3 Signs That Stablecoins Will Shake Up Banking and Payments

Over the past year, three developments have occurred that, while missed by many, will reshape the entire financial ecosystem, from banking to payment systems:

1. Stripe and MoonPay Spent Over $2 Billion in Stablecoin Startups.

Stripe made the largest acquisition in its history, buying the stablecoin infrastructure platform Bridge for $1.1 billion. Bridge is an on/off-ramp platform that builds a bridge between traditional money and stablecoins, allowing users to convert dollars or euros to stablecoins and back to their local currency. Its client portfolio includes Coinbase, SpaceX, and government agencies, and its international transaction volume is growing by 50% annually.

Stripe didn't stop there: it also acquired Privy, a crypto wallet infrastructure provider. Privy's distinction is this: while the industry requires a 12-word seed phrase to open a non-custodial wallet, Privy makes it possible with just an email address, removing the biggest barrier to the spread of non-custodial wallets.

Considered together, the message from these two acquisitions by Stripe is clear: to offer a crypto wallet experience that anyone can easily open and to enable payments with stablecoins through these wallets. These are strategic moves designed for faster adoption.

Meanwhile, MoonPay made three acquisitions in 2025 alone: Iron, a stablecoin API infrastructure provider; Helio ($175 million), a Solana-based crypto payment company; and Meso, an on-ramp infrastructure that connects users' bank accounts directly to crypto applications.

These two giants, which handle trillions of dollars in payment volume, have spent a total of over $2 billion in stablecoin startups with the sole purpose of reshaping payment systems from the ground up to run on stablecoins.

2. The Unseen Trend: All Major Crypto Exchanges Launched a Non-Custodial Wallet.

In the last year, major crypto exchanges like Kraken, Bitpanda, Robinhood, and Coinbase have all launched their own non-custodial wallets. You can go to the App Store and check out the apps below one by one; each pair belongs to the same company, but one is custodial, and the other is non-custodial.

Normally, these companies are centralized, regulated entities that, just like banks, hold assets on behalf of their users (i.e., custodial). But now, through these second apps, they are indirectly offering their customers DeFi yields of up to 8% via protocols like Aave, Morpho, and Sky. And in doing so, they are consciously giving up control over those assets—at the cost of keeping the user within their ecosystem

3. American Banks Are Lobbying Hard to Restrict Stablecoin Yields Through Regulation.

While the average savings account in the U.S. offers a yield of 0.39%, this rate is between 5% and 8% in DeFi protocols. The banks' concern is not unfounded; stablecoin yields will fundamentally shake the interest income model that banks have built on deposits. In fact, according to a Standard Chartered forecast, by 2028, $500 billion will shift from bank deposits in developed markets to stablecoins.

In the U.S., the GENIUS Act, which came into force in July 2025, prohibited stablecoin-issuing companies from paying direct yield to users. The still-debated CLARITY Act has become a major point of tension between crypto companies and the banking sector. Coinbase, which earns approximately $1 billion annually from stablecoins, withdrew its support for the CLARITY bill in January 2026. As of February 2026, crypto policy talks at the White House have stalled.

It appears that banks (and regulators) are ignoring the fact that the blockchain—just like the internet—has a distributed architecture, without a kill switch or an owner, and the current process is only accelerating the user exodus to non-custodial alternatives. The right step to take here is not to ban or ignore, but rather—just as the major crypto exchanges have done—to launch a non-custodial wallet or to pursue partnerships (such as white-labeling) with existing DeFi wallets.

🧐 Why This Matters?

For businesses, stablecoins offer a chance to escape the 2–3% commission paid to credit card companies on every transaction. For consumers, it means earning yields of 5-8% on their (foreign currency) savings instead of the 0.3% offered by banks. Consequently, as deposit interest, one of the most fundamental revenue streams for banks, comes under serious threat, a kind of „Titanic moment“ is approaching for payment companies that fail to adapt.

📈 The Numbers To Remember

In 2025, the transaction volume on stablecoins reached $33 trillion. This figure is more than the annual transaction volume of Visa and Mastercard. The stablecoin market cap surpassed $300 billion in 2025 alone. According to Standard Chartered's forecast, this figure will rise to $2 trillion by 2028.

🚀 Free Startup Idea

„YieldShield“ — A Stablecoin Yield Platform for SMEs

Elevator Pitch: A platform that automatically allocates the idle cash of small and medium-sized enterprises from their bank accounts to multiple DeFi protocols (Aave, Compound, Sky) to generate yields of 5-8%.

- Until next week 🙋🏻‍♂️

Umut Onan Wunder Innovation Studio

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