Stripe Co-Founder: Banks ‘Very Interested’ in Stablecoin Use
Payments firm Stripe has reportedly held initial talks with banks about using stablecoins.
As Bloomberg News reported Friday (May 30), these discussions are happening as Stripe is rolling out a series of stablecoin-related products.
“In the conversations we have with them, they’re very interested,” Stripe President and Co-Founder John Collison said in an interview with Bloomberg.
“This is not something that banks are just kind of brushing away or treating as a fad. Banks are very interested in how they should be integrated with stablecoins into their product offerings as well.”
The report said Stripe is among several companies in the FinTech space — including PayPal, FIS, and Fiserv — that are using stablecoins as a method of payment, and not just something used in crypto trading.
“Regulated bank-issued stablecoins offer faster, more efficient and globally accessible payment options,” said Julia Demidova, head of digital currencies product and strategy at FIS. “With proper regulation, banks will become central players in digital assets, driving innovation while ensuring consumer protection.”
Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote last week about the potential for stablecoins to solve the logistics problem associated with making crypto payments.
“People hold their assets in crypto, but ‘pay with bitcoin’ is so 2019. Merchants don’t want to accept it, they want to accept stablecoins,” Mesh CEO and Co-founder Bam Azizi told PYMNTS during an interview at Stablecon.
“The crypto market cap is $3 trillion, and the stablecoin market cap is $250 billion, meaning it’s less than 10%. If you want to build a payments network, you need to solve the divide so shoppers can walk in and pay with their assets, while merchants receive the payment as stablecoin.”
Prized for their price stability and rapid transfer capabilities, stablecoins such as USDC and USDT have become key instruments in global trade, remittances and decentralized finance (DeFi). But beyond their apparent simplicity sits a complicated network of operational, technical and security frameworks.
“At first glance,” PYMNTS added, “sending stablecoins appears deceptively simple: input a recipient address, confirm the amount, and submit.”
Still, this transaction traverses an ecosystem involving wallet infrastructure, smart contracts, off-chain data integrations, compliance tools, and blockchain networks, all of them offering potential points of failure or attack.
“The biggest problem in crypto is not adoption, it’s the user experience,” Azizi said. “You need to make payments so simple that even a grandmother will use it one day, maybe without even knowing that the mechanism behind the scenes is a stablecoin … to do that, you need to do a lot of heavy lifting.”
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