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For much of the 20th century, speaking on the phone across state lines was a luxury good — a conversation that ran a tab by the minute, all controlled by the Bell System in its private fiefdom. Decades later, policy rewired the economics of the communications infrastructure. The AT&T breakup in 1984, followed by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, unleashed a wave of competition. Prices collapsed. The running tab on calls vanished. It was a script WhatsApp would follow years later, exploiting the high cost of SMS to seize messaging away from mobile carriers.
Today, the world of payments looks uncomfortably familiar. A handful of institutions, such as credit card issuers and banks, run the tollbooths of everyday payments, collecting a toll on every swipe, tap, or wire. What amounts to a private tax on the economy has a brilliant marketing scheme: Consumers, showered in merchant-funded rewards, believe they are getting a free service, all while the background radiation of invisible fees shapes business models — to the tune of $187 billion in merchant fees in 2024. The passage of the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act presents leaders with new options that could upend that system.
What Are Stablecoins, and Why Are They Different?
A stablecoin is a digital token designed to be a true dollar bill for the internet. The GENIUS Act, which became U.S. federal law in July 2025, mandates that to qualify as stablecoins, these tokens must be fully backed by high-quality, liquid assets, making them redeemable on demand 1-to-1 for U.S. dollars. This guarantee is what separates them from a balance inside PayPal or Cash App, which is merely an IOU from the payment system, and from other cryptocurrencies, which fluctuate in value.
The historical problem with this concept has always been trust: How do you know that the money is really there? The GENIUS Act addresses this by creating rules for reserve composition, legal claims, and audits. This regulatory clarity gives businesses the confidence they need to adopt the technology. For innovators, it’s a green light to take a sledgehammer to the 50-year-old infrastructure that has determined how money moves.
Compared with traditional payments, stablecoins offer three fundamental advantages:
1. Efficiency. Stablecoins enable instant settlement, 24/7, anywhere in the world, dramatically reducing the costs and delays associated with cross-border payments and wire transfers. According to Visa, stablecoins processed an astounding $9.1 trillion in volume in the last 12 months, rivaling Visa’s own $13.2 trillion. Although traditional payments are a fraction of that amount, at less than $100 billion, stablecoin adoption is growing fast, with the B2B segment alone growing 315% year over year.
2. Programmability. Stablecoins are built on programmable blockchains, enabling the automation of payment workflows, such as billing and corporate treasury management, and the creation of new financial services. Nowhere is this more apparent than in decentralized finance, where protocols have turned stablecoins into a global, 24/7 lending market with over $26 billion in loans. Programmability is crucial for agentic payments, empowering AI agents to autonomously make purchases using machine-native protocols like the x402 standard, all while being safely constrained by rules and budgets. As autonomous agents increasingly transact with each other, they’ll need to be able to make real-time micropayments — something regulated stablecoins can now enable, after years of failed attempts.
3. Accessibility. Stablecoins operate on open networks, meaning that anyone with an internet connection can access a functional “USD bank account” via a self-custody wallet, bypassing the need for a financial intermediary. This is currently stablecoin’s largest use case, with Tether (USDT) commanding a market capitalization of over $170 billion as savers and businesses in emerging markets use it to hedge against currency devaluation.
Changing the Plumbing, Not the Paint
Excitement over previous waves of crypto often proved to be exaggerated — and was affected by scams and bad actors — so it’s fair to ask what makes this moment different. The answer is a shift from speculation to utility, driven by regulation. For a decade, “fintech” has mostly meant putting a beautiful user interface on yesterday’s plumbing. The UX sprinted while the back end — still running on batch settlements and clunky sponsor-bank models — wore ankle weights. But making the underlying infrastructure more accessible and programmable enables anyone to improve old services and invent entirely new ones. The innovation starts with simple things like instant cross-border payments, but it quickly ripples outward, transforming everything from gig-worker payouts to how corporate treasuries automate global, 24/7 cash management.
Historically, market‑creating laws have had two effects: They have forced interoperability and offered a clear formula for new players to innovate and compete. The Telecommunications Act did not invent fiber, but it made fiber rollout unavoidable. Once a price falls close to zero, old fees start to look not just expensive but absurd. Just ask anyone who used to have to pay per text message.
What This Means for Businesses: Choosing Your Ambition
The GENIUS Act does more than clarify rules. It forces a choice. Should stablecoins be treated as a simple utility or as a foundational technology on which to build a stronger financial platform? The second path seems ambitious until you realize how many brands have already taken it. The line between a product and its financial ecosystem has always been blurry, and the savviest companies have long understood that the loyalty program of today can become the bank of tomorrow.
Airlines are the prime example. They are really two businesses under one roof: a low-margin, capital-intensive, brutally competitive logistics company that flies planes; and a high-margin, wildly profitable financial company that prints its own private currency. That second business, the loyalty program, is often the one keeping the first one solvent. Airlines mint miles out of thin air and sell them by the billions to credit card partners, generating significant cash. This financial engine is so valuable that the loyalty programs themselves have been valued at tens of billions — often more than the entire airline — and have been used to secure the companies’ loans.
So why would any company risk this valuable moat by making its private currency interoperable? The simple answer is that companies don’t have to: They can use stablecoins to modernize the underlying payments — like purchases, refunds, and vouchers — without altering the closed-loop logic of the loyalty program itself. And for those feeling more adventurous, a hybrid strategy emerges: They could begin to open up their miles to the outside world — while still controlling the exchange rate — to own an even greater share of their customers’ financial journeys.
Brands like Starbucks pushed the rewards model so far that it effectively became a bank in all but name and licenses. Its loyalty app, which allows customers to hold a balance, consistently holds over $1.9 billion in customer funds — an interest-free loan from its customers that is larger than the deposits of many FDIC-insured banks. This massive float isn’t a quirky accounting line item: It’s a financial ecosystem built on caffeine, point-of-sale convenience, and brand trust.
Target took a different approach by attacking the payment life cycle itself. Its RedCard is more than just a loyalty card — it’s a private payment rail that connects directly to a customer’s bank account. By routing transactions through the low-cost ACH network, Target sidesteps the interchange fees charged by card networks. It then reinvests those savings to provide a 5% discount — a brilliant piece of financial engineering that transforms a cost center into a loyalty-building machine.
The strategy is always the same: Monetize your most valuable asset. For automakers like Ford, that asset was the customer at the moment of a huge purchase, allowing its financing arm to become a profit center more stable than its factories. For Apple, the asset is the iPhone in your pocket, which it is slowly transforming into a financial hub with Apple Card and Apple Savings. For Amazon, it’s the marketplace. All of them show that once you have a customer’s trust, the logical next step is to become their bank.
Not surprisingly, many of these brands are now exploring stablecoins, which reflects a recognition that the road ahead is split into two strategic paths.
The Efficiency Play
For most businesses, payments are a utility. The immediate opportunity is to use regulated stablecoins for simple efficiency gains, turning money movement into a service that is faster, cheaper, programmable, and always on.
Businesses should focus on two factors when selecting a stablecoin: safety and utility. Safety means choosing regulated, reputable issuers to manage risk. Utility means ensuring that the stablecoin not only fits the specific use case — like corporate treasury management versus micropayments — but also has seamless on- and off-ramps to the financial tools customers and partners actually use.
Once safety and utility have been confirmed, the decision comes down to leverage. In today’s land grab for market share, stablecoin issuers such as Circle, Bridge, and Paxos are willing to trade the interest from their reserves for user adoption. Services that can drive a high volume of usage can demand a significant revenue share from the issuers. It’s a window of maximum leverage that will close as soon as the winners emerge.
This strategy treats stablecoin providers as interchangeable utilities, demanding the best performance and cost while simultaneously designing an escape hatch for the day when renting someone else’s asset is no longer a company’s best move.
The Strategic Platform Play
The more ambitious path is an opportunity for businesses where finance is a core product, not just a utility. This category extends far beyond fintech, encompassing the global payout engines of the creator economy, like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok; retailers and e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Amazon, and Walmart; the massive, self-contained economies of gaming platforms like Roblox; and the trusted payment intermediaries of the gig economy, such as Uber, Remote, and Airbnb. For all of these companies, a branded stablecoin is a natural upgrade to their core mission of moving value.
The common thread in all of these cases is a customer relationship built on trust. Ceding control of the core financial asset in that relationship by distributing someone else’s stablecoin means risking becoming a “dumb pipe” — the commoditized plumbing for a competitor’s product.
While this may be an acceptable trade-off for a gaming company, it’s an existential threat for any regulated financial institution whose entire business is linked to the pipe and the custody of assets. It’s the inflection point IBM faced with Microsoft in the 1980s: Control the operating system for programmable payments, or become commoditized hardware.
IBM built the dominant hardware but outsourced the operating system to Microsoft, tragically failing to see that the OS wasn’t a component but the foundational layer where all future value would be built. IBM controlled the box, but Microsoft controlled the platform. The final mistake was letting Microsoft license its OS to other PC makers — a decision being replayed in real time by every financial services company that integrates Circle’s USDC stablecoin, effectively helping a future competitor build a global network on its back.
Today, financial institutions provide the trusted “hardware” of money: accounts, controls, compliance. Programmable stablecoins are the new operating system for value. To simply distribute a competitor’s stablecoin is to repeat IBM’s mistake: becoming a dumb pipe for their platform and ceding the most valuable strategic ground of the next decade.
The danger is that this new OS can run on anyone’s hardware. Packaged into a self-custody wallet, it can offer a functional USD bank account to anyone on the planet, bypassing the traditional system entirely. While this is currently a story of regulatory arbitrage, it follows the classic Silicon Valley playbook: Launch first, achieve unstoppable scale, and then negotiate from a position of power. An issuer that pulls this off doesn’t just become a competitor; it becomes a global financial primitive — a new kind of power that even the fastest banks and fintechs can’t match. Tether is already making its move, announcing a push for U.S. legitimacy by partnering with regulated bank Anchorage Digital and hiring former White House crypto adviser Bo Hines to lead the effort.
The speed of the stablecoin market has turned issuance from a defensive move into an offensive imperative for all financial players, including payment networks like Zelle, neobanks like Revolut, and the largest U.S. and EU banks. It is the only way for these companies to control their ecosystem, gain operational knowledge, and learn to compete on open platforms, especially given that the next killer agentic payments app will not be built on legacy rails.
This technology has ignited a strategic conflict for control. At the forefront is Stripe, which is aggressively building a vertically integrated ecosystem — controlling the payment rails, the asset, and the embedded wallet — to escape its dependency on card networks. On the other side, stablecoin issuers are fighting to commoditize blockchain rails so value flows to their tokens.
The choice, then, is a stark one: Become a piece of the new operating system for money or cede that foundational role to a competitor. What is certain is that payments are becoming a layer of software. And when the bedrock of an industry transforms into code, new giants are born.