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Episode Brief: Stablecoins Are Cheaper, Merchants Don’t Care w/ José Fernández Da Ponte (Stellar)

Why this episode matters

Stablecoins already move serious money, but mostly where the buyer is rational and the constraints are obvious: treasury, B2B, and capital markets. Consumer payments are different. “Cheaper” is not a product. It is an internal efficiency, and merchants rarely re-platform for internal efficiency.

José’s operator takeaway is that adoption is gated less by settlement tech and more by distribution, liquidity, and compliance-grade “payments wrapping” (refunds, disputes, privacy, identity). That shifts where builders should aim first, and what institutions are actually evaluating when they say they are “going onchain.”

The core ideas you should take away

• Merchant adoption is pulled by incremental revenue, not lower processing cost. Cost savings matter to CFOs, but do not create merchant urgency.
• A blockchain transaction is not a payment. Payments require layers on top: refunds/returns, disputes, privacy/PII constraints, reporting, risk controls, and merchant-friendly integration paths. Much more complexity to handle for a merchant than just opening a wallet. This is where vendors come in.
• For incumbents, “issue vs partner” is over-discussed. The real success drivers are distribution, deep liquidity (to reduce slippage and make off-ramps work), and world-class risk management.
• Stablecoins scale first in the “unseen layer”: corporate treasury and B2B flows that need 24/7 movement, weekend liquidity positioning, and time-zone overlap relief. José’s expects corporate treasury volumes to dwarf B2B payments at scale
• OCC charters signal an institutional phase shift. Crypto-native firms will need bank-grade compliance, finance, and operational maturity, and the talent market will move accordingly.
• Institutions choose chains using a pragmatic checklist: technical primitives (finality, throughput), reliability/track record, compliance features (including freeze controls), and ecosystem depth (integrators, auditors, infra vendors).

What this changes

• For fintechs and PSPs: the pitch should be “new buyers, new geos, higher conversion, fewer declines,” with stablecoins hidden behind familiar UX unless the user explicitly wants them.
• For banks and asset managers: tokenization and cash management are the near-term wedge, and they will pressure chains on uptime, governance maturity, and operational tooling more than ideology.
• For stablecoin issuers: market cap is not the goal by itself, but liquidity is. If you cannot support tight spreads and predictable off-ramps, your “payments story” stays theoretical.
• For builders: the opportunity is middleware that turns onchain settlement into enterprise-grade payments and compliance workflows, not another wallet-to-wallet demo.

What we didn’t fully resolve

• What is the winning privacy architecture for regulated finance: privacy at the base layer vs privacy parameterized at the application layer, and who gets to decide the knobs?
• How non-USD stablecoins escape the chicken-and-egg of liquidity, especially when most FX liquidity and credit intermediation still sit with banks and incumbent market makers.
• Whether open, permissionless rails remain the default, or whether “infrastructure capture” by proprietary stacks pushes institutions toward corporate chains in practice.

If you listen, listen for this

Stablecoins are not “a better payment method.” They are a better balance sheet primitive for moving and managing money globally, and payments are just one downstream expression. The path to mainstream commerce runs through treasury, capital markets, and compliance-grade abstraction layers that make the onchain part invisible until it does something the old rails cannot. In a nutshell, there's a lot more to build!