Why the Next Stablecoin Winners Start With Builders

Builders who simplify real-world payments will define the next wave.

Bettina Sosa

DevRel & Full-Stack Engineer

Why the Next Stablecoin Winners Start With Builders

Stablecoins have outgrown their roots as trading chips. In the past year they processed an estimated $46  trillion in on‑chain transactions, even after filtering out bot activity the volume is roughly $9 trillion, comparable to PayPal and closing in on Visa’s $16 trillion footprint. On modern blockchains, throughput already exceeds 3,000 TPS, and issuers hold more than $150 billion in U.S. Treasuries, making stablecoins the world’s 17th‑largest holder of U.S. debt.

Institutional players aren’t ignoring this:

Visa is now building a multi-coin, multi-chain settlement network.
Mastercard tried to buy Zero Hash for up to $2B after losing BVNK to Coinbase
Stripe rolled out USDC subscription payments
Shopify plugged into USDC via Base, including refunds, delayed capture, and tax routing

Yet these numbers mask the fact that stablecoins account for less than 1 % of global daily payment flows, and adoption is concentrated in remittances and B2B corridors. Massive capital flows through the pipes, but consumer adoption has not followed at the same pace.

Stablecoins Are Real. Adoption Isn’t Inevitable.

Real-world usage emerges where the value is most obvious:

FX‑exposed payroll and remittances: 71 % of LATAM institutions use stablecoins for cross‑border payments and 92 % say their wallet and API stacks are production‑ready. Faster settlement and FX stability matter where inflation might take 40% off your salary by the end of the month.
SMB import/export: small businesses use tokens to bypass bank gating and wire cut‑off windows.
Subscription billing for tech‑savvy clients: Stripe notes that some AI companies have shifted ~20 % of their volume to USDC because they can settle faster and it costs half as much as cards.
Online commerce pilots: Shopify and Coinbase’s Base integration supports delayed capture, tax finalization and refunds, meaning merchants can mimic card‑like flows without exposing customers to crypto complexity.

These use cases work because they deliver tangible improvements over existing rails. They also expose where adoption hasn’t happened: consumer‑to‑merchant payments in developed markets, offline point‑of‑sale, or peer‑to‑peer spending among non‑crypto natives.

Where Stablecoins Actually Work

Paying contractors in inflationary markets.

Small business cross-border commerce.

$50-size remittances with weekend settlement needs.

Subscription + digital commerce flows.

The common pattern: places where legacy rails introduce friction.

These are mundane, unsexy flows. They’re routine financial tasks that benefit from speed, cost efficiency, and access. Which is precisely why Stablecoins work better than any of their traditional counterparts.

Builders Catalyze Adoption

Infrastructure doesn’t magically translate into customers. Issuers can mint tokens and payment companies can route liquidity, but those rails remain idle until someone builds compelling products on top of them. Builders are the bridge: they decide what an invoice looks like, how a cross‑border payout feels, and whether end‑users ever have to know they’re touching a blockchain. In markets like Latin America, adoption grew because software teams wrapped tokens in simple experiences that solved currency volatility and settlement delays, not because there was a new protocol.

A lesson we could learn from Stripe in building payment flows is ‘simplicity’. By embracing a developer-first mindset, clean, consistent APIs, superb docs, low integration friction, Stripe became the default choice for businesses and engineers alike. Their platform enabled seamless web and app payment flows, which in turn shifted market share. In short: when you make it easy for builders to build, you win distribution.

Crypto hasn’t earned that trust yet. Right now, crypto UX often works against this: fragmented docs, jargon-heavy flows, and onboarding that assumes protocol literacy. AI-native builders, especially, won’t adopt rails that require decoding research papers.

In addition to real builders, the industry also needs regulatory clarity, fiat on‑ramps, and trust, to flourish.

How to Actually Win Builders

If you want developers to use your rails instead of Visa, ACH, or Stripe, give them a better path to production:

Ship real reference flows: Don’t just dump an API spec on GitHub. Provide end‑to‑end examples for payroll, invoicing, and e‑commerce that handle settlement, retries, FX quotes, and edge‑cases. Shopify’s escrow smart contract for USDC on Base demonstrates how to handle authorization, delayed capture and refunds; copy that pattern.

Invest in long‑term partner programs: Hackathons produce demos, not real scale. Work with small cohorts over months, with workshops and on‑call support. For instance, Stripe’s AI‑company clientele shifted ~20 % of their volume to stablecoins because the company co‑built subscription billing flows that hid blockchain complexity.

Publish performance and reliability: Merchants and financial operators care about 99th‑percentile settlement times, payout success rates and FX spreads, not “TPS” or DeFi jargon. Make those metrics public and prove you’re more dependable than card networks.

None of this matters if your compliance story is weak. Builders won’t risk their company on rails that regulators might shut down or that can’t deliver fiat payouts. Offer clear guidance on licensing, KYC/AML obligations, and tax reporting out of the box.

Why Myosin Is Building DevRel

At Myosin, DevRel is distribution engineering. We sit between product and market, translating complex infrastructure into usable products, connecting builders to the right corridors.

That means:

clean documentation tied to real workflows
SDKs with examples that hold up in production
support across time zones during go-live cycles
feedback loops between builders and protocol teams
corridor-specific integration playbooks

Stablecoin adoption compounds through earned trust, strong tooling, and predictable integration paths. Our DevRel function exists to make that process repeatable.

Builders move money. Myosin will help them move faster.