Mainstream financial giants rush to cash in on stablecoins

Stablecoins processed $33 trillion last year — 20 times the amount of transactions that PayPal did. And now, financial giants like BlackRock, credit cards like Visa and crypto ventures like World Liberty Financial are racing to get in on the cryptocurrency, which allows money to be transferred instantly and with minimal fees.

At least, that is the verdict from a gathering of heavyweights at the Future Investment Initiative in Miami, where I interviewed Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, World Liberty Financial co-founder Zach Witkoff and Maja Vujinovic, CEO of Digital Assets at FG Nexus, about how the digital asset will transform our financial systems.

Stablecoins, which are pegged to the dollar and designed to be less volatile than, say, Bitcoin, carved out a prominent role at FII Miami this year as sovereign wealth funds, family offices and asset managers look to get more exposure to lower-risk cryptocurrencies.

“Do I think the biggest banks in the world are thinking about whether they should launch a stablecoin? Yeah, I know they are,” Garlinghouse told me.

JPMorgan, Bank of America and Citi are in talks to launch a joint stablecoin in part because they worry they are being supplanted by the new technology, according to recent reports — and Garlinghouse believes this is just the beginning.

“You’re seeing CIOs and CFOs at Fortune 2000 companies saying, ‘Hey, are we using stablecoins? Could we be using stablecoins?’ And that’s going to continue to happen,” Garlinghouse adds. He points to the Genius Act’s passage last summer, which set rules about who can issue stablecoins and how they’re overseen, as well as the success of early adopters.

Ripple itself is an example of how quickly a company can benefit. The XRP-focused payments company was minting 20% of a rival coin, Circle’s USDC, before deciding 13 months ago to launch its own stablecoin instead.

“We found if we’re the number-one minter on the network, why don’t we look at actually doing this ourselves?” Garlinghouse said.

Now Ripple’s stablecoin handles well over $100 billion in payment volume annually, with the company making more than $100 million on the crypto.

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World Liberty Financial’s stablecoin, meanwhile, was born of necessity. After Donald Trump was “debanked” by major financial institutions ncluding JPMorgan and Bank of America in 2021, Witkoff explains, his sons Don Jr. and Eric — who are co-founders of WLF — “began to think and strategize around a more democratized system where no one was going to tell you that you couldn’t hold US dollars because of your political beliefs.”

They created a stablecoin that can be used for payments but also “tokenizes” by letting investors buy a tiny piece of a real-world asset — something which, previously, only financial institutions were able to do.

WLF most recently tokenized a hotel in the Maldives. “There’s no reason why someone with $20 to invest shouldn’t be able to invest in class-A real estate,” Witkoff told me.

Much of this is born of necessity, Vujinovic explained. She’s worked with entrepreneurs and investors who saw large chunks of their money getting eaten by bank transfers. “When transferring money takes about 15% of your paycheck, you start to question things,” she said.

This also comes amid a growing need for AI to authorize payments. Witkoff sees a world where machines pay each other directly — for data access and service agreements — without a human in the loop. “These machines aren’t going to be able to pay each other on traditional banking rails,” he said. “They’re too slow.”

JP Richardson, CEO of crypto wallet Exodus, thinks the window is closing for anyone still dragging their feet: “AI agents won’t wait for wire transfers. They won’t be limited by bankers’ hours. Money has to move at the speed of the internet now — the SWIFT era is over. When information is instant, slow money is dead money.”