Executives from MoonPay, Ripple and Paxos said at Consensus Miami 2026 that regulation of stablecoins has accelerated institutional adoption, but significant infrastructure and privacy gaps still block their mainstream use.
Summary
- MoonPay Vice President Richard Harrison said the GENIUS Act gives companies regulatory approval, accelerating the entry of traditional finance into stablecoins.
- Jack McDonald, senior vice president of Ripple, argued that institutional adoption depends on regulated products, trusted custody, and utility beyond market capitalization.
- Paxos engineer Brent Perrault has warned that unresolved privacy issues on public blockchains remain a significant barrier to stable enterprise-wide payments.
Top executives from three of the most active stablecoin companies told the Consensus Miami 2026 audience on May 8 that new U.S. regulations have fundamentally changed the competitive landscape for dollar-pegged tokens, bringing traditional financial institutions into a market that was previously difficult for them to access. This change, however, has highlighted a new set of problems that the industry has yet to resolve.
Richard Harrison, MoonPay’s vice president of banking and payments partnerships, said the passage of the GENIUS Act gave businesses in the traditional financial sector a regulatory framework within which to operate. “What GENIUS has given us is clarity,” Harrison told the panel, noting that traditional financial companies are now moving into stablecoins more quickly because compliance is easier to assess.
Harrison compared the current state of stablecoin adoption to electric vehicles: the base product works, but mass market adoption is entirely dependent 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, senior vice president for stablecoins at Ripple, told the panel that institutional clients focus less on market capitalization and more on the nuts and bolts: regulatory compliance, custody security and whether stablecoins can do anything useful beyond trading.
McDonald said Ripple continues to focus on treasury operations, collateral management and cross-border payment settlement as its primary business use cases, arguing that utility must drive adoption rather than speculative interest.
Harrison added that stablecoins currently represent a relatively small share of global fund flows, although he predicts that figure could rise to around 10% of the market over the next five years as payment pathways improve and more merchants integrate digital dollar services.
Stablecoin-based cross-border transfers are already settled almost instantly at fees of less than a dollar, compared to traditional bank fees which can exceed 6%.
Brent Perrault, senior software engineer at Paxos, said privacy remains the industry’s most persistent unsolved problem. Public blockchains expose transaction amounts and fund flows, creating compliance and privacy concerns for companies handling sensitive financial data.
Perrault warned that partial privacy solutions are insufficient as users inevitably move between private and public blockchain environments. He said competitive differentiation between stablecoin issuers is now increasingly driven by trust, distribution partnerships and user incentives rather than technical specifications alone.
Distribution Gaps and What Comes Next
Perrault pointed to the growth of PayPal USD and Charles Schwab’s use of Paxos infrastructure as proof that demand from established financial institutions is real and extends beyond crypto-native businesses.
The challenge, he said, is that even well-capitalized issuers with strong compliance records face significant friction when trying to connect stable rails to the everyday payment systems that consumers and businesses already use.
The panel’s comments at Consensus Miami came as the CLARITY Act moves toward its May 14 Senate Banking Committee markup. As crypto.news reported, five major banking trade groups rejected the language of the Tillis-Alsobrooks stablecoin compromise just days before the vote.
Consensus executives did not directly address the markup issue, but their remarks highlighted why the regulatory outcome is important for companies building stable payment products at scale.
The stablecoin market currently stands at a total value of around $317 billion. Western Union announced its stablecoin USDPT on Solana earlier in May, with an issuance via Anchorage Digital.
This entry reflects exactly the dynamic described by Harrison: regulation has lowered the barrier, but the infrastructure necessary for stablecoins to function in everyday consumption contexts is still being built.
