Mastercard, Visa, Fiserv, and Stripe are adding stablecoin capabilities, showing that traditional finance sees stablecoins as useful for global payments, despite challenges. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) criticized stablecoins in its 2025 Economic Report, stating they do not perform well as a currency due to issues such as price instability, lack of trust, and vulnerability to criminal use. The BIS also noted that stablecoins lack the flexibility of credit essential to modern financial systems. On one hand, they’ve gone from niche crypto tools to serious considerations by legacy financial institutions. On the other, they continue to fail the basic tests of stability, acceptability, trust and utility.The success of stablecoins as a form of money requires overcoming significant challenges in infrastructure, compliance, and the economy, which may take years. “The biggest problem in crypto is not adoption; it’s the user experience,” Mesh CEO and co-founder Bam Azizi told. While traditional payment systems are governed by unified standards, stablecoins operate on fragmented blockchains and each comes with its own set of protocols. Bridging tokens across these chains can be clunky at best and introduce security risks at worst. Stablecoins also introduce new wrinkles in compliance, particularly around KYB and KYC requirements as most blockchains are pseudonymous, meaning identity verification requires external, often cumbersome, tooling. This lack of embedded identity has made stablecoins a popular tool for money laundering and illicit finance. Another critical barrier to mainstream adoption is user experience. Signing transactions, managing private keys, and navigating gas fees make stablecoin payments a chore for the uninitiated. Still looming large over the entire stablecoin ecosystem is the question of regulation. This lingering, but potentially waning, uncertainty has hampered adoption by banks and merchants who don’t want to navigate compliance ambiguity.