[Dante Disparte] Stablecoins: Build, buy, or partner?

Every company in the world needs a stablecoin strategy. But not every company in the world needs to launch a stablecoin. At their core, stablecoins are open digital money, and the openness is the most important feature — one that enables organizations to conceive of and offer always-on internet-scale payments and economic activity. However, because of a wave of regulatory clarity in the US and around the world, triggered by landmark new laws for stablecoins such as the US GENIUS Act, and Europe’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation (MiCA), most global organizations and their boards are asking three simple questions about stablecoins — namely, build, buy, or partner?

To build a stablecoin network from scratch is tantamount to launching an AI platform from the bottom up, ignoring the capital and technological investments that are needed to be a viable competitor in the AI space race. In the same way companies would not try to build their own large language models or run a massive data center to harness AI’s full potential, regulated stablecoins afford the same type of tranformational opportunities and access, but for financial services. It is better to preserve options and strategic choices with emerging technologies, than to wage a standards war, whether with AI, cloud infrastructure, or novel payment systems and their open blockchain networks.

Over the last decade, stablecoins and tokenization have moved from the fringe of finance to the core. Yet prospective new entrants often ignore the regulatory, technological, compliance, banking, and other cost structures associated with a world-scale internet financial system. To build one may be a fool’s errand, as we have seen from some of the failed big tech vanity stablecoin projects or the branded efforts from large incumbent payment and banking companies. This also ignores the central premise and promise of a stablecoin network vis-à-vis existing banking, commercial, and economic structures, which is not to recreate the walled gardens that dominate today’s payment systems, but rather to leap over them.

Stablecoins bear similarities to money networks such as M-Pesa in East Africa, which leapt over legacy fixed infrastructure and the analog brick-and-mortar banking system that left billions of people behind. Stablecoins are designed to allow companies of all sizes to effectively reenvision their connectivity with customers, markets, suppliers, and so many other potential use cases — all powered by regulated stablecoins serving as veritable financial services shareware.

While the proliferation of stablecoins and many flavors of blockchain networks continues, the true competitive advantage for companies is not in building their own branded stablecoins (which may resemble loyalty points or monetary airline miles), but rather to plug in to existing networks. The real strategic opportunity is to meet novel markets, new users and use cases where they are. Today, more than 800 million crypto-enabled wallets, together with the growing institutional adoption of stablecoins by banks and non-banks alike expand economic reach, without disrupting existing systems. With this rate of adoption, along with the proliferation of themobile internet and low-cost mobile devices, we can now envision a world where every internet-connected device can serve as a compliant payment endpoint.

With the proliferation of stablecoins reaching more than $300 billion in circulation at the end of 2025, a number of key use cases are growing like greenshoots in a fertile field of responsible fintech innovation. From stablecoin adoption in perennially stubborn and costly cross-border payments, to digital escrow accounts supporting international trade and commerce, all the way to powering agentic economic activity — these are all payment breakthroughs that would not be possible without stablecoins as the digital thrift of the new Internet economy. Each of these use cases enable boards, management teams, and global startups competing in the fintech market to envision not just a new payment and economic strategy for their organizations, but rather plugging into world-scale stablecoin infrastructure as a part of their broader approach to digital transformation.

The initially slow and skittish pace of cloud computing adoption offers a useful comparison to how the stablecoin adoption cycle might play out. It is important to remember, however, that the cryptographic tokens or digital objects that make up stablecoins are not their true technological breakthrough. Rather the true breakthrough is that stablecoins and their corresponding blockchain networks are like financial services shareware, giving end users access to the global economy, without bearing the true cost of large scale regulated financial infrastructure. Those costs, by market reality and regulatory obligation, are borne by stablecoin issuers, which are increasingly regulated at the level of traditional banking and payment institutions. So rather than build a stablecoin from scratch, which is liable to not reach scale because of network effects, Moore’s law and technological capacity, plug into an existing one and begin supporting a new economy and new definitions of customer reach and economic opportunity.

For banks, the rise of stablecoins should not represent a zero sum game coming at the expense of their deposit base. Indeed what regulated stablecoin markets have proven in the US, Europe, and other jurisdictions, is that as stablecoins grow, so too do the number of use cases that play to the core value proposition of banking — such as payments, deposits, safekeeping, and beyond. For major retailers and even existing payment networks, the simple message is watch what they do not what they say when it comes to stablecoin adoption. Herein stablecoins like USDC are already being connected into the stream of commerce of major retailers and platforms, and through integration with global card networks are being embedded into the last mile point of sale infrastructure all over the world.

You cannot put new money on old rails. While much has been said over the years about the various forms of cryptographic money that would gain regulatory and therefore banking acceptance — from many failed flavors of deposit tokens, to the potential monetary misadventure of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) — the fact remains, with more than $300 billion in circulation, today’s generation of stablecoins have gained global product market fit. For them to work as a universally acceptable form of internet money, they not only need to eliminate fundamental economic and prudential volatility, which is true of banking, money and crypto assets, they have to be deeply banked innovations. Without this partnership between stablecoin issuers and banks, the bridge between the internet of value and the real economy would have a missing link.

While it may be tempting to resist this wave of innovation, that too would be foolhardy — not unlike using a paywall to protect content at the dawn of the Internet. Regulated stablecoins are designed to democratize access to the financial system the way the internet democratized access to information. Both developments are an all ships rising proposition — getting on board is the best life raft.

Dante Disparte

Dante Disparte is the chief strategy officer and head of global policy and operations for Circle, a financial technology firm and the issuer of the world’s leading regulated digital currencies. The views expressed here are the writer’s own. — Ed.