Why Stablecoins Struggle to Move Beyond Crypto-Native Use Cases

The token mechanics are clean: mint/burn against reserves, deterministic peg, on-chain transfer. The go-to-market, by contrast, remains an unsolved engineering problem. The friction does not live in the protocol. It lives at the merchant boundary.

Why the merchant boundary resists adoption

Airwallex VP of Product Dan Kim, who previously led merchant outreach at Coinbase, told Fortune that the channel hit a structural wall. Chargeback liability, double-stack integration with incumbent processors, and local-currency settlement requirements each impose a cost layer that stablecoin rails do not amortize away. Kim's framing was unsparing: "I ran into a blocker for how to make stablecoins useful … It was a dead end." The same logic applies to domestic U.S. retail: Venmo and Zelle already clear P2P at near-zero marginal cost, and credit-card reward economics tend to dominate any stablecoin-yield equivalent that issuers can construct.

The result is a use-case imbalance the data makes visible. Roughly 98% of stablecoins in circulation remain U.S. dollar-backed, and that concentration has held for years. Demand is dollar-anchored by construction, even where end-user needs are not.

Where the rails actually pull weight

Two corridors show the system working as designed. The first is consumer dollar access in emerging markets, where Tether has scaled to a $183 billion business serving users who treat USDT as a dollar substitute and store of value. The second is intra-African B2B settlement, where Onafriq now routes regulated USDC across a network spanning roughly 1 billion mobile money wallets, 500 million bank accounts, and more than 40 markets. Per Crypto Briefing, over 80% of those cross-border transfers historically pass through offshore correspondent banks — a routing path that absorbs roughly $5 billion in fees annually. Circle's API and mint infrastructure, according to the same reporting, compressed Onafriq's projected six-month integration to four to six weeks. That acceleration is the precise mechanical dividend a programmable settlement rail is meant to deliver.

The Onafriq build is worth parsing at the protocol level. Partners retain their existing fiat stack and add USDC as a parallel settlement rail rather than a replacement, so legacy compliance perimeters stay intact while interbank latency collapses. The topology differs from a consumer merchant push, which is why the rails scale in corridors where correspondent banking is the bottleneck and stall in domestic retail checkout where cards already dominate.

The non-USD branch

Revolut's reported launch of EURR, a euro-backed stablecoin, signals one path off the dollar axis. The two outlets carrying the item — Disruption Banking and East & Partners — disclose neither issuance scale, reserve composition, nor licensing jurisdiction in the available material, so a deeper read waits on primary documentation. Conceptually, euro and other national-currency tokens plug the gap Fortune flagged: smaller vendors under local-currency or crypto-admission restrictions can still sit inside a stablecoin graph, provided the token matches the clearing currency. Until those issuers ship at scale, the 98% USD figure stays sticky, and the dollar functions as the de facto unit of account for the entire stablecoin stack — including the corridors it does not natively serve.