From crypto to checkout: What I didn’t say as the moderator

I recently moderated a ThePaypers session on stablecoins and the future of payments. ThePaypers is one of the most renowned payment industry media, a reference point for merchants’ CFOs and payments directors, people working in Payment Service Providers and basically all professionals working in payments. I thought it might be interesting to share some perspectives on our views as a business here in our insights section, so perhaps our customers who are interested in our industry can understand more about the context we operate in, and some of our views on what is happening and where we might be heading.

The panelists who attended the session are truly exceptional leaders and real practitioners in this space.

• Eric Barbier (Founder and CEO - Triple-A)
• Damon Burk (Digital Assets Director, LATAM - Nuvei)
• Rivai Adidharma (Business Development Director - Razer Gold, Razer)
• Irina Gorbach (Compliance Leader - Crystal)

The panel was chosen carefully to bring in the perspective of a merchant (Rivai), of a Crypto PSP (Eric), a global payments platform that also offers digital asset payments (Damon) and a compliance company (Irina). 

Of course, it was great to have Eric, because he also happens to be our Chairman of the BoD. But for those who don’t know him, he is a truly visionary entrepreneur, having led and founded multiple successful fintechs, such as Mobile 365 sold to SAP, and Transferto now Dtone (global mobile credit top ups provider) and Thunes (Cross border payments infrastructure).  

Also great to cross paths with Rivai again, who I met for the first time in 2011 when I was CEO of a mobile payments company. Rivai is a legend of payments and monetization in Southeast Asia. His opinions are also very insightful, as gaming companies tend to be the earliest adopters of new payment methods, because they tend to younger segments that are also unbanked and are therefore looking to maximize their reach. Therefore, we can through the lens of gaming companies what companies in other industries might see some years later.     

As a moderator, my job was obviously to make the guests shine and get their impressions, not to push my own worldview (I hope I did a decent job here).

This post is my attempt to capture what stood out and add some context and personal opinions.
 

Why crypto and stablecoin payments matter

The session started with the “why”: If you live in Europe, crypto payments seem to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. You have SEPA, cards everywhere, fast bank transfers, and decent consumer protection. So why introduce something “new” and “risky”?

Damon’s answer was an important reminder and one with which I totally agree: most of the world does not live inside European payment comfort. He described countries like Venezuela and Argentina, where currency devaluation is normal and capital controls are a real thing. People are limited to small amounts of dollars per month, sometimes around USD 200. In that world, stablecoins are becoming a practical payment and financial tool. 

Digital dollars give people what local currencies cannot: stability, mobility, and choice. They can hold value. They can move it. They can spend it without begging the banking system for permission.

Then Damon introduced B2B flows, including the so-called “stablecoin sandwich” where stablecoins sit in the middle of flows where local currency is converted to stablecoins, moved cross border, and changed into the new local currency. These flows without stablecoins would otherwise be blocked, slow, or predatory. For anyone who has not lived through capital controls, it is hard to understand how big that is.

Rivai then gave an overview of Razor’s customers using crypto payments. He mentioned that adoption starts where users are already crypto native and price sensitive. Gaming is the perfect example. Many gamers are already into crypto. Also Fees matter. Speed matters. So the jump from holding stablecoins to spending them is smaller than many assume. Rivai also made a point that matched Damon’s theme: South America shows up again and again because people are already trained by reality to use stablecoins.

Then he took it to the B2B aspect, which is where you start seeing the practicality for businesses in using stablecoins. Razer Gold resellers have to prepay inventory. So stablecoins make sense because he says: "using bank transfers is unpredictable in terms of knowing when the funds will actually reach the bank account, and the cross border charges are ridiculous"

Eric backed this up with what I see across the industry: Eric explains that Triple-A enables crypto payments for B2C use cases such as Farfetch or purchasing flight tickets from Trip.com (but remember you can purchase your flights from us too here: https://www.cryptorefills.com/en/flights). However he sees volumes increasing also on the B2B side, such as cross border payments. He gave a concrete examples saying: “the problem for many African importers [is that] they are having a hard time sourcing US dollars so they are increasingly reverting to stablecoins. So we [Triple-A] are getting stablecoins from the Africa importer and paying the Chinese exporter in Yuan”, adding “The other case we see fairly in B2B is the payment to freelancers [..] whether they are in Argentina, Africa, Bangladesh [..], they prefer to receive their payment directly in stablecoins."

Eric went on to explain he has a contrarian view on the stablecoin sandwich. For example if you are trying to send EUR to USD or vice versa it is probably not going to be cheaper and on the contrary more expensive to use stablecoins. But he does see what in a previous linked in post he referred to as a stablecoin toast, where it is likely that there are companies that have no need to hold stablecoins, because for example they are happy in keeping their money at Jp Morgan and other companies maybe due to geography instead holding stablecoins, and thus a flow from stablecoins to fiat.

As an Italian I could not keep myself from commenting that since it is an open face stablecoin toast, maybe its better to call it a stablecoin Pizza.

Irina brought the wider network view: e-commerce checkouts, yes, but also payroll, payouts, marketplaces for global workforces, remittances, and last-mile payments. Anywhere traditional banking is slow, expensive, or simply unavailable, stablecoins will keep showing up.

My takeaway from the “why” discussion is simple: stablecoins are not trying to replace cards in London or SEPA payments in Europe, they are simply replacing broken rails in half the planet, at least for the moment.
 

“How it works” is getting easier. The real cost is fragmentation.

Rivai described the user experience as relatively straightforward, but he flagged gas fees as a recurring concern. He also pointed out that for many users the gas fee problem gets sidestepped because payment providers integrate with major exchanges like Binance, Coinbase, and Crypto.com. Users pay off-chain inside exchange ecosystems. No gas, no confusion.

That is true. We see it at Cryptorefills too for people purchasing gift cards or flights with crypto. We support those flows and they are indeed popular. However, maybe because we are addressing native crypto users: the majority of our stablecoin volume is still on-chain. I think this is driven by the fact that crypto native users are often using Defi. Therefore due to the fact that we support 9 different stablecoins across 14 different blockchains and layer 2 networks, for defi users it is quicker and cheaper to use directly one of the 39 distinct stablecoin / network pairs payment options we offer, rather than bridging back into a network supported by the exchange and transferring back to the exchange to use the exchange’s offchain payment. The on-chain experience has improved a lot. Ethereum alternatives and new networks have reduced costs and increased speed. 

Also to notice, that Ethereum fees are also lower than the horror stories people still repeat from a few years ago, especially when users move to Layer 2 networks like Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon.

So yes, gas fees are less scary than they used to be. My bigger concern is different: fragmentation. From the user side, fragmentation looks like a choice. On Cryptorefills, as discussed above, we do everything we can to accommodate as many networks possible to suit the needs of our users, for example we support Solana, Avalanche, Tron, Sonic, Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, World and just recently launched TON and SUI. But let me tell you that from the operator side, fragmentation means cost and complexity. Every new network means new infrastructure, new liquidity paths, new reconciliation logic, and new compliance and monitoring surfaces. Then add accounting, treasury management, reporting, and operational controls. It compounds fast. I think we will ultimately see consolidation. Not because people dislike innovation, but because merchants need reliability, and processors need economics that work.

Eric reinforced this point about supported networks and tokens saying that merchants do care about coverage in terms of stablecoins and networks supported. But according to him merchants care even ore about compliance, saying: “because there is always the reputation risk adding the pay with stablecoin payment option because you can be seen as innovative but also people can be concerned that there is additional risk. That is why it is very important to look for a partner that is duly licensed, and licensed for handling [specifically] crypto payments”. 
 

Regulation and the political reality nobody wants to admit

We went on to discuss more in detail regulation and policies. 

Damon suggested that local governments may not push back on stablecoins even if USD stablecoins flood local markets. His reasoning was that we are seeing local currency stablecoins, sometimes under local regulatory frameworks, acting as on-ramps.

I’m not sure I buy this optimism. If I were a central bank in a weak currency country, I would be terrified of frictionless dollarization. A USD stablecoin is not just a payment method, It is also a vote of no confidence in local monetary policy. And the more seamless conversion becomes, especially from a local stablecoin into USDC or USDT, the more that conversion will happen. So yes, local currency stablecoin initiatives are happening. But I would assume huge efforts will be made to control convertibility. Limits, friction, and policy walls will show up. Otherwise stablecoins become a one-way drain out of the local currency system. This is the part of stablecoins that will get political fast.
 

The Digital Euro: one cool promise, and a lot of skepticism

Eric did not mince words on the Digital Euro. He called it a joke, mostly because of timeline and constraints, mentioning the current caps of EUR 3,000 being discussed, and the general pace of institutional rollout as the main reason of failure. I personally mostly agree with his skepticism. I think the Digital Euro, if it happens, will land as a limited product and will for sure not be the revolution promised.

This said I have gone through the official documentation. You can find here the full text of the EU’s proposal for a Regulation on the establishment of the digital euro here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:52023PC0369. In reading this I for sure belong to the camp that is very worried, that if this is actually implemented, this could lead to terrible consequences in terms of privacy, surveillance and authoritarian control. However, I did find one promised feature genuinely interesting. “The digital euro will be available offline […].” 

After the blackout events in Portugal and Spain earlier this year, and the very real panic that comes when you cannot purchase anything with your cards, digital wallets or bank for 12 to 24 hours, offline capability I think becomes a serious feature. But here is the problem, I went through the Rulebook which in theory provides detailed operational definitions that implement the regulation, including offline usage, I didn’t manage to find any explanation of how this is technically done. You can read it here if interested: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/timeline/profuse/shared/pdf/ecb.derdgp250731_Draft_digital_euro_scheme_rulebook_v0.9.en.pdf.

How do you prevent double spending offline? How do you reconcile balances offline? How do you solve conflicts after reconnection?

If someone in the crypto industry can solve offline payments cleanly, I think that that could be a massive breakthrough. My prediction: either the Digital Euro never happens, or it happens in a constrained form and adoption stays marginal. The ECB’s ultimate advantage is not UX, it’s regulation. If they want adoption, they can mandate the rails, but whether it creates a product people love is another story.
 

Euro stablecoins: why is demand still so weak?

But the second part of the question to Eric, was about the adoption of non USD pegged stablecoins, such as Circle’s EURC. Eric’s argument is straightforward: Europe has cards and SEPA, so demand for EUR pegged stablecoins is low. Fair. If you live in Europe, you can already move euros easily.

But stablecoins are not about Europe. They are about the other 8.6 billion people outside the European bubble. So why do we not see stronger global demand for digital euros, or even better, digital Swiss francs? If money flows to where it is treated best, you would expect flows to harder currencies. CHF has held value against the dollar historically better than many currencies. So why is “digital CHF” not an obvious winner in crypto land?

I have a few hypotheses and I’m not fully satisfied with any of them. First, liquidity. The dollar is the base layer of global finance. Stablecoin liquidity, DeFi liquidity, CEX trading pairs, everything is dollar-native. If you want deep liquidity, you end up back at USD. 

Second, unit-of-account psychology. Pricing, thinking, and risk measurement are still done in dollars across most of global markets. People say they hate the dollar, then they measure everything in dollars anyway.

Third, geography and network effects. The dollar’s dominance is not only political. It is infrastructural. US capital markets sit at the center of global flows. People buy dollars to buy US assets especially to purchase stock in the world’s biggest and historically most successful equity market. That habit and structure carry over into crypto.

But then I start from this last point and think: crypto removes geographic restrictions. DeFi and CeFi are not “located” in a jurisdiction or tied to a currency in the ways a stock exchange or a bank are. And then back to the second point, if the barriers become less geographic and more mental, we may eventually see demand shift toward stronger digital currencies issued by more fiscally disciplined jurisdictions. Maybe it starts as a psychological barrier today, maybe it becomes a real demand curve later. Then back to the first point, this may bring liquidity into other non-USD-pegged stablecoins. I’m not claiming this will happen, but this is a question I’ve been thinking about for a while.
 

Closing thought:

Stablecoins are already real infrastructure, just that if you are European or in the US, this is happening not where you live. If you have to take one thing from the panel, let it be this. Stablecoins are not waiting for permission to become payment rails. They are already acting like rails in the places where the existing system fails. Emerging markets, cross-border B2B, global payouts, remittances, marketplaces.

I truly believe Europe is not the reference case, but on the contrary It’s the exception. I think the next phase is not about convincing people that stablecoins are useful. It’s about whether the industry can reduce fragmentation, professionalize compliance, and survive the political pushback that will come as stablecoins will likely eat monetary sovereignty.