Stablecoins Shift to Payments Rails
Stablecoins and fintech infrastructure
FTX forced a clean break between crypto speculation and stablecoin utility. For infrastructure vendors like Layer2, demand vanished when the product was framed as crypto exposure, then reappeared when the same underlying rails were packaged as faster cross border money movement with fiat on and off ramps, local payouts, and bank account delivery. The real lesson is that customers wanted better payments plumbing, not a pure crypto stack.
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Layer2’s original product sold crypto infrastructure to fintechs and banks. After FTX, the company says pure crypto demand disappeared, which pushed it to add fiat support so customers could send USD in, convert through stablecoins when useful, and pay out in USD, EUR, INR, CAD, or SWIFT from one system.
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What survived the crash were workflows with an obvious operational payoff. Layer2 describes LPs outside the US funding AngelList vehicles with USDC and settling up to $2.5M within hours, versus days on bank wires. Kapital describes the same pattern in LatAm, where stablecoins solve treasury protection and supplier payments, not trading.
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The broader market has since converged on this hybrid model. Reap positions stablecoins as a back end network for cards and cross border payouts in regions where traditional rails are weak, and Stripe’s expansion into stablecoin infrastructure shows the category has shifted from crypto niche to mainstream payments building block.
The next phase is less about selling crypto products and more about embedding stablecoin rails inside ordinary fintech workflows. The winners will look like global payments APIs with wallets, FX, compliance, and payout orchestration built in, where the stablecoin is just the fastest path through the middle of the transaction.