Regulating stablecoins has accelerated institutional adoption, but key infrastructure and privacy gaps still prevent mainstream use, executives from MoonPay, Ripple and Paxos said at Consensus Miami 2026.
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- MoonPay Vice President Richard Harrison said the GENIUS Act gave companies a regulatory pass, accelerating traditional finance’s entry into stablecoins.
- Jack McDonald, Ripple’s senior vice president, argued that institutional adoption depends on regulated products, trusted custody, and utility beyond market value.
- Paxos engineer Brent Perrault warned that unresolved privacy issues in public blockchains remain a major barrier to enterprise-level stablecoin payments.
Senior executives at three of the most active stablecoin companies told an audience at the Miami Consensus 2026 conference on May 8 that new US regulation has radically changed the competitive landscape for dollar-pegged tokens, bringing traditional financial institutions into a market that was previously difficult for them to enter. However, this shift has revealed a new set of problems that the industry has yet to solve.
Richard Harrison, MoonPay’s Vice President of Banking and Payment Partnerships, He said The passage of the GENIUS Act gave businesses across traditional finance a regulatory framework within which to operate. “What GENIUS has brought us is clarity,” Harrison told the committee, noting that traditional finance companies are now entering stablecoins at a faster pace because compliance is easier to assess.
Harrison compared the current state of stablecoin adoption to electric cars: the core product works, but mass market acceptance depends entirely on the supporting infrastructure. “How can you use a stablecoin to pay rent?” He said. “How do you use it to buy a cup of coffee?”
Institutional demand versus real-world ease of use
Jack McDonald, senior vice president of stablecoins at Ripple, told the panel that institutional clients are focusing less on market cap and more on practical details: regulatory compliance, security of custody, and whether stablecoins can do something useful beyond trading.
McDonald said Ripple continues to focus on treasury operations, collateral management and cross-border payment settlement as its core use cases for institutions, arguing that utility should drive adoption rather than speculative interest.
Harrison added that stablecoins currently account for a relatively small share of global remittance flows, though he expects the number to reach around 10% of the market over the next five years as payment paths improve and more merchants integrate digital dollar services.
Stablecoin-based cross-border transfers are already settled almost instantly with fees of less than $1, compared to traditional banking fees that can exceed 6%.
Brent Perrault, a senior software engineer at Paxos, said privacy remains the sector’s most pressing and unsolved problem. Public blockchains reveal transaction amounts and the flow of funds, creating compliance and confidentiality concerns for companies that handle sensitive financial data.
Perrault warned that partial privacy solutions are insufficient because users inevitably move between private and public blockchain environments. Competitive differentiation among stablecoin issuers is now increasingly driven by trust, distribution partnerships and user incentives rather than technical specifications alone, he said.
Distribution gaps and what comes next
Perrault pointed to the growth of PayPal USD and Charles Schwab’s use of Paxos infrastructure as evidence that demand from established financial institutions is real and expanding beyond native crypto companies.
The challenge, he said, is that even well-capitalized issuers with strong compliance records face significant friction when trying to connect stablecoin paths to the everyday payment systems that consumers and businesses already use.
The committee’s comments in the Miami consensus came as the CLARITY Act moves toward markup in the Senate Banking Committee on May 14. I mentionedFive major banking trade groups rejected settlement language for the Tillis-Alsobrooks stablecoin just days before the vote.
Consensus executives did not directly address tokenization, but their remarks underscored why the regulatory outcome is important for companies building stablecoin payment products at scale.
The total value of the stablecoin market is currently around $317 billion. western union Announce and its USDPT stablecoin on Solana earlier in May, with its release through Anchorage Digital.
This entry reflects exactly the dynamic described by Harrison: regulation has lowered the barrier, but the infrastructure needed to make stablecoins work in everyday consumer contexts is still being built.
