Stablecoins Win Regulation, Face Adoption Hurdles at Consensus

Stablecoin executives from MoonPay, Ripple and Paxos told Consensus Miami 2026 that the GENIUS Act has handed the sector a regulatory "permission slip" — but infrastructure, privacy and distribution gaps still cap how fast institutional and consumer adoption can scale. The panel framed the next phase of growth as a build-out problem, not a legitimacy one.

MoonPay's Richard Harrison said clarity from GENIUS is already pulling traditional finance into the market, and that stablecoins are a natural fit for cross-border payments where legacy rails still take days and remittances carry steep fees. He pegged stablecoins' share of global remittances today as small, with a path to roughly 10% within five years, and called B2B payments a clear use case while consumer adoption remains the harder problem.

Why it matters

Ripple's Jack McDonald pushed the institutional angle: regulated products, trusted counterparties and clear custody arrangements are the gating factors for moving meaningful volume on chain, and Ripple is targeting utility — payments, corporate treasury, collateral in capital markets — over market-cap growth. Paxos' Brent Perrault pointed to PayPal USD's trajectory and Charles Schwab running on Paxos infrastructure as evidence that sophisticated financial firms are already moving, but flagged public-chain transparency as a privacy problem partial solutions cannot fully fix.

Market impact

Harrison's electric-car analogy is the read: the core stablecoin product works, but the supporting rails — payroll, rent, point-of-sale, consumer UX — are the bottleneck. The near-term investable signal is institutional and B2B, where regulatory clarity and named-custody infrastructure already clear the bar, while mass consumer remittance share is a multi-year build rather than a near-term catalyst.