Since going to market and working alongside partners like Ingenico, we have had conversations with hundreds of payment teams. PSPs, acquirers, neobanks, digital wallets, and payment infrastructure businesses spanning the US, UK, EU, Singapore, South Africa, Nigeria, and a lot of markets in between.
These are not exploratory chats. They are substantive conversations with people who run payment products, lead compliance, or own commercial strategy. And across all of them, regardless of market or size, a pattern has emerged that is hard to ignore.
Stablecoin and crypto payments are no longer a fringe conversation. They are on the agenda of almost every payment team we speak with. The question has shifted from "should we be thinking about this?" to "how quickly do we need to move, and what does the right move actually look like?"
This post is our attempt to share what we have learned from those conversations, honestly and without the hype. Because the picture is more nuanced than either the crypto maximalists or the sceptics tend to describe.
The conversation has changed
Two years ago, most payment teams we spoke with were in one of two places. Either they had dismissed stablecoin and crypto payments entirely as a compliance risk not worth taking on, or they were in an early exploratory phase with no clear path to a decision. Both positions were defensible at the time. The regulatory environment was genuinely ambiguous. The customer demand signal was uneven. The infrastructure was immature.
That has changed. The conversations we are having now are different in character. Compliance teams are asking specific questions about Travel Rule implementation and MiCA scope, not general questions about whether stablecoin and crypto payments are legal. Product teams are asking about integration timelines and merchant onboarding flows, not about what a stablecoin is. Commercial teams are asking about revenue models and competitive positioning, not about whether there is a market.
The nature of the questions has moved from "whether" to "how." That is a significant shift, and it has happened across markets and organisation types with a consistency that suggests it is structural rather than cyclical.
What payment teams are worried about
Across all these conversations, a handful of concerns come up repeatedly. They are worth naming plainly, because they are legitimate and because understanding them is part of understanding why the payments industry has moved at the pace it has.
The first is compliance. Specifically, the fear of getting it wrong. Payment businesses operate in heavily regulated environments and have compliance functions that are rightly cautious about adding new product categories. The Travel Rule, MiCA requirements, sanctions screening for crypto addresses, and KYT obligations are all real compliance workloads, and they are not trivial to implement. The PSPs who have moved quickly on stablecoin and crypto payments tend to be those whose compliance teams engaged early and found that the requirements, while real, were manageable with the right infrastructure. The PSPs who are still hesitating tend to be those where compliance has not yet had a detailed conversation with a credible infrastructure partner.
The second is technical complexity. There is a persistent assumption that adding stablecoin and crypto payments means a significant engineering lift: blockchain nodes to run, smart contracts to audit, new security protocols to maintain. In practice, the integration footprint for a well-designed stablecoin and crypto payment product is much closer to adding an alternative payment method than to building a blockchain product. But that understanding has not yet spread evenly across the industry, and the assumption of complexity continues to slow decision-making in organisations where the engineering team has not been part of the early conversations.
The third is the timing question. Even payment teams that are positive about stablecoin and crypto payments frequently get stuck on when to move. There is a natural tendency to want to wait until the market is more mature, the regulatory picture is fully settled, or a large competitor has moved first and provided a proof point. The risk with this approach is that the organisations waiting for certainty are, in many cases, watching their competitors build the relationships and operational muscle that will be structurally hard to catch up with.
What payment teams are excited about
The concerns are real. But the conversations we have had make clear that there is genuine commercial excitement on the other side of them, and it is grounded in specific use cases rather than general crypto enthusiasm.
Cross-border payments come up in almost every conversation. The economics of stablecoin settlement on corridors where traditional rails are expensive and slow are compelling enough that even cautious commercial teams sit up when the numbers are laid out. Settlement in seconds rather than days, and no correspondent banking chain eats into the received amount. For PSPs with merchant portfolios that include businesses operating internationally, this is not a theoretical benefit. It is a tangible improvement on a real problem that their merchants face today.
Merchant demand is a growing driver. A number of the PSPs we have spoken with came to the conversation not because stablecoin and crypto payments were on their internal roadmap, but because a merchant in their portfolio asked for it. That signal is meaningful. It means the demand is coming from within existing customer relationships, not from a new market segment the PSP needs to develop. When a merchant asks their PSP for a capability, and the PSP cannot provide it, that is a relationship risk. Payment teams across the industry are starting to recognise that.
The user demographic angle matters too. PSPs that serve neobanks, digital wallets, or any platform with a high proportion of users under 40 are increasingly aware that a significant share of that user base holds and actively spends stablecoins. Estimates consistently place the share of digitally active fintech users who have transacted in stablecoins in the past 12 months at between 15 and 25 percent. For PSPs whose business model depends on capturing as much of their clients' payment volume as possible, that is a share of activity that is currently flowing outside their infrastructure.
What we have learned about what good looks like
After hundreds of these conversations, we have a reasonably clear picture of what separates the payment teams that move effectively on stablecoin and crypto payments from those that stall.
The ones that move well start with a specific use case rather than a general capability. They identify the merchant segment, geography, or customer type where the commercial case is clearest, and they build toward that rather than trying to solve the general problem of stablecoin and crypto payments all at once. Cross-border merchant settlement, high-value B2B payment flows, and digital-native merchant portfolios tend to be the strongest starting points.
They involve compliance early and specifically. Not as a gatekeeper to be persuaded, but as a technical partner who needs to understand the infrastructure before they can make a sound assessment. The payment teams that struggle tend to be those where the product or commercial team has moved ahead of the compliance conversation and then hit a wall. The ones that move well tend to be those where compliance has had a detailed conversation with the infrastructure provider early in the process.
They chose infrastructure that was designed for regulated payment environments, not adapted to them. There is a meaningful difference between a stablecoin and crypto payment product built for PSPs from the ground up, with compliance architecture, merchant onboarding tooling, and settlement infrastructure designed around how PSPs actually operate, and a consumer or DeFi product that has been retrofitted with a B2B layer. WalletConnect Pay is built in the former category. That distinction matters significantly when it comes to compliance assessment timelines, integration complexity, and the operational experience after launch.
The shape of the market right now
Based on the conversations we have had across these markets, our honest read of where things stand is this.
In the US and EU, there is a meaningful cohort of payment teams who have concluded that stablecoin and crypto payments are a 2026 priority and are in active conversations with infrastructure providers. They are not a majority of the market, but they are no longer a small minority either. The regulatory tailwinds from MiCA and the GENIUS Act have moved a significant number of organisations from observation to action.
In Singapore, the regulatory environment is the most mature globally for digital payment infrastructure, and the PSPs operating there are generally furthest along in thinking through what a stablecoin and crypto payment product looks like in practice.
In South Africa and Nigeria, the commercial driver is different and arguably more immediate. Currency volatility, high remittance costs, and existing stablecoin adoption among consumers mean that the demand signal from merchants and users is strong and practical rather than speculative.
Across all of these markets, the dynamic is the same: the payment teams that are moving now are building a position that will be structurally advantageous. The ones that are waiting are extending the timeline of that disadvantage.
What this means if you run a payment business
We are not suggesting that every PSP needs to launch a stablecoin and crypto payment product immediately. The compliance work is real, the integration requires resource, and the commercial case varies by portfolio and geography.
What we are suggesting, based on everything we have heard across these conversations, is that the question is no longer whether stablecoin and crypto payments will become a mainstream capability for regulated payment businesses. The question is how far behind you are willing to be when they do.
The payment teams we speak with who are most comfortable with their position are the ones who have done the assessment, have a view on their timeline, and are making a deliberate decision rather than a default one. The ones who seem least comfortable are those who have not yet started the conversation and are aware, on some level, that they probably should have.
WalletConnect Pay is a complete, compliant stablecoin and crypto payment method built to fit directly into existing PSP stacks, without changing how payments operate today. If you are at the beginning of that assessment, the documentation is a useful starting point. If you are further along and want to talk through what an integration looks like for your specific stack, the team is available.
The conversation is worth having. Hundreds of your peers have already had it.