If stablecoins are to achieve rapid and widespread adoption, they would do well to remember Walter Reuther’s famous line: “If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it just may be a duck.”
Stablecoin’s DLT Offer Transformative Value
A real opportunity lies in Programmability – Smart contracts – allow payments to execute automatically when predefined conditions are met.
One clear example is the UK’s persistent late-payment culture. Large corporates routinely extend 30-day terms to 60 or 90 days, despite legal frameworks designed to prevent this. The working capital impact on SMEs is significant with £2.3billion ($3.1 billion) in payments over 30 days not paid to the normal business practises every month. Double this when large corporations are included.
Smart contracts embedded into government procurement or supply chain finance could:
* Trigger automatic payment on day 30
* Remove administrative friction
* Eliminate discretionary delay
This is not theoretical technology. The capability already exists. The historical barriers have been legal recognition and institutional willingness — both of which are now shifting under evolving regulatory frameworks.
The Narrowing Advantage of Speed
Historically, stablecoins’ advantages were framed around speed and instant settlement.
However, traditional international payments have improved considerably over the past two decades, driven by e-commerce and regulatory pressure. Over seventy countries are implementing instant domestic payment systems. Regulators globally are compressing settlement cycles in securities markets toward T+1 or even T+0.
The correspondent banking system — often cited as slow — continues to evolve. While cross-border payments can still take 1-5 days, improvements are ongoing.
This means that “speed alone” is no longer a sufficiently differentiating feature for stablecoins.
Modern fiat currencies are designed to circulate domestically with minimal or no visible transaction costs to the end user. That principle was foundational to the success of the euro. The political agreement underpinning the single currency assumed frictionless intra-zone payments as a precondition for adoption.
Sterling and the US dollar operate on similar expectations: consumers and businesses do not expect to pay explicit fees for routine domestic payments.
Stablecoins seeking general use must align with this reality. If a domestic stablecoin payment includes:
* Visible gas fees
* Variable transaction charges
* Conversion costs
* Settlement delays
…it will immediately be perceived as inferior to existing fiat payment rails.
Digital Wallet Infrastructure
Digital wallets have already reached mass adoption:
* 4.3 billion users globally
* 54% of UK adults using digital wallets in 2024
Settlement timelines across equities, bonds, FX and payments are compressing. Wallets are increasingly capable of holding:
* Multiple currencies
* Tokenised assets
* Stablecoins
* Self-custodial balances compliant with data protection law
Self-custodial wallets, when properly regulated, offer users permissioned control over their assets while maintaining compliance.
Winning the Crowd
Stablecoins will not succeed merely because they are technologically elegant. They must “win the crowd.”
To do so, they must:
* Match domestic fiat fee expectations (near-zero visible cost)
* Compete in cross-border FX efficiency
* Deliver programmability that solves real economic frictions
* Integrate seamlessly into already-adopted wallet infrastructure
In short, if stablecoins want to be treated like money, they must behave like money — not like experimental infrastructure.
Only then will they stop being perceived as an alternative, and start being accepted as a natural evolution.
Read more on Finextra Research
