At a recent gathering of banking and fintech leaders in London, one argument stood out from the usual noise about crypto and AI. The real contest in global finance is no longer about currencies or apps. But about who controls the underlying rails money moves on.
As reported by Entrepreneur UK, Pavel Kashuba, a strategic leader at Coinspaid Solutions. Used his keynote at the Payments Leaders’ Summit to argue that stablecoins have moved well past their experimental phase. And are now functioning as genuine payment infrastructure. His central point was blunt: banks and payment executives. Who still think of this as a “crypto story” are misreading the shift entirely.
Kashuba’s case rests heavily on numbers. Conventional cross-border transfers routed through correspondent banks can take several business days to clear. With combined costs FX spreads, intermediary fees, reconciliation often eating up more than 3.5% of the transaction. Especially in emerging economies. Stablecoin rails, he said, flip that math: settlement in seconds rather than days, costs under 1.5%, minimal failed transactions, and a fully traceable transaction record. He was careful to frame this not as marketing but as a hard cost comparison that large institutions can no longer dismiss.
Three trends, in his view, are pushing adoption from the margins into the mainstream. First, regulation is catching up MiCA is active in the EU, US stablecoin legislation has advanced. And the UK’s crypto framework is close behind, giving large institutions the compliance clarity they typically wait for before committing capital. Second, volume has scaled dramatically: stablecoin transaction flow hit roughly $33 trillion in 2025, outpacing Visa’s annual throughput, with much of that now tied to genuine commercial activity like treasury management and B2B settlement rather than speculative trading. Third, and perhaps most telling, major payment networks are no longer just watching Mastercard’s $1.8 billion purchase of BVNK and Stripe’s $1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge signal that industry giants are buying blockchain settlement capability outright instead of building it from scratch.
Kashuba also pointed to a widening gap between consumer appetite and merchant readiness. He cited figures suggesting more than 741 million people worldwide already hold digital assets. With markets like India, Nigeria, Indonesia, and Vietnam growing fastest. The number of businesses actually equipped to accept blockchain-based settlement remains comparatively small. That mismatch, he argued, is exactly where the commercial opportunity sits, particularly for companies operating. South and Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, where traditional banking rails remain slow and costly.
Much of the failure among enterprise blockchain pilots, he suggested, comes down to underestimating governance rather than technology. He outlined four requirements for infrastructure to work at scale compliance checks built into every transaction in real time rather than bolted on afterward. Liquidity management across multiple pre-funded corridors; redundancy across several blockchain networks so transactions can reroute around congestion (Coinspaid, he noted, operates across 22 chains). And a genuine operating track record, referencing Coinspaid’s eleven years running in production. The eventual goal, he added, is infrastructure that end users never notice at all a merchant getting paid in local currency. A business settling invoices faster, with the blockchain layer working invisibly underneath.
He closed by linking this shift to the rise of autonomous, AI-driven commerce. Arguing that traditional banking rails simply weren’t built for machine-executed transactions requiring instant, programmable, deterministic settlement. Protocols like x402, which attach stablecoin payments directly to web requests, could become foundational for this next wave. For Kashuba, the takeaway for the room was straightforward: this is no longer a bet on crypto as a trend. But a strategic bet on where settlement economics are already heading.
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