Stablecoin adoption is splitting into two very different markets

Dan Kim's dead end is an unusual place to start a conversation about crypto's killer app, but that is where the stablecoin adoption debate now sits.

Kim, vice president of product at Airwallex, spent part of an earlier stint at Coinbase trying to persuade merchants to adopt stablecoins, only to hit the same wall: merchants asked who would handle chargebacks, or decided a new payment layer was not worth the complexity.

“I ran into a blocker for how to make stablecoins useful … It was a dead end,” Kim told Fortune's Term Sheet Crypto.

Stablecoins have outlasted the crypto winter with their reputation intact, and investors and startups hail them as a long-awaited killer application—even skeptics concede they are a superior technology for moving money around, especially after the 2025 passage of the GENIUS Act gave them predictable rules.

The question Fortune's piece leaves open is not whether stablecoins work, but who will actually use them.

In North America, the consumer answer is hard to defend: the author of the Fortune piece notes that Venmo and Zelle already handle his everyday transfers, and even a Coinbase-built ecosystem of USDC rewards would struggle to out-earn the credit-card points in his wallet.

That is not a Luddite objection—consumer payment habits are sticky, and a novel yield story rarely displaces an existing spend story.

The consumer story is different where the dollar is not the local currency.

Tether has built a $183 billion business on giving people in developing countries a reliable way to hold U.S. dollars, and that is a savings-account insight rather than a payments insight; the killer feature of stablecoins is dollar access rather than payment speed.

Cross-border business payments are the natural institutional fit: stablecoin transfers are faster and more secure than wires, which makes corporate treasuries the obvious first wave.

But Kim's own experience cautions against treating the corporate treasury as the whole market: big companies are well positioned to adopt, he told Fortune, but the smaller vendors at the end of the chain may face regulatory restrictions on accepting crypto or dollar payments, and they still need to operate in their domestic currency.

A stablecoin rail compresses the cross-border leg; the last mile still runs in local money.

In theory, national stablecoins close that loop: a real stablecoin in Brazil, a Canadian dollar stablecoin in Canada, and so on.

The tokens exist, Fortune reports, but they have not redrawn the map; the gravitational pull of the dollar remains strong enough that a supplier in a local-currency economy still has to convert out of a foreign asset to pay wages.

That conversion is the bottleneck, and it is no longer a regulatory one.

The GENIUS Act settled the issuer question without settling the user question: Treasury's first GENIUS Act rulemaking, which this publication covered in August, will determine which issuers face U.S. rules.

Hong Kong's first regulated stablecoin is set to settle trade and insurance deals, and Circle has set a Sept. 16 target for Arc's public mainnet launch, with eleven founding institutions controlling block production.

All of that is progress on the plumbing, but none of it tells a merchant why stablecoins are better than the payment method they already accept.

That reframes the competitive field: Coinbase is trying to build a rewards flywheel around USDC, Tether sits on the largest dollar-storage franchise in crypto, and Airwallex is trying to build the cross-border business in between.

The winning stablecoin is the one that behaves like a bank account, not a payment rail.

It is the same utility test applied to tokenized treasuries and exchange collateral.

None of this means stablecoins fail; it means they win where the dollar is scarce and lose where the dollar is abundant, and Kim's dead end was real but it was a map of where not to dig.

The firms that find the local-currency exit—the on-ramp where dollars enter and the settlement where they leave—will hold the next wave of volume.

The GENIUS Act made their business legal; they still have to make it useful.