With more than 20 years in the technology industry, Avinash Chidambaram is the co-founder and CEO of Cybrid, a global payments platform bridging the gap between traditional financial rails and stablecoin-native payments, helping partners launch, bank, and pay faster using stablecoins.

The shift in global payments toward stablecoins isn’t theoretical anymore. It’s visible in the data, in treasury operations, and on the balance sheets of companies using them today. Stablecoins have moved from experiment to operating reality, becoming a core tool enabling how value moves across borders. Companies that build now will gain an efficiency and liquidity edge that will become the industry baseline.

Since the GENIUS Act was passed in July, the market for stablecoins has exploded. With a regulatory framework now in place, what started as a crypto experiment has become a tectonic, structural shift in how value moves across borders.

Most executives in payments know what stablecoins are, but only a small percentage understand what they mean for their business, and even fewer know how to start using them.

Stablecoins are a working-capital unlock because they eliminate the need for dozens of pre-funded accounts. Treasury teams can hold digital dollars and deploy liquidity instantly, freeing up capital and improving returns. They’re a cost and reliability advantage. Cross-border transfers clear in seconds rather than days and at near-zero cost. For high-volume corridors, that translates directly into margin and customer retention.

One of our customers, a mid-sized remittance platform, recently began using USDC for intercompany settlements. The result: transfer times dropped from 48 hours to under 60 seconds and float requirements fell by 40 percent, without any change to their customer experience.

Where to start?

In building a strategy for stablecoin integration, start by reframing how the technology is viewed. Adopting stablecoins does not mean becoming a crypto company, and it is not a product pivot. It means modernizing treasury and settlement operations with a new rail that works alongside your existing infrastructure. You do not have to rebuild your app or UX. Stablecoins sit under the hood, powering your existing rails with real-time settlement. Think of it as adding an intelligence layer into the infrastructure.

For banks and fintechs, ground your strategy by clearly defining the use case. Align internally across legal, compliance, and treasury on how stablecoins will be supported, custodied and reconciled. A focused use case, such as cross-border settlement or internal treasury transfers, provides architectural direction and prevents overengineering.

Here are four ways leading companies are using stablecoins:

For intercompany or cross-border settlement, replacing slow wires.
Holding stablecoins for liquidity management, reducing trapped capital and FX exposure.
Enabling instant disbursements through existing payout networks.
Partnering with regulated infrastructure providers which manage custody, compliance, and fiat connectivity.

Most organizations benefit from using an API-first orchestration layer rather than direct chain integrations, enabling faster deployment, embedded compliance, and bank-grade controls. The integration layer itself must function like a modern payment rail, with capabilities for wallet management, transaction orchestration, KYC/AML compliance, ledgering, liquidity management and automated reconciliation.

With the foundation in place, validate flows through a small, controlled pilot to refine compliance and operational workflows and to show measurable improvements in speed and cost. Then test operational readiness for real-time monitoring, fraud detection, dashboards, and support tooling, all of which are essential for handling the irreversible nature and velocity of blockchain transactions.

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Given a successful pilot and internal stakeholder buy-in, the organization can confidently scale across more chains, stablecoins, and use cases, ultimately embedding stablecoin rails seamlessly into partner APIs and customer products.

The bottom line

We have already seen exponential growth in stablecoin adoption in just six months. I expect that in 2026 there will be a real push to tokenize a broad range of assets, and trillions of dollars in stablecoins will be issued as new use cases emerge. From DeFi companies to traditional fintechs, leaders will need to think about how to take advantage of an infrastructure that is faster and cheaper for customers who will begin to expect a more efficient experience. In 2026, stablecoins are not a future bet. They are the present tense of global payments, and the shift is already here.