Stablecoins for Business Leaders

A stablecoin is a digital dollar.

That's the whole concept. Not a volatile cryptocurrency that swings 10% overnight. Not a speculative asset you buy hoping it goes up. A dollar that lives on internet infrastructure instead of bank infrastructure.

One USDC equals one dollar. One USDT equals one dollar. Always. When you hold a stablecoin, the issuer holds real dollars and Treasury bills in reserve. There's no financial engineering or algorithmic magic—it's straightforward accounting, just on different rails.

Those rails are what actually matter.

Your bank balance is already digital. It's not like there's physical cash in a vault with your name on it. The difference between a bank balance and a stablecoin isn't whether it's digital—it's whose system it runs on and what rules govern it.

Your bank's system operates on their terms. Their hours. Their fees. Their correspondent banking relationships. Their pace. When you wire money internationally, it hops through multiple banks, each taking time and a cut. When you send a domestic ACH payment, it settles in one to three business days—and "business days" means weekends don't count, holidays don't count, and anything after the cutoff time doesn't count either.

Stablecoin infrastructure operates differently. Open rails that anyone can use. No intermediaries required between sender and receiver. Settlement finality in minutes, not days. Available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five days a year. The system doesn't care if it's Sunday afternoon or Christmas morning.

The best analogy is email replacing letters. Email didn't win because technologists declared it superior or because it had better branding. It won because sending a message instantly for free was obviously better than paying for postage and waiting days. The technology wasn't the point—the improvement in speed and cost was the point.

Stablecoins work the same way. They're not interesting because they're "crypto" or because they run on a blockchain. They're interesting because they move faster, cost less, and don't require permission from a chain of intermediaries.

None of this requires you to understand how blockchains work or care about cryptocurrency markets. You don't need to understand SMTP protocols to send an email, and you don't need to understand consensus mechanisms to send a stablecoin. The infrastructure handles it.

What matters is what it enables: faster movement, lower costs, and new capabilities that weren't possible on legacy rails.

Every international payment today carries a hidden tax. Most companies have accepted it because there wasn't an alternative. There is now.

When you send a wire transfer internationally, the money doesn't travel directly from your bank to the recipient's bank. It hops through correspondent banks—intermediaries that each take a cut and add time. A single transfer might pass through three or four institutions before arriving. Each one charges a fee. Each one adds a day.

Add in the foreign exchange spread—the difference between the rate you're quoted and the actual market rate—and a $10,000 transfer can easily lose $300-500 before it reaches its destination. On larger amounts, the losses scale accordingly.

Then there's the time. Three to five business days is standard for international wires. That means a payment sent Thursday afternoon might not arrive until the following Wednesday. If there's a problem—a compliance hold, a rejected field, a correspondent bank delay—it could take longer. And during that entire window, you have no real visibility into where the money actually is.

This is the infrastructure the global economy runs on. It was built decades ago and hasn't fundamentally improved since.

Stablecoins fix both the cost problem and the time problem.

On cost: Moving stablecoins costs basis points, not percentage points. A $10,000 transfer might cost a few cents, not a few hundred dollars. There are no correspondent banks taking cuts along the way. No FX spreads hidden in the transaction. The sender sends dollars, the receiver gets dollars, and the fees are negligible.

On speed: Settlement is final in minutes. Not business days—minutes. Send a payment at 8pm on Saturday and it arrives at 8:05pm on Saturday. The recipient can verify it immediately. There's no "pending" status that lasts for days. When it's sent, it's sent.

Availability matters too. Traditional banking rails are closed for roughly 115 days per year when you account for weekends and holidays. Stablecoin rails don't close. A payment needed urgently on Christmas Day moves just as easily as one sent on a Tuesday morning in March.

Domestic payments also improve. ACH—the standard method for bank-to-bank transfers in the US—takes one to three business days. That's working capital sitting in limbo, unavailable for use. Stablecoin settlement is final in minutes, freeing that capital immediately.

The friction in international payments has real consequences. It affects supplier relationships when payments are unpredictable. It eats into margins when every transaction loses 3-5% to fees. It creates operational overhead when finance teams spend hours tracking where money is and when it will arrive.

Stablecoins don't just improve this process. They make the friction largely disappear.

The most common misconception about stablecoins is that they're experimental—an interesting idea that might matter someday but isn't proven yet. The numbers tell a different story.

To put that in perspective: $27.6 trillion in 2024 transaction volume is more than Visa and Mastercard combined. The infrastructure is processing more value than the largest payment networks in the world.

Tether's 500 million users represent approximately 6% of the global population using a single stablecoin. The growth has been particularly strong in emerging markets—countries with high inflation, limited banking access, or both—where stablecoins offer a way to hold dollar-denominated value without needing a US bank account.

But it's not just individuals in emerging markets. Businesses across sectors have started integrating stablecoins into their operations.

The regulatory milestones reinforce this. When the US passes dedicated stablecoin legislation, when Europe implements comprehensive rules, when Hong Kong creates licensing frameworks—these aren't reactions to something that might matter. They're responses to something that already does.

The question isn't whether stablecoins work or whether anyone uses them. The scale answers both questions. The relevant question is whether your organization has figured out where they fit.

Here's how traditional banking works, stripped to its essentials.

You deposit money in a business account. The bank pays you interest—currently around 0.5% for most corporate deposits, maybe slightly more for large balances or special arrangements. Meanwhile, the bank takes your money and puts it to work. They buy Treasury bills yielding 4-5%. They lend it out to other customers at 7% or higher. They invest it in various instruments.

The spread between what they earn and what they pay you is their profit margin. On a $50 million corporate treasury sitting in a standard deposit account, you might earn $250,000 per year. The bank earns several million.

This model has persisted because, until recently, there wasn't a practical alternative. Money market funds offered slightly better returns but came with withdrawal restrictions and operational overhead. Higher-yield options meant sacrificing liquidity or taking on significant risk. Most corporate treasuries chose safety and convenience, accepting that idle cash earns almost nothing.

Stablecoins change this equation.

The first generation of stablecoins—USDT, USDC, and others—are digital dollars that move fast and cheap, but holders earn nothing. The issuers keep all the yield. Circle holds roughly $75 billion in reserves, invested in Treasuries earning 4-5%. That's $3-4 billion in annual interest income, and USDC holders see zero percent of it.

The second generation passes yield through to holders. These newer stablecoins invest their reserves the same way—Treasury bills, lending protocols, and other strategies—but distribute the returns to the people actually holding the tokens.

Yields vary by strategy and risk profile. Conservative options backed purely by Treasury bills offer 4-5%, roughly matching what you'd get in a money market fund but with better liquidity. More aggressive strategies that incorporate lending or trading can push yields to 8-15%, though with additional risk factors to evaluate.

That's not a rounding error. It's a meaningful number for almost any company—enough to fund initiatives, hire teams, or simply improve the bottom line.

The yield-bearing stablecoin category barely existed two years ago. In early 2023, total market cap was around $660 million. Today it exceeds $12 billion—roughly twenty times larger. The growth reflects increasing recognition that treasury cash doesn't have to be dead weight.

The gap between 0.5% and 8% is too large to ignore indefinitely. The only question is how quickly your treasury adjusts.

The biggest barrier to stablecoin adoption was never technical. The infrastructure worked. The economics made sense. What kept serious organizations on the sidelines was regulatory uncertainty—the concern that the rules might change, that compliance couldn't be assured, that legal teams couldn't sign off because nobody knew what the rules actually were.

That changed in 2025.

In the United States, Congress passed the GENIUS Act—the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins Act—which President Biden signed into law in July 2025. For the first time, there's a federal framework specifically governing stablecoins.

The requirements are substantial and designed to ensure stability. Issuers must maintain 100% reserve backing in US dollars or short-term Treasury securities. No fractional reserves, no creative accounting—every stablecoin in circulation must be matched by a real dollar in a real account. Regular attestations from independent accountants are required. Bank-level oversight and examination apply.

This isn't a light-touch regulatory framework. It's rigorous, which is precisely the point. Stablecoins that comply operate with clear legal status, defensible to boards, auditors, and regulators.

What does this mean practically?

Safety considerations extend beyond regulation. Operational security—how tokens are stored, who has access, what happens if keys are compromised—matters enormously. Reputable custodians offer insurance, multi-signature controls, and institutional-grade security practices. Choosing the right custody setup is part of any serious implementation.

The risks haven't disappeared. But they're now identifiable, manageable, and comparable to risks organizations already navigate in traditional finance.

Stablecoins can improve yield on idle cash, accelerate payment settlement, reduce cross-border costs, and enable new market access. But "stablecoins can help" is too vague to act on. The starting point depends on what matters most for your specific situation.

If yield on treasury cash is the priority

Start by quantifying the gap. What's your current operating cash balance? What interest rate are you earning? A company with $20 million earning 0.5% is leaving approximately $1.5 million per year on the table compared to an 8% alternative. The number might justify immediate attention or it might be immaterial relative to other priorities. Run the math for your actual situation.

From there, evaluate yield-bearing options by risk tolerance. Conservative strategies backed by Treasury bills offer 4-5% with minimal incremental risk. Higher-yielding options exist but require more diligence. Start with what your risk framework can accommodate—you can expand later as confidence builds.

If payment speed and cost are the priority

Map your current flows. Where does money move most frequently? Which corridors have the highest fees or longest delays? International supplier payments, contractor payroll, and intercompany transfers are common pain points. Pick one use case and pilot it rather than trying to convert everything at once.

Implementation typically involves setting up a custody solution, establishing on/off ramps to convert between traditional banking and stablecoins, and building operational procedures for approvals and controls. None of this is technically complex, but it requires the same organizational discipline as any financial infrastructure change.

If market access is the priority

Identify where payment friction limits your business. Are there customers you can't serve efficiently because of their location? Markets you'd enter if cross-border payments didn't eat into margin? Stablecoins can enable revenue that traditional rails make impractical to capture.

If you're simply trying to understand whether this matters

Start with education rather than implementation. This guide walks through stablecoin infrastructure in detail, covering everything from basic mechanics to specific use cases by business function. Reading it costs nothing and doesn't commit you to anything.

The wrong approach is waiting for perfect certainty. The infrastructure is mature. The regulations are clear. The economics are compelling. The companies moving now will build operational experience and capture benefits while others are still deliberating.