Stablecoins Are Taking Over and Most Banks Are Already Behind

Tedd Huff, CEO of fintech advisory firm Voalyre and founder of Fintech Confidential, sits down with Nik Milanović, Founder and FinTech Enthusiast in Chief of This Week in FinTech, a global community of more than 200,000 members, and the founder of StableCon, the first conference built exclusively around stablecoins and payments. Nik also serves as a General Partner at The FinTech Fund, where he invests in the next generation of FinTech startups.Stablecoins have spent years being called either the future of money or a passing trend. What's changed isn't just the hype cycle: it's the regulatory foundation underneath it. The passage of the GENIUS Act, the repeal of SEC guidance SAB 121 on crypto custody, and a visible shift in how banks and financial institutions are engaging with stablecoins have moved this conversation from theoretical to operational. Banks that were quietly watching are now building. Companies that had no public stablecoin strategy 12 months ago are now processing stablecoin transactions in more than 150 countries.But here's what's worth paying attention to: the version of stablecoins that actually reaches everyday people won't look like what the original crypto community envisioned. No seed phrases. No self-custody. No libertarian utopia. What mass adoption looks like is a Stripe-powered merchant settlement that runs on blockchain rails while the customer sees something that looks exactly like a credit card transaction. As Nik puts it, "the revolution has to become a lot more boring first."That's not a failure of the original idea. That's how every major technology shift has played out, from radio to the internet. The infrastructure gets built, the guardrails go in, the corporates arrive, and what was once radical becomes routine.The same pattern is showing up in how banks and FinTech companies are working together. The old model of banks acquiring technology companies and absorbing them in-house has largely failed. What's replacing it is a partnership model: tech-forward institutions like FinWise, Column Bank, and Cross River Bank figuring out how to extend their capabilities without overreaching their charters. The tension between "you're either a bank or a tech company" has given way to something more practical.That shift in thinking is exactly what Nik built StableCon around. After six years of running This Week in FinTech and hearing repeated calls to launch a conference, the case for yet another general FinTech or crypto event wasn't there. There are more than 250 conferences globally with FinTech in the title. What didn't exist was a conference sitting at the specific intersection of banking, FinTech, and crypto, focused entirely on stablecoins: not asset price speculation, not blockchain theory, but the actual infrastructure of how money moves.The conference was announced January 17, 2025. It ran May 29 in New York City. That's five months to plan, hire, sell tickets, and pull off an inaugural event in one of the most expensive cities in the world. At the start of May, only 400 tickets had been sold. In the final two weeks, 500 more sold as word spread and people realized they needed to be in the room. Final attendance: more than 1,000.What the event revealed was as important as the numbers. Attendees were so focused on meeting each other that many skipped the general sessions entirely. That's not a failure: that's what happens when you gather a thousand people who are actually working in the same ecosystem and give them a room for the first time. The feedback confirmed it: StableCon filled a gap that BTC Vegas, Token2049, Permissionless, Money 2020, Consensus, Finovate, and FinTech Nexus weren't filling.The next StableCon US is expanding to three days, moving to Washington, DC at the Gaylord at National Harbor, and shifting to September to avoid scheduling conflicts. The goal is to bring in policy participants, regulators, law firms, and accounting firms alongside the operators, reflecting where the stablecoin conversation is actually heading.The current phase of stablecoin adoption has a name: skeuomorphic. Just like early apps made digital wallets look like leather wallets to make them feel familiar, today's stablecoin products largely rebuild what already exists on traditional rails. ACH replaced by stablecoin settlement. Wires replaced by on-chain transfers. The form looks the same; the infrastructure underneath is different.What comes after that phase is where things get genuinely interesting. Programmable payments with instructions built directly into the transaction. Conditional transfers that can't be replicated on analog rails. On-chain escrow, disputes, and chargebacks managed without customer service departments. Collateral composed from tokenized holdings across multiple asset classes, combined into a single deposit without requiring conversion into dollars first.That future isn't fully visible yet. As Nik says, "the coolest products that are built with ...