Stablecoins Just Got Real: The Future of Programmable Money in the GENIUS Era

For years, stablecoins have been seen as duct tape: a temporary bridge for crypto traders, a way to transfer money cheaply and quickly across borders, or to hedge against local currency inflation.

Fast forward to today, and that duct tape is starting to look a lot more like plumbing. Quietly, stablecoins have become the most used, most trusted application on blockchain, becoming the rails for internet-native payments. And with the GENIUS Act now signed into law in the U.S., the world is entering a new phase of programmable money.

GENIUS is a key example in the global regulatory scene, joining legislation from other countries that are providing clarity for privately-issued fiat-pegged crypto assets. But the highest risk falls on countries caught in limbo. When builders face regulatory ambiguity, they move elsewhere.

Countries yet to provide clarity on stablecoins risk becoming passive participants on rails defined and governed abroad.

From bridge token to institutional use case

Stablecoins started as utility tokens on crypto exchanges, letting traders avoid exchanging crypto into fiat, while avoiding market volatility. By 2024, stablecoins had processed nearly 3% of global remittance flows with growing capital markets usage.

Today, stablecoins are becoming infrastructure and have matured into a $260+ billion assetclass, expected to grow to $2 trillion by 2030.

And institutions are paying attention.

Take fintech giant Stripe’s transformation. The company now supports stablecoin payouts in over 100 countries, and news just broke that they’re launching a Layer 1 to own the rails.

Similarly, Circle, long seen as “just” a stablecoin issuer, is positioning itself as a core infrastructure player. Beyond its recent IPO success, the company’s Circle Payment Network (CPN) lets fintechs and service providers build stablecoin-powered financial flows. Not to mention, the firm just revealed it’s also creating a proprietary L1, with USDC as its native asset.

Even the old guard is moving fast: Visa has launched stablecoin settlement APIs for clients, enabling 24/7 global transactions.

These moves reveal something critical — legacy institutions aren’t adopting stablecoins out of curiosity. They’re doing it because the value proposition is now impossible to ignore.

GENIUS as a turning point

The GENIUS Act breaks the regulatory deadlock around stablecoins, bringing payment stablecoins into the U.S. financial system with clear rules on reserves, audits and consumer protection. That clarity is already influencing how other jurisdictions approach programmable money.

The global regulatory situation around stablecoins can be divided into three camps.

At one end, countries such as the U.S., Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan are enabling regulated private innovation. This approach combines licensing frameworks with institutional-grade oversight, recognizing that market participation and institutional oversight can coexist.

In the middle, the EU and the UK are pursuing tight supervisory control with some room for innovation. At the restrictive end, countries like China, India, and South Korea are prioritizing state-led alternatives like central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), while delaying or restricting private stablecoins.

Beyond payments: Unlocking new financial possibilities

Cross-border payments represent the most immediate opportunity for stablecoin adoption. Domestic systems like India’s UPI or Brazil’s Pix work well within borders, but cross-border transfers remain slow, costly and inefficient.

But stablecoins are more than moving money faster. They’re becoming the platform layer for a new financial internet.

Financial markets are next. With stablecoins acting as programmable cash, we’re seeing the rise of tokenized treasuries, real-time FX, derivative assets and other market infrastructure that mirrors TradFi but operates faster and more transparently. Just as TradFi scaled with internet rails, blockchain-native markets are forming atop stablecoin infrastructure.

Then come new business models. Stablecoins make entirely new types of value exchange possible, such as usage-based pricing, per-API-call billing, streaming payments, and automated transactions powered by AI agent flows.

The Tech Is Finally Ready

Stablecoins may have gotten here first, but it’s the infrastructure beneath them that’s quietly leveled up. Public blockchains, once written off as congested and expensive, have become faster, cheaper and more capable. Thanks to scaling solutions, networks can now process high volumes with sub-second finality and minimal fees.

Wallets have grown up, too. On the institutional side, custody platforms now offer multiparty computation and fine-grained access controls, giving enterprises confidence that digital money is safe. On the consumer side, wallets have added features that make self-custody more user-friendly. Meanwhile, in compliance, on-chain analytics tools now provide real-time surveillance, behavioral risk scoring and AML flagging.

Addressing criticism, accelerating adoption

Like any emerging technology, stablecoins have drawn scrutiny. Regulators flag illicit finance, regulatory arbitrage and poor consumer UX.

These concerns are valid. But they’re not fatal — and they miss the broader evolution underway.

The bigger point is this: traditional finance often assumes innovation should wait until every risk is neatly solved. But stablecoins evolve in real time. They iterate in public, correct visibly and scale globally by default. As with GENIUS, we must regulate dynamically, not defensively.

The future will be layered. CBDCs, tokenized deposits and regulated stablecoins can co-exist. Countries and companies that embrace this shift will help shape the next generation of financial infrastructure. Those that hesitate may find themselves running on rails built by others. This is the moment to experiment, to integrate, to shape what programmable value should look like.

Anurag Arjun is the co- founder of Avail, a unified foundation for rollups to scale horizontally, share liquidity, move assets trustlessly, communicate permissionlessly along with a multi-token economic security.