Stablecoins get treated like a crypto market structure story. The more practical way to look at them is as a payments product.
If a new rail makes money movement faster or cheaper, it tends to win. If it does not, it stays a niche tool.
That is how Zach Abrams, CEO of Bridge, frames the space. His baseline comparison is fintech, not ideology. Square lowered the friction to accept card payments. Brex reduced friction for startups to get a corporate card. Robinhood made trading feel free. These products worked because the value proposition was obvious in dollars and cents.
He sees stablecoins the same way. They can move value in a way that is faster and cheaper, and that makes them hard to ignore over time.
Payments are “simple” until you look at the rails
A common misconception is that payments are trivial. Money moves from one account to another.
In practice, payments products are built by stitching together messy systems. Abrams gives a clean example from outside crypto.
Early Cash App let people send money to bank accounts instantly, even though the US did not really support instant bank transfers at the time. The trick was using debit card refunds. Refunds hit a debit card immediately, which credits the bank account quickly. That refund mechanism became an instant payment experience.
This is what innovation often looks like in payments. It is not a new rail. It is a clever use of an existing one.
Stablecoins are different because they are not just a UI improvement. They can change how settlement works underneath.
Why the US rails lag Europe
Abrams also gives a practical explanation for why the US feels behind Europe on bank-to-bank transfers.
The US has far more banks and a dual banking structure. You can have large federal banks operating across states and many smaller state-regulated banks serving local markets. That creates multiple regulators and makes coordination hard.
In the US, new payment rails roll out bottom-up. Adoption is optional. RTP gets some adoption, not universal. FedNow gets some adoption, not universal.
In Europe, fewer banks and heavier regulation make it easier to mandate standards. If everyone is going to support SEPA Instant, it happens.
The US ends up with a strange outcome: very strong banking infrastructure, but weak payment rails.
Why stablecoins looked obvious in 2018, and still felt underbuilt in 2022
Abrams points back to 2018, when USDC launched and he was at Coinbase. The early instinct was to use stablecoins to build cross-border money products, because the cost and friction of moving value globally is real.
By 2022, when Bridge started, he was surprised by how little had changed. Stablecoins were still used heavily for trading and crypto-native settlement, but less for mainstream payments use cases.
Bridge is aimed at that gap. An infrastructure platform that lets companies issue, move, hold, and spend stablecoins via APIs.
The duopoly problem
Abrams describes the market as a duopoly: USDT and USDC. Both are successful.
But he argues they are not aligned with stablecoins becoming a core payment rail because their incentives are oriented around assets under management. They keep the yield. They have fees that make high-velocity payments less attractive.
His view is that payments use cases need economics that flow back to developers and users, not economics optimized for static AUM.
This is why he is interested in stablecoin issuance. A company can issue its own stablecoin, capture the economics, control where it operates, and avoid fee structures that make payments uneconomic at scale.
Regulation is not optional
Abrams is direct that the long-term outcome depends on regulation.
Early on, the only priority was surviving long enough to get customers. Once the business exists, the priority shifts. He says they are now making regulatory investments and spending time with regulators because stablecoins will not scale without regulatory clarity.
He also describes how stablecoins get treated in practice. Banks and boards often treat stablecoin activity as automatically higher risk, even when the underlying activity is similar to traditional money movement. The label changes the risk category.
The risks he cares about
He lists three main risks.
One, the ecosystem stays a duopoly. Stablecoins get bigger, but payments adoption stays limited because the incentives do not support high-velocity use cases.
Two, regulation. The market is downstream of political battles, competing bank interests, and the rules that end up getting written.
Three, depegs. At an early stage, a major loss of trust can shift the trajectory.
A fourth risk is also raised: over-reliance on the US dollar. There is demand for tokenized versions of other currencies, but issuers and infrastructure are still early.
A founder lesson that is not about stablecoins
Abrams also describes how hard it was to start Bridge in 2022 and 2023. Terra, FTX, SVB, USDC depeg. A period where it felt like the market could disappear at any time.
He says that scarcity shaped the company. They under-hired and stayed behind demand once things started working.
It is a useful reminder that timing does not only affect adoption. It affects how founders build.
Bottom line
This view treats stablecoins as a payments product first.
Whether they become a real payment rail depends on incentives and regulation. The technology matters, but it does not decide the outcome by itself.
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