Stablecoins have their 'permission slip.' Now comes the hard part.

Stablecoins have moved from crypto niche to an institutional priority, but the next phase of adoption will depend on infrastructure, privacy and real-world usability, executives from MoonPay, Ripple and Paxos said at Consensus Miami 2026.

Richard Harrison, MoonPay’s vice president of banking and payment partnerships, said traditional finance firms are entering stablecoins faster because regulation has made the market easier to navigate.

“What GENIUS brought us was clarity,” Harrison said. “It was like a permission slip for companies to enter into stablecoins.”

Harrison said stablecoins are also a natural evolution of payments, where speed and convenience have long been limited by legacy rails. Cross-border transfers can still take days and remittances can carry steep fees, he said, while stablecoins allow near-instant, one-to-one value transfer.

Still, Harrison said stablecoins represent only a small share of global remittances today and may reach roughly 10% within five years. Business-to-business payments are already a clear use case, he said, but consumer adoption remains harder.

Jack McDonald, Ripple’s senior vice president of stablecoins, said institutional customers require regulated products, strong counterparties and trusted custody arrangements before moving meaningful volume on chain.

“For institutions to really unlock the full demand … you have to be regulated at the highest level,” McDonald said.

He said Ripple is focused less on stablecoin market capitalization than on utility, including payments, corporate treasury movement and collateral use in capital markets. McDonald said Ripple’s stablecoin complements XRP rather than competing with it, because transactions on the XRP Ledger still use XRP as the native token.

Brent Perrault, senior staff software engineer at Paxos, said newer regulated stablecoins can compete by emphasizing trust, distribution and user incentives. He cited PayPal USD’s growth and large institutions such as Charles Schwab using Paxos infrastructure as signs of demand from sophisticated financial firms.

But Perrault said privacy remains unresolved. Public blockchains expose transaction amounts and flows, and partial privacy is insufficient if users eventually move between private and public environments.

Harrison compared stablecoins to electric cars: the core product works, but adoption depends on supporting infrastructure.

“How do you use stablecoin to pay your rent?” he said. “How do you use it to buy a cup of coffee?”