PODCAST: Stablecoins Are Moving Real Money, Just Not That Much of It Yet

Explore more conversations like this From the Block. 

The headlines would have you believe stablecoins are already eating the payments world. Hundreds of billions in market cap. Transaction volumes that allegedly rival Visa. A DeFi ecosystem humming along in the background. And sure, directionally, those numbers are real.

But in latest “From the Block” conversation, PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster wasn’t interested in the headlines. She wanted the ground truth.

“We’re still talking about single-digit stablecoin transaction volume in terms of real people and real payments,” she said at the outset, and that wasn’t a dismissal. It was a provocation. A way of saying: before we talk about where this is going, let’s be honest about where it actually is.

Joining her were Ryan Rugg, global head of Digital Assets for Treasury and Trade Solutions at Citi, and Tanner Taddeo, CEO of Stable Sea — two people who are not theorizing about stablecoins but actually deploying them, working through the friction, and building the trust that adoption requires. The conversation that followed was practical, clear-eyed and at times bracingly honest about the gap between the stablecoin story and the stablecoin reality.

The CFO Is Not Your Innovation Partner

Webster pushed early on the adoption question: Who inside these enterprises is actually moving the needle, and what are they actually trying to solve?

The answer, Taddeo made clear, is not who the stablecoin industry tends to pitch.

“CFOs are, rightly so, conservative,” he said. “They’re not buying innovation. They’re buying to de-risk something.”

That single sentence reframes the conversation. If you’re pitching stablecoins as a revolutionary leap forward, you’re pitching to the wrong person in the wrong language. What actually gets a CFO’s attention is a specific payment corridor that is slow, expensive or unreliable — and a stablecoin solution that can fix exactly that problem.

Webster pressed him on what that looks like in practice. Is this companies genuinely changing how they move money, or is it still mostly kicking the tires?

Taddeo didn’t sugarcoat it. “Stablecoins aren’t a panacea,” he said. “From an enterprise perspective, they’re being used as point solutions.”

A multinational isn’t ripping out its banking infrastructure and replacing it with blockchain rails. What is happening is more surgical: Identify a specific geography where settlement is slow, a specific corridor where wire fees are punishing, a specific use case where the legacy system is visibly failing, and deploy a stablecoin solution there. Prove it works. Then, maybe, expand.

Rugg confirmed that this is exactly how Citi is approaching it from the bank side, and she made a point Webster zeroed in on. The complexity of the underlying blockchain infrastructure gets fully abstracted away from the corporate client. “This is what we built Citi® Token Services around. We’ve completely obfuscated the complexity of blockchain for them because that was what they requested,” Rugg said.

So, Webster asked, they don’t care about the blockchain part at all?

“They just want the utility of it,” Rugg said.

That’s the product truth that often gets missed in stablecoin coverage. Enterprises don’t want to become crypto-native. They want their money to move faster and cheaper in the places where their current systems are failing them. The blockchain is the means, not the point.

Early Traction, Big Questions — So When Does That Change?

Webster kept pulling on the thread: OK, so the interest is growing, but where does it actually register right now?

From the startup side, Taddeo says institutional trading still dominates stablecoin volume, and real enterprise payment flows are a fraction of that.

But something is shifting in the quality of the conversations, according to Taddeo. “There’s been a marked increase in finance and treasury teams beginning to perk their ears up,” he said. Cross-border payments are where the interest is most concentrated, and that makes sense since it’s where the pain is most acute. Slow settlement, high fees, currency risk, correspondent banking friction. If stablecoins can solve for even a slice of that, the ROI case is real.

Webster pushed on the timeline. How long does the crawl last before it becomes a walk?

Taddeo was honest in conceding there’s no clean answer. “It’s a crawl, walk, run approach to the enterprise because that trust does take time. It’s never given, it’s always earned.” Then, with a laugh, he added, “It’s a lot of crawling.”

Rugg put the same idea in infrastructure terms, drawing a parallel to earlier buildouts in financial services. “Scale reliability come first, then the real use cases get put on.” The pattern isn’t new. It’s the pattern every major financial infrastructure shift has followed.

Webster pressed, asking what actually accelerates the process. What breaks the crawl open?

Repetition, both Rugg and Taddeo said — proven results compounding. “Success breeds success,” Rugg said. Each successful deployment, no matter how narrow, builds internal confidence, generates the data finance teams need and makes the next conversation easier. There’s no shortcut.

The End State: Not Winner-Takes-All

Webster steered the conversation toward the longer arc. Where does this actually end up? Is there a dominant rail, a dominant asset, a winner?

Neither Rugg nor Taddeo bit on that framing.

“I don’t think it has to be winner-takes-all,” Taddeo said, and for Citi, that’s not just a philosophical position, it’s how the firm is building. Interoperability is the central organizing principle. “We have to be interoperable. We have to be always on. We have to be multi-asset,” Rugg said. “It’s going to be a completely different world of commerce.”

Webster pushed back: Don’t networks naturally consolidate? Doesn’t someone end up owning the infrastructure?

Rugg’s view was that the model this time is different, more pluralistic, less platform-winner-takes-all. Stablecoins, tokenized deposits and other digital instruments are likely to coexist, each serving different use cases and regulatory contexts. The institutions and infrastructure players that win in this world are the ones that can plug into everything else, not the ones trying to own the whole stack.

Taddeo agreed, and he brought an analogy Webster found worth probing. He pointed to neobanks, not as a technology story, but as an experience story. Neobanks didn’t invent fundamentally new financial products; they made existing ones easier and cheaper to use. “The product experience was better, and that was just enough to tip the balance,” Taddeo said.

Webster asked about the stablecoin equivalent of that tipping point. Taddeo’s answer was that it’s already starting to happen in specific corridors — and that the accumulation of those moments is what transformation looks like. Not a single dramatic inflection, but enough individual wins that the pattern becomes undeniable.

The Honest Take

Webster kept coming back to the gap between the stablecoin narrative and the stablecoin reality. Not to be dismissive of the narrative, but to be clear-eyed about what it actually takes to close that gap.

Rugg and Taddeo offered real answers. Stablecoins are precision instruments solving specific problems in specific places, deployed carefully by organizations that cannot afford to be wrong.

The trust is real but slow. The progress is real but incremental. The end state is genuinely interesting, but getting there requires doing the unglamorous work of proving it out, one corridor, one pilot, one trusted transaction at a time.