Tens of trillions of dollars move through dollar‑based stablecoins every year, and close to 90% of that is still tied to trading crypto tokens. Stablecoins work a lot like casino chips. You turn your dollars into chips, play blackjack, slot machines, or whatever game you want, and then cash your chips back out into dollars when you leave. In the crypto world, like USDT (Tether) or USDC (Circle) to place your bets, and when you are done, you convert those stablecoins back into dollars.

With the passage of the GENIUS Act, which gives stablecoins new regulatory legitimacy, other use cases are starting to emerge involving institutions. They are early, but some are already showing real momentum.

McKinsey & Company recently shared a report with some useful numbers on this shift. Out of roughly $35 trillion in annual stablecoin volume, only about $390 billion is actually payments , e.g., cross‑border remittances, treasury cash management, payroll, and card spend. The rest is still mostly speculative trading in crypto assets. What is interesting, though, is that about 56% of that payments volume is business‑to‑business activity (supply chain, cross‑border flows, treasury). That B2B segment looks like it has real staying power.

So why do corporate treasurers care about stablecoins? A typical treasury team at a multinational has to juggle funding across many subsidiaries and hundreds of suppliers. Their objective is to keep subsidiaries funded, maintain the right level of liquidity, maximize returns on cash, and minimize trapped capital. The current system makes that hard. Moving money internationally can take days and cost 1–3% in fees. Stablecoin transactions, by contrast, are close to instantaneous, and you can program the triggers for when transfers happen. For example, treasury can automate movements of stablecoins between subsidiaries based on predefined cash‑balance thresholds.

How are treasuries actually getting onto these new rails? Some are building directly by setting up their own blockchain wallets and using popular stablecoins like USDC for internal and cross‑border flows. Circle, which issues USDC, offers a service called Mint specifically for institutions to mint and redeem USDC at scale. But most corporates are turning to their existing banks. Players like JPMorganChase , HSBC , and Standard Chartered now offer 24/7, real‑time cross‑border payment capabilities for corporate clients using either stablecoins or tokenized deposits under the bank’s umbrella.

This creates a strategic question for mid‑size banks. They need a plan to offer similar alternative payment rails to their corporate clients or risk seeing deposits drain from valuable non‑interest‑bearing accounts. For many, that will mean partnering with fintechs that can provide the underlying technology when the bank is unable or unwilling to build it in‑house.

A payments system that has survived for decades is now changing quickly. The technology and regulatory frameworks are finally in place to make moving money feel as simple and as fast as sending a text.