If stablecoins finally had their moment during 2025, it wasn’t the moment most crypto evangelists imagined.
There were no consumer splash campaigns that took off, no breathless promises of “banking the unbanked,” and no viral apps that suddenly made digital dollars part of everyday life.
Instead, the stablecoin economy throughout 2025 was one that was increasingly real, increasingly regulated and increasingly institutional. The disruption happened, but not necessarily where retail users could easily see it.
The news this week alone put an exclamation point on that reality, with announcements that unfolded as a series of institutional moves.
SoFi launched an enterprise stablecoin. Coinbase rolled out a white-label stablecoin issuance product aimed at corporations and banks, while partnering with Klarna and enabling the global digital bank and flexible payments provider to raise short-term funding from institutional investors denominated in USDC.
Elsewhere, the FDIC formally began rulemaking around implementation of the GENIUS Act, signaling a new phase of regulatory clarity, and PayPal introduced stablecoin financial tooling tailored for AI-native businesses, while Visa expanded U.S. stablecoin settlement capabilities.
Looming over it all, JPMorgan poured a bucket of cold water on market hype, stating it does not foresee a trillion-dollar stablecoin market any time soon. The banking giant, for its own part, likely prefers tokenized deposits to stablecoins.
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An Ongoing Evolution
The innovation in stablecoins is happening beneath the user interface. They are no longer being treated primarily as a product for end users, but as a programmable settlement layer for enterprises, banks, payment networks, and now, AI-driven systems.
SoFi’s move is emblematic. Rather than pitching a consumer-facing token to its millions of users, the company introduced an enterprise stablecoin designed for back-end financial operations: internal transfers, corporate payments and potential integration with other institutional platforms. The signal is clear. For SoFi, stablecoins are not about replacing Venmo or debit cards. They are about reducing friction, settlement time and cost in the plumbing of finance.
Coinbase’s announcement may be the most revealing in this regard. By introducing a white-label stablecoin issuance solution, the exchange is effectively telling corporations and financial institutions: you don’t need to become a crypto company to use crypto rails.
Visa’s expansion of U.S. stablecoin settlements, and the fact that Cross River Bank and Lead Bank are the first American institutions to actually use USDC for settlement, underscore how far this shift has progressed.
Visa has spent decades perfecting a global settlement network built on batch processing, intermediaries and delayed finality. Stablecoins offer something radically different: near-instant settlement with transparent records and 24/7 availability. That Visa is not merely experimenting abroad, but deploying this capability domestically, signals confidence that the regulatory and operational groundwork is finally sufficient.
Read more: Conditional Charters Pull Crypto Closer to Core of US Banking
From Theory to Practice
Perhaps the most consequential development of the week was less flashy: the FDIC’s initiation of formal rulemaking to implement the GENIUS Act. Formal rulemaking marks a transition from abstract debate to operational reality.
For banks, this matters more than any single product launch. Regulatory clarity reduces risk for executives and compliance officers. It enables internal investment committees to approve pilots. It allows institutions to move beyond proofs of concept into production systems.
In other words, regulation is not slowing stablecoins down this year. It is enabling them.
This inversion challenges the dominant narrative of FinTech disruption. Historically, consumer-facing products—neobanks, mobile wallets, peer-to-peer payments—were the wedge that forced incumbents to adapt. Stablecoins are flipping that script. The disruption is happening first at the institutional layer, with consumer experiences likely to change later, indirectly.
And looking ahead, while PayPal’s own announcement—stablecoins designed for AI-native businesses—may appear niche at first glance, it points to an emerging use case that could prove more important than consumer payments.
AI systems increasingly transact autonomously—paying for compute, data, APIs and services on demand. Traditional payment rails, built for human-initiated transactions and legacy compliance workflows, are ill-suited to this model. Stablecoins, by contrast, are programmable, divisible and capable of operating at machine speed.
By positioning stablecoins as the financial substrate for AI agents, PayPal is implicitly arguing that the next major wave of payments innovation will not be consumer-to-merchant, but machine-to-machine.
Ultimately, consumers may not notice stablecoins immediately. When they do, it may not be because they downloaded a “stablecoin app,” but because payments clear faster, cross-border transfers cost less, or AI services operate seamlessly across platforms.
