From niche to infrastructure: What’s next for stablecoins

Nik Milanović is founder and CEO of Stablecon and the founder of This Week in Fintech. The FR sat down with him to discuss stablecoins’ growing role in financial services and what to expect from the Stablecon conference, which begins tomorrow in Washington, D.C.

Stablecoins quickly moved from a crypto niche to the core of financial services. What changed, and why did that make this the right moment to launch Stablecon?

Around 2024, I started noticing that every single conversation I was having, whether it was with a bank, a card network, a crypto-native builder, or a payments PM, was somehow bending back toward stablecoins.

The numbers were becoming impossible to ignore. We were looking at billions of dollars a year in transaction volume. And yet there wasn't a conference place where the traditional finance side and the crypto-native side of that conversation were actually sitting in the same room. You had crypto conferences that felt closed off to banks and policymakers, and you had traditional fintech conferences that treated stablecoins as a niche panel topic instead of the main event.

That was the whole thesis behind This Week in Fintech: I like building the connective tissue that the industry doesn't realize it's missing yet. Stablecon was the same instinct applied to the stablecoin space.

And just as we started building it, Stripe acquired Bridge for $1.1 billion. Nine months later, when we hosted the conference, Circle went public.

That first conference brought together over 1,000 operators, payments leaders, bankers, investors, and stablecoin founders. And this year, we’re looking at 2x the size of year 1, and just hosted our first international conference in EMEA. 

As stablecoins integrate deeper into mainstream finance, which use cases and industry shifts will define the next few years?

The next few years will play out on a few fronts.

First, cross-border payments: today, that’s where stablecoins have a real structural edge in terms of speed and cost.

Second, and underrated: agentic payments. If agents are going to transact autonomously, they need a payments rail built for machines. You're already seeing the early competition taking shape around this, including x402, an open standard based on the HTTP 402 “Payment Required” status code; Google’s Agent Payments Protocol, or AP2; and Stripe-backed Tempo.

Third, banks are going to have to pick a lane between tokenized deposits and stablecoins, and most haven't figured out which one yet, in spite of the bank consortium stablecoin announcement last week.

And fourth, the story isn't just USD stablecoins winning globally. Non-USD stablecoins are going to matter a lot more than the U.S.-centric conversation suggests, since the regulatory and infrastructure picture looks different region to region.

What impact is the U.S. regulatory climate having on the stablecoin ecosystem?

Its importance is understated. Until now, stablecoins have been operating in a gray zone. They’re useful and the market is obviously growing, but nobody banking wants to build on top of something that could get reclassified or shut down overnight.

The GENIUS Act changes that calculus. Once you have an actual federal framework for who can issue, what backs the token, how it's supervised, liability, bankruptcy waterfalls, etc., stablecoins stop being a fintech product and start being financial infrastructure.

And as a few attendees told me at our EMEA conference in Amsterdam 2026: “Where the US goes, other countries tend to follow.” Other regulators are waiting for GENIUS and CLARITY to enact their own regs.

How are fintechs integrating stablecoins?

I’d push back on the framing that fintechs are “adding stablecoins” as a bolt-on feature.

The more interesting companies are re-architecting their stacks around them: treasury management, FX, instant wallets, faster settlement, seamless P2P payments, etc.

Nobody using fintech products should have to know or care that a stablecoin was used in the background. That’s the sign that integration is actually working: when stablecoins disappear into the plumbing instead of being the pitch.

Stablecon went international with a European conference this year. What does international expansion look like next?

Stablecoins are a global story. It’s a truly international product innovation, and use cases and user profiles differ significantly by geography. In some countries, dollar access alone is a real product.

We’ll keep running our flagship annual conference in D.C. This year, we went international with our first European conference, but we also had a very successful full-day roadshow event in Mexico City. We’ll do that again next February, with our Europe conference in Lisbon in April, and you can expect us to pop up in one or two more regions in 2027 as well.