Executives from MoonPay, Ripple and Paxos said at Consensus Miami 2026 that regulation of stablecoins has accelerated institutional adoption, but that significant gaps in infrastructure and privacy still block their widespread use.
Summary
- MoonPay vice president Richard Harrison said the GENIUS Act gave companies regulatory permission, accelerating the entry of traditional finance into stablecoins.
- Ripple Senior Vice President Jack McDonald argued that institutional adoption depends on regulated products, trusted custody, and utility beyond market capitalization.
- Paxos engineer Brent Perrault warned that unresolved privacy issues on public blockchains remain a major barrier to enterprise-scale stablecoin payments.
Senior executives at three of the most active stablecoin companies told the Consensus Miami 2026 audience on May 8 that new US regulation has fundamentally changed the competitive landscape for dollar-pegged tokens, bringing traditional financial institutions into a market they previously found difficult to enter. The change, however, has exposed a new set of problems that the industry has yet to solve.
Richard Harrison, Vice President of Banking and Payments Partnerships at MoonPay, saying The passage of the GENIUS Act provided traditional finance companies with a regulatory framework within which to operate. “What GENIUS brought us was clarity,” Harrison told the panel, noting that traditional financial firms are now getting into stablecoins at a faster pace because compliance is easier to assess.
Harrison compared the current state of stablecoin adoption to electric vehicles: the core product works, but mass market adoption is entirely dependent on the supporting infrastructure. “How do you use stablecoin to pay rent?” said. “How do you use it to buy a cup of coffee?”
Institutional demand versus real-world usability
Jack McDonald, senior vice president of stablecoins at Ripple, told the panel that institutional clients focus less on market capitalization and more on nuts and bolts: regulatory compliance, custodial security, and whether stablecoins can do anything useful beyond trading.
McDonald said Ripple continues to focus on treasury operations, collateral management and cross-border payment settlement as the main enterprise use cases, arguing that utility should drive adoption rather than speculative interest.
Harrison added that stablecoins currently represent a relatively small proportion of global remittance flows, although he projected the figure could reach around 10% of the market in the next five years as payment pathways improve and more merchants integrate digital dollar services.
Stablecoin-based cross-border transfers already settle almost instantly with fees of less than a dollar, compared to traditional bank fees that can exceed 6%.
Brent Perrault, senior software engineer at Paxos, said privacy remains the industry’s most persistent unsolved issue. Public blockchains expose transaction amounts and the flow of funds, raising compliance and confidentiality concerns for companies handling sensitive financial data.
Perrault warned that partial privacy solutions are insufficient because users inevitably move between public and private blockchain environments. He said competitive differentiation among stablecoin issuers is increasingly driven by trust, distribution partnerships and incentives for users, rather than just technical specifications.
Distribution gaps and what comes next
Perrault pointed to PayPal’s USD growth and Charles Schwab’s use of Paxos infrastructure as evidence that demand from established financial institutions is real and expanding beyond crypto-native companies.
The challenge, he said, is that even well-capitalized issuers with strong compliance records face significant friction when trying to connect stablecoin rails to the everyday payment systems that consumers and businesses already use.
The panel’s comments at Consensus Miami came as the CLARITY Act moves toward its markup from the Senate Banking Committee on May 14. Like crypto.news reportedFive major banking trade groups rejected Tillis-Alsobrooks stablecoin compromise language just days before the vote.
Consensus executives did not directly address the profit margin, but their comments underscored why the regulatory outcome is important for companies creating stablecoin payment products at scale.
The stablecoin market currently has a total value of approximately $317 billion. Western Union announced its USDPT stablecoin on Solana in early May, with issuance through Anchorage Digital.
That entry reflects exactly the dynamic Harrison described: regulation has lowered the barrier, but the infrastructure necessary for stablecoins to work in everyday consumer contexts is still being built.
