Stablecoins Won't Scale Without Banks

In brief

• Genuine stablecoin payments ran at about $390 billion annualized in late 2025, roughly 0.02% of a cross-border market worth $208 trillion.
• Enterprise flows begin and end in fiat, leaving stablecoins to settle only the middle leg that once ran through correspondent banking.
• Single-bank dependency is the sector's most underrated operational risk, with Silvergate, Signature, and the FDIC pause letters as precedent.

Stablecoins were supposed to route around the banking system. Instead, the companies scaling them are building deeper into it than anyone predicted.

Stripe paid $1.1 billion for Bridge, whose core product is orchestrating banks. Citi is launching crypto custody. Standard Chartered is testing stablecoin settlement in Singapore. One by one, the operators moving institutional volume keep landing on the same architecture.

An enterprise cross-border payment has three legs. The payer's money moves in local currency over local rails—a Brazilian importer paying in BRL via Pix. The payee receives local currency on their end—the supplier collecting dollars in their account.

Between them sits the middle leg: getting value across the border from one institution to the other. That leg used to run through correspondent banking, SWIFT messages hopping between intermediary banks, each holding accounts with the next, each adding a day and a fee. When both institutions accept a stablecoin, that leg settles on-chain in seconds. Banks still own the other two.