Stablecoins are widely billed as crypto's long-awaited 'killer app,' and the 2025 passage of the GENIUS Act gave the industry something it never had before: a predictable regulatory environment for using the tokens. Even skeptics of crypto concede the technology is superior for moving money.
The numbers come first. Tether has built a $183 billion stablecoin business by giving consumers in developing countries a reliable way to hold U.S. dollars, according to Fortune. And despite the existence of national alternatives — a real-backed stablecoin in Brazil, a Canadian-dollar token, and others — a full 98% of stablecoins in circulation are backed by U.S. dollars, a share that has held for years.
In North America, the picture looks different. Venmo and Zelle already move money between friends and local businesses without friction, and it is hard to see stablecoin rewards outcompeting existing credit-card rewards programs for American consumers. Merchants approached about adopting stablecoins have raised their own objections — chiefly, who handles chargebacks, and whether the added complexity is worth it. Dan Kim, VP of Product at Airwallex and formerly of Coinbase, put it bluntly: 'I ran into a blocker for how to make stablecoins useful … It was a dead end.'
Cross-border business payments looked like the obvious use case, since stablecoins move faster and more securely than wires. But smaller vendors serving big companies often face regulatory restrictions on holding crypto or dollars, and they still need to transact in their own currency — the same bottleneck that keeps 98% of the market anchored to the dollar.
Airwallex's own pivot illustrates the uncertainty. CEO Jack Zhang told Fortune in 2024 he was skeptical of stablecoins, betting instead on a model built around financial licenses and local-currency liquidity pools. Two years later, with a Visa investment behind it, Airwallex has built a service to convert U.S. stablecoins into local currency and is backing a startup called Metal, which is building a blockchain designed to comply with local financial rules from the outset. Kim also points to a coming era of 'agentic commerce,' where automated bots handle a portion of shopping — a race Coinbase, Robinhood, and Stripe are all running as well, alongside last-mile rivals Rain and MoonPay.
What stands out is what is missing: a mandate. No regulator picked the winning stablecoin use case, and none has decided who the customer will be. The GENIUS Act simply cleared the legal fog and let capital go looking for work — in Tether's case, dollar-starved consumers abroad; in Airwallex's case, a late but calculated bet on last-mile conversion.
That is the free-enterprise story here, even if it is an unglamorous one. Regulatory clarity did not guarantee demand; it only removed the excuse for not testing it. Companies are now spending their own capital to find out where stablecoins actually create value, and the ones that guess wrong will absorb the loss themselves — not the taxpayer. Capital rewards clear rules, but it still has to earn its return.
