Stablecoins Just Became Corporate Payment Infrastructure. India Said No Thanks.How Fast Corporate Stablecoin Payments Actually Grew
Published: August 21, 2026 | Category: Business, Startup | By Mahesh
For most of their existence, stablecoins were a crypto trading tool wearing a corporate finance costume. They let traders park value between speculative bets without cashing out to a bank account, and the pitch that they might someday replace correspondent banking for ordinary business payments sounded like the kind of thing crypto advocates said every year regardless of whether it was actually happening. What changed in 2026 is that the claim stopped being aspirational. Depth Grid has tracked the broader shift in how capital and payments infrastructure are being rebuilt outside traditional channels in pieces like Private Credit's $3 Trillion Reckoning, and stablecoins in corporate payments are a distinct instance of the same pattern: financial infrastructure that once required a bank intermediary is increasingly running on rails banks do not control, backed this time by a clear regulatory framework rather than a legal grey zone.
What Actually Changed in 2025 and 2026
The regulatory turning point has a precise date. President Trump signed the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins Act, known as the GENIUS Act, into law on July 18, 2025, creating the first federal framework specifically for dollar-backed payment stablecoins.[4] The law requires issuers to hold full reserves in liquid assets, submit to annual audits and defines stablecoins explicitly as payment instruments rather than securities or commodities, a classification distinction that mattered enormously for institutional legal and compliance teams who had previously treated any stablecoin exposure as a securities law question with genuinely uncertain answers.[4] The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency followed with a proposed implementing rule on March 2, 2026, and the CLARITY Act passed the same month, further narrowing the jurisdictional ambiguity that had slowed institutional adoption through 2024.[5]
The result, according to McKinsey and Artemis Analytics data published in February 2026, was a 733 percent year-over-year surge in B2B stablecoin payments during 2025, reaching an estimated $226 billion annually and accounting for roughly 60 percent of all genuine stablecoin payment activity, as distinct from speculative trading volume.[1] That distinction matters. Total on-chain stablecoin volume reached roughly $33 trillion, but the overwhelming majority of that figure reflects trading, internal transfers between exchanges and automated market-making rather than anything resembling a business paying a supplier.[1] McKinsey's more conservative estimate of genuine end-user payment activity, covering B2B transfers, payroll, remittances and capital markets settlement combined, put the real figure at approximately $390 billion in 2025, still more than double the prior year's total.[2] The gap between those two numbers, $33 trillion in raw volume against $390 billion in actual commerce, is a useful reminder that headline stablecoin statistics require real scrutiny before they translate into a genuine corporate adoption story.
The Real Economics of a Stablecoin Payment
The business case driving this growth rests on a specific, well-documented cost and speed gap rather than abstract technology enthusiasm. A standard SWIFT correspondent banking transfer takes two to three business days to settle, with less established corridors stretching to seven days, and total costs on that traditional path typically run 3 to 7 percent of transaction value once correspondent bank fees, foreign exchange spreads and intermediary charges are combined.[6] Stablecoin rails, by comparison, settle in minutes rather than days and carry total costs closer to 0.5 to 2.5 percent, a gap wide enough that EY's Parthenon survey of 350 corporate and financial institution executives found 41 percent of organisations already using stablecoins reported cost savings of at least 10 percent, concentrated specifically in B2B cross-border payments using dollar-denominated stablecoins.[7]
That gap is not evenly distributed across every use case, which is precisely why adoption has concentrated so heavily in cross-border supplier settlement rather than domestic payments. Domestic same-day ACH already handles routine domestic transfers adequately in most developed markets, and stablecoins offer little incremental advantage there. International corridors, where correspondent banking chains route a single payment through multiple intermediary banks, each adding fees, cut-off times and reconciliation gaps, are where the advantage compounds most clearly.[8] The World Bank puts average global remittance costs at 6.3 percent, with some corridors charging as much as 20 percent, and for a business paying suppliers frequently across those same expensive corridors, that cost differential compounds into a genuine, recurring line-item saving rather than a one-time novelty.[9]
Who Is Actually Using This, and Where
The adoption pattern breaks two ways that complicate any simple narrative about who benefits most. By company size, EY-Parthenon found active stablecoin usage highest among organisations with $10 billion to $50 billion in revenue, at 19 percent actively using the technology, followed closely by companies in the $1 billion to $10 billion range, suggesting mid-to-large enterprises with genuine cross-border supply chains, rather than either small businesses or the very largest multinationals, are leading adoption.[7] Fireblocks' separate March 2026 survey of 295 C-suite executives found the driving force is not primarily crypto-native firms but traditional B2B operators including ship brokers, steel traders and import-export businesses, industries where the underlying pain of slow, expensive correspondent banking has always been particularly acute.[10] Among current users, 62 percent specifically use stablecoins to pay suppliers, the single most common use case by a wide margin.[10]
Geographically, adoption skews heavily toward emerging markets and Asia rather than the wealthy economies where the regulatory headlines are being written. McKinsey and Artemis data shows Asia-originated stablecoin payments account for $245 billion, roughly 60 percent of global volume, concentrated specifically in Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan.[11] In Latin America, Fireblocks' 2025 research found 71 percent of firms already use stablecoins for cross-border payments, among the highest adoption rates measured anywhere.[11] The infrastructure enabling this has also matured quickly on the institutional side. BNY Mellon and State Street now offer institutional-grade custody for major stablecoins, removing a counterparty risk concern that had kept many corporate treasuries on the sidelines, while SAP S/4HANA and NetSuite have extended their treasury modules to support blockchain-based settlement directly inside existing enterprise resource planning environments, removing what had been a significant technical integration barrier for finance teams without dedicated crypto infrastructure.[12]
Why India Is Saying No
Set against that global momentum, India's central bank has taken a position that runs directly counter to the trend, and the contrast is instructive precisely because India is not a minor or disinterested market. According to internal government documents reviewed by Reuters and reported in July 2026, the Reserve Bank of India's preferred policy stance has hardened to what officials describe as "leaning toward prohibition," specifically targeting both foreign currency-backed stablecoins, which the RBI argues threaten India's monetary sovereignty, and rupee-backed stablecoins, which it warns could erode government seigniorage revenue and create financial stability risks during periods of market stress.[3] RBI Deputy Governor testimony to India's Parliamentary Standing Committee in early July 2026 went further, stating that virtual digital assets more broadly "should not be legalised," and pushing a strategy of containment centred on the Reserve Bank's own central bank digital currency, the Digital Rupee, as the preferred alternative.[13]
The RBI's argument is coherent on its own terms even where it diverges sharply from the American and European approach. Its June 2026 Financial Stability Report explicitly referenced the GENIUS Act and the EU's MiCA framework while arguing that countries should prioritise central bank digital currencies over privately issued stablecoins specifically to preserve monetary policy transmission and avoid fracturing domestic payment ecosystems, a concern sharpened by India's dependence on energy imports and its recurring current account deficit pressures.[14] The central bank also points to a practical alternative unavailable to most developing economies: India already operates the Unified Payments Interface, a instant, ubiquitous domestic retail payments rail that has made the case for privately issued stablecoins as a domestic payments solution considerably weaker than in markets without an equivalent system.[15]
Yet the RBI's containment strategy is running against a market that has already moved past it in practice, if not in law. India has nearly 39 million crypto investors holding an estimated $2.1 billion in digital assets as of May 2026, figures that put the country among the largest cryptocurrency markets in the world by user count despite years of regulatory hostility, and fewer than 25 percent of the roughly 645,000 individuals who transacted in crypto during the year ending March 2023 properly reported those gains on their tax returns, according to India's own tax department.[3] A June 2026 supply crunch in dollar-backed USDT reportedly fuelled fresh demand for rupee-backed stablecoin alternatives, and industry voices, including Binance's Asia-Pacific leadership, have begun arguing publicly that regulated rupee-pegged stablecoins could actually reduce India's dependence on dollar-denominated crypto rails rather than undermine domestic monetary control, a framing the RBI has so far declined to accept.[16] Meanwhile, India's government and its central bank are visibly not aligned. The Ministry of Finance signalled in its Economic Survey for 2025-2026 that it is actively considering a stablecoin regulatory framework, a position that directly diverges from the RBI's preference for prohibition, leaving India's eventual policy direction genuinely unresolved even as the rest of the world's major economies converge on regulated adoption.[17]
What Could Still Go Wrong
Even in jurisdictions actively embracing stablecoin adoption, the underlying risks the RBI cites are not purely defensive posturing, and mainstream financial institutions share several of the same concerns in more measured language. The Federal Reserve's own research staff, in a note published in March 2026, cautioned that successful adoption of payment stablecoins for cross-border transactions is genuinely not guaranteed, since outcomes depend heavily on how issuers price their services, which is itself shaped by regulation and technology choices still very much in flux.[18] The Brookings Institution has separately flagged that current GENIUS Act rules permit stablecoin reserves to include uninsured bank deposits and cash borrowed through repurchase agreements, both of which can become risky and illiquid precisely during the periods of market stress when reserve quality matters most, and has recommended stronger prudential capital and liquidity requirements to guarantee that holders can always redeem at par.[19]
A separate structural risk concerns the underlying business model of stablecoin issuance itself, which depends heavily on distribution partnerships that remain only partially resolved. Large stablecoin issuers earn revenue primarily from the yield on reserve assets rather than transaction fees, and an unresolved question in the industry is whether issuers can adequately compensate the exchanges and platforms that distribute their tokens to end users, since a failure to do so could weaken the incentive for widespread distribution even where the underlying technology and regulation both function as intended.[20] Regulatory uncertainty remains, even now, the top-cited barrier to further adoption among corporates surveyed by EY, at 73 percent, nearly twice the second most common concern, which is a lack of clarity on accounting and tax treatment at 38 percent, underscoring that the GENIUS Act resolved federal issuer-level regulation without fully resolving the accounting and operational questions that individual corporate treasury teams still have to answer for themselves.[7]
What This Means For You
For finance and treasury leaders at companies with meaningful cross-border supplier or contractor payment volume, the practical starting point is evaluating specific corridors where correspondent banking costs and settlement delays are most acute, rather than treating stablecoin adoption as an all-or-nothing infrastructure decision. The clearest near-term use cases, cross-border supplier settlement, intercompany treasury transfers and contractor payroll, are also the ones with the most mature institutional custody and ERP integration support already available, making them the most realistic entry point for a company without dedicated crypto expertise.
For businesses operating in or transacting with India specifically, the practical reality is that the regulatory ambiguity closing elsewhere remains wide open domestically, and any stablecoin-based payment flow touching Indian counterparties should be built around India's existing 30 percent capital gains tax and 1 percent transaction-level tax deducted at source on virtual digital assets, alongside anti-money laundering and Know Your Customer obligations already enforced through the Financial Intelligence Unit, rather than assuming India will converge toward the American or European regulatory model on any predictable timeline.
For investors and policymakers watching this space more broadly, the widening gap between the United States' rapid regulatory embrace and India's active resistance is a genuinely useful test case for whether financial infrastructure innovation of this kind eventually converges globally or persists as a durable divide between markets with different underlying currency, banking infrastructure and monetary sovereignty priorities, a question with implications well beyond stablecoins for how digital financial infrastructure develops over the next decade.
Common Questions
Sources
- Bancoli, "Stablecoin Adoption in B2B Payments: 2026 Market Data and Growth Projections," citing McKinsey and Artemis Analytics, April 2026. bancoli.com
- RZLT, "Stablecoin Payments in 2026: The B2B Guide," citing McKinsey and DeFiLlama data, July 2026. rzlt.io
- Cryptonomist, "India Crypto Regulation: RBI's Prohibition Stance and Market Impact," citing Reuters, July 2026. cryptonomist.ch
- State Street Global Advisors, "GENIUS Act Explained: What It Means for Crypto and Digital Assets." ssga.com
- Payfuture, "Stablecoins in Cross-Border Payments: 2026 B2B Guide," June 2026. payfuture.net
- DashDevs, "Stablecoins for Cross-Border Payments: B2B Guide 2026," June 2026. dashdevs.com
- EY, "Cost Savings and Speed Drive Stablecoin Adoption," citing EY-Parthenon Stablecoin Survey. ey.com
- Forbes, "Stablecoin Cross-Border Payments in 2026: From Theory to Practice," March 2026. forbes.com
- RZLT, "Stablecoin Payments in 2026," World Bank remittance cost data (see source 2).
- Tazapay, "Stablecoins in Emerging Markets: The Cross-Border Payments Playbook for 2026," citing Fireblocks State of Stablecoins 2025 survey, June 2026. tazapay.com
- Tazapay, "Stablecoins in Emerging Markets," regional adoption data (see source 10).
- Payfuture, "Stablecoins in Cross-Border Payments," institutional custody and ERP integration data (see source 5).
- Coinpedia, "Crypto Regulations India 2026," July 2026. coinpedia.org
- CryptoDaily, "RBI Keeps a Crypto Ban on the Table: India's Stablecoin Wall Just Got Higher," July 2026. cryptodaily.co.uk
- Cointelegraph via TradingView, "India's Government May Consider Stablecoin Framework, Diverging From RBI." tradingview.com
- CryptoTimes, "Binance APAC Head Says India Needs Rupee Stablecoins to Cut Dollar Reliance," August 2026. cryptotimes.io
- CoinMarketCap, "India Government Eyes Stablecoin Rules as RBI Urges Caution." coinmarketcap.com
- Federal Reserve, "Payment Stablecoins and Cross Border Payments: Benefits and Implications for Monetary Policy Implementation," FEDS Notes, March 2026. federalreserve.gov
- Brookings Institution, "Next Steps for GENIUS Payment Stablecoins," March 2026. brookings.edu
- William Blair, "How Stablecoins Are Transforming Global B2B Payments." williamblair.com
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Article by Mahesh | Depth Grid