There is undoubtedly growing demand for instant payments as a faster, cheaper, always-on way to move money, whether locally or across borders. The legacy system of US correspondent banks and SWIFT-style rails has only ever served certain parts of the world, and those it has missed are taking matters into their own hands. The question is, what does an environment where payments are settled in real time look like? For many, stablecoins appear to be the answer. Mastercard’s acquisition of BVNK, the stablecoin payments infrastructure business, and a more recent announcement extending its settlement capabilities to include the asset show the direction in which one of the world’s leading payments enablers is heading. More than a speculative playIt’s not just a strategic move by an industry player with a vested interest in securing its leadership position, or even a speculative play. An International Monetary Fund working paper noted that, in 2024, stablecoin transactions totaled $2 trillion. While flows were highest in North America and Asia Pacific, what’s striking is that they accounted for the highest proportion of GDP in Latin America and the Caribbean (7.7%) and Africa and the Middle East (6.7%). These are regions where “access to a stable currency has historically been constrained”, as Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, recently put it. In other words, those parts of the world that are currently underserved by traditional payment infrastructure. It is understandable why stablecoins are being seen as the next evolution in payments. With its lower costs and digital nature, many feel that stablecoins offer a foundation that could serve a new, more streamlined model.There are noted drawbacks: currently, providers Tether and Circle hold by far the greatest market share, both of which are denominated to the US dollar, while stablecoin use cases are dominated by crypto trading (88% of global use cases) with payments trailing some way behind (accounting for just five per cent of global use cases). This dominance of the dollar does not scream a revolution in how payments and currency cross borders; rather, it seems like a continuation of the old ways, only digitalised. Beyond stablecoins in international paymentsTo be clear, stablecoins certainly have their place in transforming the future of finance. But when it comes to payments, rarely are they the whole story. In fact, to be successful, there needs to be local architecture in place that complies with national regulations. The system that works internationally is not automatically going to work within a country, as it has to conform to relevant legislation, as well as local approaches to payments and financial services in general.So the reality is that there needs to be the appropriate national infrastructure in place to support instant transactions. For instance, Brazil’s PIX processed nearly 80 billion transactions in 2025. PIX-inspired instant settlement experiments are spreading across Latin America, testing whether the same model can work across borders, not just within them. Elsewhere, India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is now live for travellers in Dubai, highlighting how there could be more than one way to enable a new global payments infrastructure. PIX is the proof of concept. Brazil built instant, 24/7, near-zero-cost payments on regulated rails and saw mass adoption within months. That is the benchmark against which any new settlement layer should be measured. The secrets of PIX’s successHow did it manage it? One of the reasons was regulatory clarity. The central bank mandated that financial institutions participate in PIX and ensured it remains free. In doing so, those previously priced out of banking could always access a way of making payments, and merchants would be paid promptly. That regulatory clairty is starting to emerge with stablecoins. What that looks like takes several forms: the US, with the Genius Act, is creating a landscape that supports it, while in Brazil the focus is slightly different: in November 2025 the central bank reclassified cross-border stablecoin flows as foreign-exchange operations, which classes them alongside any other remittance. While these are contrasting stances, what both do is allow institutions to understand how the asset fits with their own regulatory environments. As a result, serious players are treating the asset as a legitimate settlement layer, and Mastercard’s moves are in response to that.But regulatory clarity is only part of the reason for PIX’s success. The other element is something that’s not often talked about in relation to stablecoins: Open Finance. Being able to share data and access in a financial system is a critical enabler of innovative services, whether it’s an instant payments system like PIX or UPI, or the deployment of crypto-based products. It is no coincidence that Brazil has achieved success with PIX and also operates the world’s largest open finance ecosystem; in 2024, it saw a 47% year-on-year increase in active data-sharing consents with institutions, with 61 million in December alone. It is not perfect; only three per cent of Brazilian companies are connected to the ecosystem, compared with 20% embracing open finance in the UK. But when you have that sort of open finance-first mindset, regulatory clarity and underserved economies, you create the conditions for innovations like PIX or stablecoins to take off. And you can’t have a system delivering cross-border payments without local traction. Who controls the data? The benefits of stablecoins are clear, and use of the payment mechanism reaches a critical mass. As understanding of the asset grows and regulations begin to catch up, debates around which coin to anchor the wider infrastructure and whether being tethered to the dollar is a problem continue to swirl. But these questions risk framing the issue as a zero-sum game, where it’s stablecoin versus something else, such as Pix. The approach that will actually change payments is more focused on how these innovations can integrate together. It’s an architecture that has stablecoins, or indeed any cross-border mechanism, settling onto regulated instant rails. The stablecoin handles the cross-border / store-of-value leg, an instant system like PIX (running on the central bank's SPI) handles final local settlement in seconds, and a regulated non-resident account plus the Open Finance consent layer is what makes the whole chain legal and traceable end-to-end. This is precisely the structure Brazil's central bank is now mandating for cross-border crypto flows. It is time for other markets to do the same.No#StablecoinsDaniel RuhmanCEO and co-founderCumbuca17 Jul, 2026