Opinion by: Aishwary Gupta, global head of payments and RWAs at Polygon Labs
Stablecoins were supposed to do for money what the internet did for information: make it global, programmable and open. In many ways, stablecoins have succeeded.
Stablecoins settle faster than bank rails, move across borders without waiting for cutoff times and already power real economic activity across crypto and beyond.
As stablecoins scale, however, something familiar is happening: the intermediary is coming back. Not in the form of correspondent banks or card networks, but through closed ecosystems, proprietary wallets and controlled distribution rails that replicate the same bottlenecks crypto was built to remove.
Citi now projects global stablecoin issuance may reach $1.9 trillion-$4 trillion by 2030. If that forecast is even directionally right, the biggest question is no longer whether stablecoins will grow; it’s whether the infrastructure around them stays open.
The next phase of stablecoin adoption won’t be won by the fastest chain or the biggest issuer. It’ll be won, or lost, on the infrastructure layer in between: the regulated rails, wallets, routing and orchestration that determine whether stablecoins behave like open internet protocols or closed financial networks. If we get that layer wrong, stablecoins won’t replace the intermediary; they’ll reinvent it.
The intermediary changes form
Payments have a way of pulling intermediaries back into the system. When money moves across borders, currencies, institutions and compliance regimes, complexity has to go somewhere. If the system doesn’t make that complexity invisible in an open way, someone will do it in a closed way and then charge rent.
That’s starting to happen.
As stablecoins move beyond crypto-native usage and into mainstream payment flows, more of the ecosystem is being rebuilt as private networks. In the short term, that can feel like progress. It comes with a hidden cost: lock-in.
If stablecoins only work seamlessly within one ecosystem, one wallet, one issuer and one network, then stablecoins don’t become open money; they become another set of fragmented payment networks — faster, cheaper and more programmable, but still gated.
That’s how the intermediary returns.
The real bottleneck is usability
Stablecoins already work on the settlement layer. They move instantly and globally, and they settle 24/7. In theory, the hard part is solved.
In practice, the friction has just moved “up the stack.”
To use stablecoins in real payments, not speculative transfers, users and businesses need to get into stablecoins compliantly, hold them securely, route them across networks without becoming decentralized finance operators and settle into whatever currency the recipient actually wants. They need all this to work with the predictability and simplicity people associate with payments.
Related: Vitalik’s take on decentralized stablecoins: What it means for DeFi
The moment stablecoins touch the real world, the experience often becomes a patchwork: fragmented providers, inconsistent compliance requirements, wallet friction, chain friction and the ever-present question, “What happens when something goes wrong?”
What “open money” actually requires
If stablecoins really are headed toward trillions in issuance, they can’t scale through bespoke integrations and private networks — a trend already visible in institutional stablecoin infrastructure. They need something closer to what the internet had from the beginning: an open, interoperable stack that makes money movement feel seamless without making it closed.
That doesn’t mean one chain or one issuer wins. It means the infrastructure layer becomes modular, so institutions can plug into regulated fiat access, wallets, routing, compliance and settlement without being forced into a single ecosystem. It means users don’t have to think about bridging, swaps, gas or which stablecoin they’re holding. The system should route value automatically, like packets moving across the internet, and deliver to the recipient what they actually want to receive.
That’s what it means for stablecoins to behave like open protocols rather than closed financial networks.
Openness isn’t an ideological preference; it’s what prevents the same bottlenecks from reappearing at scale.
A simple example
A business in São Paulo pays a designer in Lagos.
Today, that payment moves through multiple banks, sits in transit for days, incurs unpredictable fees and often arrives late or short of the expected amount.
Stablecoins can eliminate most of that friction. The business can send value instantly; the designer can receive it in seconds.
If the payment only works within a closed ecosystem or requires the designer to manage wallets, routing and conversion, then we’ve simply moved complexity from banks to a new class of intermediaries. The rails changed. The dependency didn’t.
This problem isn’t solved by stablecoins alone. It’s solved when the infrastructure around stablecoins makes the experience simple, regulated and interoperable.
This moment matters
If stablecoins become a multitrillion-dollar settlement system, they will be part of mainstream finance. It won’t be powered by an ecosystem that recreates closed networks.
It will be powered by infrastructure that allows stablecoins, including local-currency stablecoins, to move across borders and systems in a way that feels as reliable as existing payments. That’s the only path where stablecoins expand financial access without simply creating a new set of gatekeepers.
The fork in the road
One path leads to a world where stablecoins scale but through closed stacks that recreate today’s intermediaries, just rebranded for crypto.
The other path leads to stablecoins as open money: interoperable across chains and jurisdictions, routed automatically, accessible through consumer-grade wallets and connected to regulated fiat rails.
Stablecoins don’t have to reinvent the intermediary. Unless the industry builds the infrastructure layer with openness as the default, however, that’s exactly what will happen.
Opinion by: Aishwary Gupta, global head of payments and RWAs at Polygon Labs.
This opinion article presents the contributor’s expert view and it may not reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. This content has undergone editorial review to ensure clarity and relevance, Cointelegraph remains committed to transparent reporting and upholding the highest standards of journalism. Readers are encouraged to conduct their own research before taking any actions related to the company.
This opinion article presents the contributor’s expert view and it may not reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. This content has undergone editorial review to ensure clarity and relevance, Cointelegraph remains committed to transparent reporting and upholding the highest standards of journalism. Readers are encouraged to conduct their own research before taking any actions related to the company.
