliance and auditability from the start. “The market is moving fast, so institutions waiting for the market to mature will spend years reacting instead of leading,” he said.
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