Stablecoin Payment Technology Stack: A Deep Dive into the Stablecoin Ecosystem from Both Technical and Commercial Perspectives

The global financial system is undergoing a profound wave of transformation. Traditional payment networks are facing comprehensive challenges from stablecoins due to outdated infrastructure, lengthy settlement cycles, and high costs. These digital assets are rapidly innovating the models of cross-border value flow, corporate transaction paradigms, and individuals' access to financial services.

In recent years, stablecoins have continued to develop and have become an important underlying infrastructure for global payments. Large fintech companies, payment processors, and sovereign entities are gradually integrating stablecoins into consumer-facing applications and corporate cash flows. Meanwhile, a series of emerging financial tools, from payment gateways to deposit and withdrawal channels, to programmable yield products, have greatly enhanced the convenience of using stablecoins.

This report conducts a deep analysis of the stablecoin ecosystem from both technical and business perspectives. It studies the key players shaping this field, the core infrastructure supporting stablecoin transactions, and the dynamic demand driving its applications. Additionally, it explores how stablecoins give rise to new financial application scenarios and the challenges they face in being widely integrated into the global economic process.

1. Why Choose Stablecoin Payments?

To explore the influence of stablecoins, it is essential to examine traditional payment solutions. These traditional systems encompass cash, checks, debit cards, credit cards, international wire transfers (SWIFT), automated clearing houses (ACH), and peer-to-peer payments. Although they have become integrated into daily life, many payment channels, such as ACH and SWIFT, have existed since the 1970s. While they were groundbreaking at the time, most of these global payment infrastructures are now outdated and highly fragmented. Overall, these payment methods are plagued by high costs, high friction, long processing times, inability to achieve 24/7 settlement, and complex back-end processes. Furthermore, they often bundle unnecessary additional services such as identity verification, lending, compliance, fraud protection, and bank integration, which come at a cost.

Stablecoin payments are effectively addressing these pain points. Compared to traditional payment methods, using blockchain for payment settlement greatly simplifies the payment process, reduces intermediaries, and achieves real-time visibility of fund flows, not only shortening settlement times but also lowering costs.

The main advantages of stablecoin payments can be summarized as follows:

• Real-time settlement: Transactions are completed almost instantly, eliminating delays found in traditional banking systems.
• Safe and Reliable: The immutable ledger of blockchain ensures the security and transparency of transactions, providing protection for users.
• Cost reduction: Removing intermediaries significantly lowers transaction fees, saving expenses for users.
• Global Coverage: Decentralized platforms can reach markets that are underserved by traditional financial services (including unbanked populations), achieving financial inclusion.

2. The Landscape of the Stablecoin Payment Industry

The stablecoin payment industry can be subdivided into four technical stack layers:

1. Layer One: Application Layer

The application layer is mainly composed of various payment service providers (PSP) that integrate multiple independent deposit and withdrawal payment institutions into a unified aggregation platform. These platforms provide users with convenient access to stablecoin, offer tools for developers working on the application layer, and provide credit card services to users.

a. Payment Gateway

A payment gateway is a service that securely processes payments to facilitate transactions between buyers and sellers.

Well-known companies innovating in this field include:

• A certain payment provider: A traditional payment provider that integrates certain stablecoins for global payments.
• A certain cryptocurrency wallet: It does not provide direct fiat currency exchange functionality itself; users can perform deposit and withdrawal operations through integration with its third-party services.
• Helio: 450,000 active wallets and 6,000 merchants. With a certain payment plugin, millions of merchants can settle payments with cryptocurrency and instantly convert USDY to other stablecoins.
• Some mobile payment applications also allow users to make payments using stablecoins, further expanding the application scenarios for stablecoins.

The field of payment gateway providers can be clearly divided into two categories (with some overlap).

1. Payment gateway for developers; 2) Payment gateway for consumers. Most payment gateway providers tend to focus more on one of these categories, thereby shaping their core products, user experience, and target market.

The payment gateway aimed at developers is designed to serve businesses, fintech companies, and enterprises that need to embed stablecoin infrastructure into their workflows. They typically offer application programming interfaces (APIs), software development kits (SDKs), and developer tools for integration into existing payment systems, enabling features such as automated payments, stablecoin wallets, virtual accounts, and real-time settlement. Some emerging projects focused on providing such developer tools include:

• BVNK: Provides enterprise-level payment infrastructure for easy integration of stablecoins. BVNK offers API solutions for seamless process integration, a payment platform for cross-border commercial payments, as well as enterprise accounts that allow businesses to hold and trade multiple stablecoins and fiat currencies, along with merchant services that provide the tools necessary for businesses to accept customer stablecoin payments. Processing over $10 billion in annualized transaction volume, with a 200% annual growth rate, and a valuation of $750 million, clients include emerging regions such as Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.
• Iron (in beta): Provides an API to seamlessly integrate stablecoin transactions into its existing business. It offers businesses global deposit and withdrawal channels, stablecoin payment infrastructure, wallets, and virtual accounts, supporting customizable payment workflows (including recurring payments, invoicing, or on-demand payments).
• Juicyway: Provides a range of APIs for enterprise payments, salary disbursement, and bulk payments, supporting currencies including Nigerian Naira (NGN), Canadian Dollar (CAD), US Dollar (USD), a stablecoin, a stablecoin. Mainly targeting the African market, with no operational data available yet.

Consumer-focused payment gateways are user-centric, providing an easy-to-use interface that facilitates stablecoin payments, remittances, and financial services. They typically include mobile wallets, multi-currency support, fiat currency deposit and withdrawal channels, and seamless cross-border transactions. Some well-known projects that focus on providing users with this simple payment experience include:

• Decaf: An on-chain banking platform that facilitates personal consumption, remittances, and stablecoin transactions in over 184 countries; Decaf collaborates with local channels, including a certain remittance company, in Latin America to achieve almost zero withdrawal fees, with over 10,000 South American users and high ratings among certain blockchain developers.
• Meso: A deposit and withdrawal solution, directly integrated with merchants, enabling users and businesses to easily convert between fiat currency and stablecoin with minimal friction. Meso also supports the purchase of certain stablecoins via mobile payments, simplifying the process for consumers to acquire stablecoins.
• A mobile payment application: The stablecoin wallet function utilizes stablecoin technology, but its functionality is integrated into its existing consumer payment application, allowing users to easily send, receive, and use digital dollars without directly interacting with the blockchain infrastructure.

b. U Card

Cryptocurrency cards are payment cards that allow users to spend cryptocurrencies or stablecoins at traditional merchants. These cards are typically integrated with traditional credit card networks, enabling seamless transactions by automatically converting cryptocurrency assets to fiat currency at the point of sale.

The project includes:

• Reap: An Asian card issuer with clients including several enterprises, selling white-label solutions, mainly relying on transaction fees in collaboration with Hong Kong banks, can cover most areas outside the United States, supports multi-chain deposit; by July 2024, the transaction volume reached $30M.
• Raincards: A card issuer in the Americas that supports multiple companies. Its main feature is the ability to serve users in the US and Latin America. It has issued a card for a certain stablecoin company to pay for travel expenses, office supplies, and other daily business costs using on-chain assets.
• Fiat24: European card issuer + web3 bank, business model similar to the above two, supports multiple companies for card issuance; Swiss license, mainly servicing users in Europe + Asia, does not yet support full-chain transactions, only certain blockchain top-ups. Growth is slow with a total user count of 20,000, monthly revenue of $100K-150K.
• Kast: A rapidly growing U card on a certain blockchain, with over 10,000 cards issued, 5-6k monthly active users, projected transaction volume of $7m in December 2024, and revenue of $200k.
• 1Money: The stablecoin ecosystem has recently launched a credit card that supports stablecoins and provides a software development kit to facilitate L1 and L2 integration, currently in beta with no data available.

There are many cryptocurrency card providers, which mainly differ in terms of service regions and supported currencies, and they usually offer low-fee services to end users to enhance the users' enthusiasm for using cryptocurrency cards.

2. Second Layer: Payment Processor

As a key layer of the stablecoin technology stack, payment processors are the pillars of payment channels, mainly covering two categories: 1. Deposit and withdrawal service providers 2. Stablecoin issuance service providers. They act as a crucial intermediary layer in the payment lifecycle, connecting payments with the traditional financial system.

a. Deposit and Withdrawal Processor

• A certain company: supports over 80 types of cryptocurrencies, provides various deposit and withdrawal methods, and token swap services to meet users' diverse cryptocurrency trading needs.
• A network: covering over 150 countries, providing deposit and withdrawal services for more than 90 types of crypto assets. The network handles all KYC (Know Your Customer), AML (Anti-Money Laundering), and compliance requirements, ensuring the compliance and security of deposit and withdrawal services.
• Certain payment gateway: A hybrid payment gateway solution that supports bidirectional exchange and payment between fiat currency and crypto assets, achieving the integration of traditional fiat currency and crypto asset payments.

b. Stablecoin Issuance & Coordination Processor

• Bridge: The core products of Bridge include the Coordination API and the Issuance API. The former helps businesses integrate multiple stablecoin payments and exchanges, while the latter supports businesses in quickly issuing stablecoins. The platform is currently licensed in the United States and Europe and has established important partnerships with the U.S. Department of State and the Treasury, possessing strong compliance operational capabilities and resource advantages.
• Brale ( in beta): Similar to the Bridge product, it is a regulated stablecoin issuance platform that provides stablecoin coordination and reserve management APIs. It has compliance licenses in various states across the United States, and partner enterprises are required to undergo KYB (Know Your Business), while users must set up an account with Brale for KYC. Brale's clients are primarily on-chain OGs, and compared to Bridge, the endorsements from investors and business development are slightly weaker.
• Perena ( in beta ): Perena's Numeraire platform lowers the barriers to issuance for niche stablecoins by encouraging users to provide concentrated liquidity in a single pool. Numeraire employs a "central hub-and-spoke" model, with USD* serving as the central reserve asset, acting as the "hub" for stablecoin issuance and exchange. This mechanism allows for the efficient minting, redemption, and trading of various stablecoins pegged to different assets or jurisdictions, with each stablecoin acting as a similar "spoke" connected to USD*. Through this system architecture, Numeraire ensures depth liquidity and enhances capital efficiency, as smaller stablecoins can interoperate through USD* without the need to provide separate liquidity pools for each trading pair. The ultimate design goal of the system is not only to enhance price stability and reduce slippage but also to achieve seamless conversions between stablecoins.

3. Layer Three: Asset Issuer

Asset issuers are responsible for creating, maintaining, and redeeming stablecoins. Their business model is usually centered around the balance sheet, similar to how banks operate - accepting customer deposits and investing the funds in