Big Brands Pile Into Stablecoins but Create a New Problem

Watch more: Digital Shift: Conduit’s Kirill Gertman

Six months is an eternity in crypto. It’s also becoming one in stablecoins, where the last half-year has pushed the market from a single, dominant question of “Do stablecoins work?” Toward a more operational and thornier one: How do you manage them once they do?

“This space needs interoperability,” Kirill Gertman, Conduit co-founder and CEO, told PYMNTS.

He pointed to what he describes as a recent wave of corporate initiatives, “announcements from many different players launching their own stable coins,” across unrelated industries. “I’ve seen Sony, Klarna, CloudFlare,” Gertman noted, acknowledging the list is incomplete.

The important point, in his view, is not any one issuer but the direction of travel: consumer electronics, cloud infrastructure and buy-now-pay-later all “converging on this idea of stablecoins.”

If that convergence holds, it suggests stablecoins are evolving from a single product category into an infrastructure layer representing an alternative set of rails for storing and moving value. And like most infrastructure shifts, the second-order effects could matter more than the first.

The more stablecoins proliferate, the more the market inherits a familiar problem from payments history: fragmentation. The difference is that stablecoins offer real-time value transfer, which raises expectations for real-time cash management.

Read more: Institutional Interest Is Stress Testing Blockchain’s Financial Interoperability

Conduit’s latest launch of multicurrency virtual account functionality for corporate treasury accounts and customer virtual accounts is aimed at the emerging problem of stablecoin interoperability and orchestration. The premise is that companies don’t just need better exchange rates or faster settlement; they need a coherent operating model for cross-border money movement.

“We aren’t thinking specifically of swapping but of the full life cycle of a payment,” Gertman said.

Gertman wants to change the mechanics of money movement: receiving funds, converting them, holding them safely and paying them out, without forcing finance teams to stitch together a patchwork of providers and accounts.

The friction today, Gertman argued, emerges when companies must rely on different local providers in each region. Multiply that across inbound and outbound payments, and businesses can end up explaining to customers and partners why funds arrive from unfamiliar entities.

Conduit’s approach is to make the company, not the provider, the visible endpoint in each jurisdiction.

“For stablecoins to become widely adopted … they have to become invisible,” Gertman said, noting that, from the user’s perspective, the instruments matter less than outcomes.

Read more: Going From Zero to Crypto: How Banks and PSPs Can Approach Stablecoins 

Companies are not turning to stablecoins to challenge central banks or reinvent money. They are doing so because stablecoins solve mundane, but expensive, problems in corporate finance.

“Adoption follows pain,” German said, noting that in the U.S. legacy methods persist because the pain is lower.

“There’s a lot of companies that are still using checks because it works,” he added, and because they don’t face the same currency volatility when their unit of account is already the dollar.

The implication is that stablecoins’ corporate adoption curve may remain uneven: fastest in corridors where current rails are worst, slower where incumbents are “good enough.”

One notable change, Gertman said, is rising interest from financial institutions themselves. Banks and FinTechs in emerging markets, he argued, are seeing customers migrate to stablecoins and want to respond. That creates a partnership opportunity: institutions integrate Conduit’s infrastructure so their corporate clients can access faster cross-border payments and multicurrency capabilities without leaving the bank’s platform.

The real value proposition surrounding stablecoins is not monetary revolution but treasury efficiency: speed, control and optionality.

Speed, in particular, has balance-sheet implications. When payments take days to clear, companies must maintain large cash buffers to protect against delays, errors or liquidity mismatches. Faster settlement allows treasurers to operate with leaner balances, freeing capital for investment or reducing borrowing needs. In an era of higher interest rates, the opportunity cost of trapped cash is no longer trivial.

Neither, it turns out, might be the opportunity cost of standing still.

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