Executives from MoonPay, Ripple and Paxos said at Consensus Miami 2026 that stablecoins have moved from a cryptocurrency niche to an institutional priority, but the next phase of adoption will depend on infrastructure, privacy and real-world usability.
Richard Harrison, MoonPay’s vice president of banking and payments partnerships, said traditional financial firms are getting into stablecoins faster as regulations make the market easier to navigate.
“What genius brings us is clarity,” Harrison said. “It’s like a permission slip for companies to get into stablecoins.”
Harrison said stablecoins are also a natural evolution for payments, whose speed and convenience have long been limited by traditional rail. He said cross-border transfers can still take days and remittances can incur high fees, while stablecoins enable near-instant one-to-one transfers of value.
Still, Harrison said stablecoins account for only a small portion of global remittances today and could reach about 10% in five years. Business-to-business payments are already a clear use case, but consumer adoption remains more difficult, he said.
Jack McDonald, senior vice president of stablecoins at Ripple, said institutional clients need regulated products, strong counterparties and trustworthy custody arrangements before moving meaningful trading volumes on-chain.
“For institutions to really unleash the full demand … they have to be regulated at the highest level,” McDonald said.
He said Ripple is more focused on utility than stablecoin market capitalization, including payments, corporate flows and the use of collateral in capital markets. McDonald said Ripple’s stablecoin complements, rather than competes with, XRP because transactions on the XRP Ledger still use XRP as the native token.
Paxos senior software engineer Brent Perrault said newer regulated stablecoins can compete by emphasizing trust, distribution and user incentives. He sees the growth of PayPal USD and the use of Paxos infrastructure by large institutions such as Charles Schwab as signs of demand from mature financial companies.
But Perot said privacy concerns remain unresolved. Public blockchains expose transaction amounts and traffic, and partial privacy is not enough if users end up moving between private and public environments.
Harrison compared stablecoins to electric cars: the core product works, but adoption depends on the supporting infrastructure.
“How do you use stablecoins to pay rent?” he said. “How do you buy a cup of coffee with that?”