FXC Intelligence: The Status of Cross-Border Payments for Stablecoins in 2025

2025 is the "year of the stablecoin" for cross-border payments, with new announcements being made almost daily, and milestone regulatory documents officially pushing stablecoins towards traditional financial terminals. "We are reaching a 'critical point', where everyone realizes this is a newly upgraded payment technology, and real businesses and practical use cases are emerging. It is not some kind of cryptocurrency frenzy, but real applications," said Chris Harmse, co-founder of enterprise-level stablecoin infrastructure provider BVNK.

But enthusiasm also brings bubbles. Eric Barbier, founder of Triple-A, reminds: "Stablecoins seem to be treated as a panacea on LinkedIn and at conferences, as if they could end world hunger, poverty, and cure cancer tomorrow------this is obviously an exaggeration."

Stablecoins and blockchain technology are evolving rapidly, and the landscape of the financial payment market is changing in an instant, resulting in a shift in the positioning of business cooperation. FXC Intelligence's report, The State of Stablecoin in Cross Border Payments (The 2025 Industry Primer), is a valuable practical manual on stablecoin payments. It integrates FXC Intelligence's cross-border payment data, extensive research, and perspectives from 14 industry experts.

Therefore, we will compile this into a document, aiming to provide the industry with a concise, solid, and practical stablecoin payment guide, including the current status of cross-border payments using stablecoins, operational mechanisms, potential market size, application scenarios, challenges to be overcome, potential opportunities, and the future.

The full text is 27,000 words, enjoy below.

1. Stablecoin Ecosystem

Although stablecoins are still an emerging technology, they have completed the leap from marginal experiments to mainstream visibility in just a few years.

"The changes over the past 18 months have been particularly dramatic," said Chris Mason, co-founder and CEO of B2B stablecoin payment company Orbital. "Those who were the first to embrace stablecoins were often players in high-risk, high-growth emerging industries; now, the second wave has arrived------payment service providers and traditional banks are collectively awakening."

Iana Dimitrova, CEO of OpenPayd (a fiat financial infrastructure provider), added: "The current explosion is not an overnight success, but rather the result of over 15 years of trial and error and iterative development. The market has finally reached a consensus on the practical value of stablecoins, and the technology itself has reached the critical point for scalable commercial use."

The foundation of the industry's beginnings lies in the field of cryptocurrency trading: it started from there. Soon after, we began to explore new use cases for stablecoins.

1.1 A Brief History of Stablecoins

Stablecoins originated with the launch of cryptocurrency in 2008: a tokenized, decentralized, and tamper-proof digital currency that runs on a blockchain based on distributed ledger technology. Stablecoins initially emerged alongside Bitcoin, which was introduced to the world in October 2008 by an anonymous researcher (pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto) through a paper titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System."

From the very beginning, Bitcoin has been positioned as an online payment method that does not require financial intermediaries. Although early adopters conducted some limited payment experiments, it became widely popular among internet natives and tech-savvy individuals who speculated using cryptocurrencies. As interest in Bitcoin grew over the coming years, some people began attempting to utilize its underlying technology for cross-border payments. However, due to the extreme price volatility of cryptocurrencies, lack of regulation, and some associations with black market activities, many found it difficult to regard it as a payment technology.

With the emergence of stablecoins, the situation has changed: stablecoins represent a key moment in the development of blockchain technology, and we are currently witnessing its transition from the early internet era to the beginning of the modern digital age.

Stablecoins are like the birth of the P2P file-sharing platform Napster.

The first digital currency issued in the form of a stablecoin is BitUSD, which introduced the concept of 1:1 pegging cryptocurrency to fiat currency (referring to the US dollar) in 2014. However, since it is backed by cryptocurrency, it does not fully meet the definition of a stablecoin as we understand it today.

Other companies quickly followed suit, but it was Tether that truly introduced the concept of fiat currency reserves, launching USDT later that year. In the following years, the popularity and attention of USDT continued to rise, but it also faced scrutiny regarding transparency and regulation, ultimately prompting Tether to take significant steps to address these issues.

In the early development of stablecoins, developers were gradually understanding the meaning of stablecoins and their usage. In 2018, more regulated stablecoins began to emerge, with Paxos launching what is now known as Pax Dollar (USDP) and Circle introducing USD Coin (USDC) through a partnership with Coinbase. These regulated, US-based stablecoins began to gain popularity not only in the cryptocurrency space but also attracted interest from the mainstream financial industry. At the same time, participants in the financial infrastructure built on stablecoins also began to emerge, including Fireblocks in 2018 and BVNK in 2021.

However, in 2022 and early 2023, stablecoins faced a significant trust crisis, marked by several shocking events in the industry. First was the sudden collapse of TerraUSD (UST). This was an unconventional algorithmic stablecoin, whose support mechanism was not cash reserves but rather an algorithm-based system. After its value significantly dropped from the pegged rate of $1, panic trading triggered by the "death spiral" also caused the value of several other stablecoins to fluctuate briefly in major markets. Although UST was not a stablecoin in the traditional sense, and companies like Circle, Paxos, and others tried to distinguish themselves from algorithmic stablecoins, the damage to the reputation of the entire industry was still significant.

Despite many participants claiming that their asset reserves can protect them from the aforementioned issues and provide peace of mind, the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in early 2023 raised new concerns. At the time of the collapse, Circle's reserves at Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) were about $3.3 billion, and there was uncertainty about whether those deposits would be guaranteed. This triggered what is known as a "shadow run," as holders feared they would not be able to redeem the stablecoin at a 1:1 price, causing its trading value to plummet to historic lows. Although the U.S. government ultimately did guarantee the reserves of Silicon Valley Bank, and Circle never faced the genuine risk of being unable to redeem its USDC, the reputational damage was more severe, especially for institutions that need to have U.S. reserves and a strong backing for their stablecoins.

In this crisis, the adoption rate of USDT overseas continues to rise, while the circulating supply of USDC in the US has steadily decreased during 2023. As a result, a streamlined and more robust version of the industry is beginning to emerge from the ashes of this crisis. Driven by the genuine demand from key channels and vertical industries, the trading volume and adoption rates of infrastructure companies continue to climb, leading to corresponding improvements in their products; while other companies are launching products focused on the true utility of their technology. In the second half of 2023, PayPal launched PayPal USD (PYUSD), casting a crucial vote of confidence for the industry; while other companies are committed to educating those who are uncertain about stablecoins to establish regulatory frameworks and increase adoption rates. Orbital CEO Mason stated: "Education is indeed very challenging, but people are really starting to understand it."

Starting from early 2024, the circulation of USDC tokens has risen again, and the number of newly issued tokens focused on payments has also continued to grow. Recently, Trump's return to the U.S. presidency has increased institutional support for this technology, and regulatory measures such as the "GENIUS Act" have also been introduced.

Since the change of government in the United States, major financial institutions have been seeking help from companies like ours to understand where and with whom they can conduct stablecoin business in a compliant manner.

Today, with the rapid increase in adoption rates, the cross-border payment industry has also shown a strong interest, and there is still room for further growth in the future. However, the fundamental principles of stablecoins are largely consistent with the premises originally set by Satoshi Nakamoto in the Bitcoin whitepaper.

We are addressing the cash problem on the internet.

1.2 Growing Interest in Stablecoins in the Cross-Border Payment Sector

With the rise of stablecoin technology, its application cases in the field of cross-border payments are gradually increasing. As Kendall from Paxos explained, although the current use of stablecoins is still mainly concentrated on "crypto-native activities", the interest in this area is continuously growing, largely driven by the most fundamental needs of end users.

The development of stablecoins began in the trading and investment sectors, and then gradually established its foothold in the cross-border payment field during 2022 and 2023.

This experience is reflected in many companies in the field, including Conduit, which focuses on B2B inter-company payments. However, in the past year or two, things have started to change.

Initially, it was mainly those crypto-native payment companies that helped their terminal businesses transfer funds more efficiently between these channels. Today, I see a significant shift, with many companies, especially large multinational corporations, beginning to enter this space. They want to understand how to use stablecoins, particularly in challenging regions such as Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

This has also prompted some cross-border payment infrastructure providers that previously focused on fiat currency to enter the market, such as OpenPayd, which added stablecoin functionality earlier this year.

"For us, this evolution is completely natural, as we already have some existing clients who use us for cross-border fiat currency payments, coming to us saying, 'We have been accepting stablecoin payments through other providers. Can we incorporate these assets into your platform?'" said Dimitrova of OpenPayd. "Over the past 18 months, we have been receiving such requests continuously. We realized that without providing this interoperability, we would not be able to meet the growing demands of these clients."

Such requests mainly come from businesses with global trade needs, but the adoption of stablecoins is also increasing in other aspects of cross-border payments, including MoneyGram, which has begun offering stablecoin payment functionality. In 2022, MoneyGram started sending remittances in USDC, and since then, its capabilities in this area have been continuously expanding, including the launch of the white-label digital wallet deposit and withdrawal solution MoneyGram Ramps, as well as meeting its own cross-border fund management needs.

MoneyGram is a financial technology company with a global digital and cash network. Stablecoins will play a very important role in the future of MoneyGram. They help in every aspect of our business, from B2B backend to B2C service delivery methods, and how we provide services to consumers.

Today, although stablecoins occupy a small share of the market, their attention has clearly increased. In the first half of 2025, the number of press releases related to stablecoins and payments grew by 186% compared to the same period last year, a growth rate that surpassed the previous overall press release growth rate for stablecoins, and the number of press releases involving cross-border payments and stablecoins skyrocketed by over 1000%. Moreover, this is only for companies that publicly launched stablecoin solutions.

According to BVNK Harmse, the vast majority of companies in the payment industry have recognized the opportunities brought by this technology, even if they have not publicly discussed it. "I think 95% of companies have seen this," he said, "Based on the conversations we are having and potential collaborations, there are indeed many traditional payment companies that are actively getting involved, even some that you would originally think would not invest."

![FXC Intelligence: 2025 stablecoin