Executives from MoonPay, Ripple, and Paxos said at Consensus Miami 2026 that stablecoin regulation has accelerated institutional adoption but that major infrastructure and privacy gaps still block mainstream use.
Summary
- MoonPay VP Richard Harrison said the GENIUS Act gave firms a regulatory permission slip, accelerating traditional finance entry into stablecoins.
- Ripple SVP Jack McDonald argued that institutional adoption depends on regulated products, trusted custody, and utility beyond market capitalisation.
- Paxos engineer Brent Perrault warned that unresolved privacy issues on public blockchains remain a significant barrier to enterprise-scale stablecoin payments.
Top executives at three of the most active stablecoin companies told the Consensus Miami 2026 audience on May 8 that new US regulation has fundamentally changed the competitive landscape for dollar-pegged tokens, bringing traditional financial institutions into a market that was previously difficult for them to enter. The shift, however, has exposed a new set of problems the industry has yet to solve.
Richard Harrison, MoonPay’s vice president of banking and payment partnerships, said the passage of the GENIUS Act gave firms across traditional finance a regulatory framework to operate within. “What GENIUS brought us was clarity,” Harrison told the panel, noting that traditional finance firms are now entering stablecoins at a faster pace because compliance is easier to evaluate.
Harrison compared the current state of stablecoin adoption to electric vehicles: the core product works, but mass-market take-up depends entirely on the supporting infrastructure. “How do you use stablecoin to pay your rent?” he said. “How do you use it to buy a cup of coffee?”
Institutional demand versus real-world usability
Jack McDonald, Ripple’s senior vice president for stablecoins, told the panel that institutional clients are focused less on market capitalisation and more on practical details: regulatory compliance, custody security, and whether stablecoins can do something useful beyond trading.
McDonald said Ripple continues to concentrate on treasury operations, collateral management, and cross-border payment settlement as the primary enterprise use cases, arguing that utility must drive adoption rather than speculative interest.
Harrison added that stablecoins currently represent a relatively small share of global remittance flows, though he projected the figure could reach around 10% of the market over the next five years as payment rails improve and more merchants integrate digital dollar services.
Stablecoin-based cross-border transfers already settle near-instantly at fees below one dollar, compared with traditional banking fees that can exceed 6%.
Brent Perrault, a senior staff software engineer at Paxos, said privacy remains the sector’s most persistent unresolved problem. Public blockchains expose transaction amounts and the flow of funds, which creates compliance and confidentiality concerns for businesses handling sensitive financial data.
Perrault warned that partial privacy solutions are insufficient because users inevitably move between private and public blockchain environments. He said competitive differentiation among stablecoin issuers is now increasingly driven by trust, distribution partnerships, and user incentives rather than technical specification alone.
Distribution gaps and what comes next
Perrault pointed to PayPal USD’s growth and Charles Schwab’s use of Paxos infrastructure as evidence that demand from established financial institutions is real and expanding beyond crypto-native firms.
The challenge, he said, is that even well-capitalised issuers with strong compliance records face significant friction when trying to connect stablecoin rails to the everyday payment systems consumers and businesses already use.
The panel’s comments at Consensus Miami came as the CLARITY Act moves toward its Senate Banking Committee markup on May 14. As crypto.news reported, five major banking trade groups rejected the Tillis-Alsobrooks stablecoin compromise language just days before the vote.
The executives at Consensus did not directly address the markup, but their remarks underscored why the regulatory outcome matters to companies building stablecoin payment products at scale.
The stablecoin market currently sits at approximately 317 billion dollars in total value. Western Union announced its USDPT stablecoin on Solana earlier in May, with issuance through Anchorage Digital.
That entry reflects exactly the dynamic Harrison described: regulation has lowered the barrier, but the infrastructure needed to make stablecoins work in everyday consumer contexts is still being built.
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