Pavel Kashuba on Stablecoin Rails at the Payments Leaders’ Summit Keynote

At this year’s Payments Leaders’ Summit at The Landmark London, one message cut through the noise surrounding crypto, AI, and fintech disruption: the battle for the future of global payments is about infrastructure.

Pavel Kashuba, Strategic Leader at Coinspaid Solutions, took the stage with a deliberately provocative premise: stablecoins are no longer an emerging experiment; they are already a working tool.

According to Pavel, the institutions that understand this shift over the next 18 months will help define how money moves for the next decade. “Most institutions are still framing this conversation incorrectly,” Kashuba told a room of payment executives, banking leaders, and fintech operators. “This is not about crypto. It’s about payment infrastructure.”

 The keynote came at a pivotal moment for the payments industry. Over the last year alone, Mastercard acquired stablecoin infrastructure company BVNK in a $1.8 billion deal, Stripe acquired Bridge for $1.1 billion, and major financial institutions, including Visa and Citi Ventures, deepened their exposure to blockchain-based payment systems. According to Pavel, these are signals of a broader structural shift.

The Economics Are Becoming Impossible To Ignore

Kashuba argued that traditional correspondent banking infrastructure is increasingly mismatched with the demands of a global, real-time economy. Cross-border payments through conventional banking rails can still take between two and five business days to settle. Total costs, including FX spreads, correspondent banking fees, and reconciliation overhead, frequently exceed 3.5%, particularly in emerging markets. Meanwhile, failed or delayed transactions remain a major operational burden.

 By contrast, Kashuba described on-chain stablecoin settlement as fundamentally different economics:

• Settlement finality measured in seconds or minutes
• Transaction costs below 1.5%
• Near-zero failure rates
• Full auditability across the transaction lifecycle

“That is not a product pitch,” he emphasized during the keynote. “That is a structural cost differential.”

 For enterprise payment providers processing billions in annual volume, those economics quickly become strategic rather than experimental.

 Why This Moment Matters

Kashuba identified three forces converging simultaneously to accelerate institutional adoption.

1. Regulatory clarity is finally arriving

According to Pavel, one of the biggest barriers to institutional participation has historically been regulatory uncertainty. That landscape is now changing rapidly. The European Union’s MiCA framework is live. The United States has advanced new stablecoin legislation. The United Kingdom’s cryptoasset regime is nearing implementation. “For the first time,” Kashuba explained, “institutions can see a defined compliance framework for stablecoin operations across the EU, the US, and the UK simultaneously.”

That matters because large enterprises rarely move first on emerging infrastructure. They move when governance frameworks become operationally clear.

 2. Stablecoin volume has reached enterprise scale

According to the keynote, stablecoin transaction volume reached approximately $33 trillion in 2025 (more than double Visa’s annual payment flow). Importantly, the majority of this activity is no longer driven by speculative trading. “This is real payment volume”. “Cross-border transfers, treasury operations, and B2B settlement.”

 3. The world’s largest payment networks are already moving

The acquisitions by Mastercard and Stripe may ultimately become defining moments in the evolution of enterprise payments. Rather than building blockchain settlement infrastructure internally, some of the world’s most established payment giants are now acquiring it outright. 

For Kashuba, the message is clear: incumbent financial infrastructure providers no longer see on-chain settlement as optional. “They are buying capability,” he said. “Specifically for emerging payment corridors where traditional infrastructure is expensive and inefficient.”

The Emerging Market Opportunity

A central theme of the keynote was the growing disconnect between consumer demand for digital asset payments and the merchant infrastructure available to support them.

Kashuba cited estimates showing that more than 741 million people globally now hold digital assets. Countries including India, Nigeria, Indonesia, and Vietnam represent some of the fastest-growing markets for digital asset ownership and blockchain-based payments. Yet despite that demand, the number of merchants and enterprises capable of accepting and settling blockchain-native payments remains relatively small. “That gap is the commercial opportunity.”

In many emerging markets, correspondent banking systems remain slow, fragmented, and expensive. Cross-border settlement can involve multiple intermediary banks, unpredictable settlement windows, and high transaction costs.

Stablecoin infrastructure changes that equation. For businesses operating across Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa, faster settlement and lower transaction costs can materially reshape margins and market competitiveness. Kashuba framed the opportunity less as technological disruption and more as economic arbitrage.

Why Most Blockchain Payment Pilots Fail

While enthusiasm surrounding blockchain infrastructure has grown significantly, Pavel Kashuba argued that many enterprise initiatives still misunderstand the hardest part of the problem. “The technology is solved,” he said. “The real challenge is infrastructure governance.”

According to Kashuba, enterprise-grade blockchain payment infrastructure requires four core capabilities.

• Transaction-level compliance. Every transaction must be screened in real time, including wallet risk analysis and counterparty exposure monitoring. Compliance cannot exist as a separate reporting layer after settlement occurs. It must be embedded directly into the infrastructure itself.

• Liquidity management at scale. Unlike traditional banking systems, blockchain settlement infrastructure often requires pre-funded liquidity across multiple corridors and networks. Managing those liquidity positions dynamically while balancing operational risk and market exposure becomes increasingly complex as volume scales.

• Multi-chain redundancy. Relying on a single blockchain creates operational fragility. Kashuba explained that Coinspaid operates across 22 integrated blockchains, allowing transactions to reroute automatically when congestion or network instability occurs. For enterprise infrastructure, redundancy is a reliability requirement.

• Proven operational history. Finally, Kashuba stressed the importance of production-scale operating history. “Coinspaid’s eleven years of uptime matters,” he said. 

For institutional counterparties evaluating infrastructure risk, long-term operational history increasingly functions as a competitive advantage.

Invisible Infrastructure May Be The Winning Model

According to Kashuba, the future of blockchain payments is invisible infrastructure. Coinspaid advocates that merchants and end users may never directly interact with blockchain technology at all. A merchant in Lagos receives a payout in local currency. A business in Southeast Asia settles cross-border invoices faster and more cheaply. Treasury teams gain real-time visibility into settlement.

The blockchain layer operates underneath the experience. “That is the correct architecture for institutional adoption,” Kashuba explained. The approach reflects a broader trend emerging across enterprise technology: successful infrastructure often becomes invisible to the end user.

The Next Frontier: Agentic Commerce

Pavel closed the keynote by connecting payment infrastructure to another rapidly emerging trend, AI-driven autonomous commerce.

As AI agents increasingly execute transactions on behalf of consumers and businesses, payment systems will require new characteristics:

• Programmability
• Instant settlement
• Deterministic execution
• Minimal human intervention

Traditional banking infrastructure was never designed for autonomous machine-driven transactions. “Correspondent banking cannot support this model”. Pavel pointed to the x402 protocol, which enables stablecoin payments to be attached directly to web requests, as one of the foundational technologies likely to power future agentic payment systems.

If autonomous commerce scales over the next decade, the infrastructure providers already operating on-chain settlement systems may be positioned to capture significant transaction volume. “The institutions that operationalize this infrastructure early,” Kashuba said, “will capture the infrastructure margin on autonomous commerce.”

A Shift From Experimentation To Positioning

Kashuba did not present blockchain payments as an innovation lab exercise or speculative technology trend. Instead, he framed it as a market positioning decision.

The institutions moving aggressively into stablecoin infrastructure today are not making a crypto bet. They are making a long-term bet on how global settlement economics will evolve.

And increasingly, the world’s largest payment companies appear to believe that evolution is already underway.

“The settlement infrastructure question has been answered,” Kashuba concluded.