Do Stablecoins Replace ACH and SWIFT — Or Hit a Regulatory Ceiling?
Do Stablecoins Replace ACH and SWIFT — Or Hit a Regulatory Ceiling?
A question I keep circling back to:
Do stablecoins eventually rival ACH and SWIFT — or do they hit a regulatory ceiling long before that happens?
Stablecoins already move meaningful volume, just not in the ways most people notice.
This isn’t about replacing cards at checkout. That’s not what this is about at all.
It’s about settlement, treasury, payroll, and cross-border flows — the parts of finance where speed, availability, and transparency actually matter.
What Stablecoins Are Really Competing With
ACH is slow, but dependable.
SWIFT is global, but expensive and opaque.
They’ve lasted because they’re trusted, regulated, and deeply embedded into how institutions operate.
Stablecoins challenge them on very specific dimensions:
- Continuous settlement
- No weekends or cut-off times
- Cross-border by default
- Clear, near-real-time visibility
In isolation, that looks compelling.
So why haven’t stablecoins displaced legacy rails already?
Why Adoption Has Been Selective
Two reasons stand out.
1. Regulation Slows Without Blocking
Not outright hostility — deliberate caution.
Stablecoins sit awkwardly between payments, banking, and markets. Regulators don’t need to ban them to slow adoption. Requiring clarity on custody, reserves, reporting, and intermediaries is often enough to cap how far and how fast they spread.
As I’ve written before about KYC, trust, and compliance trade-offs, financial infrastructure rarely stalls because the technology fails. It stalls because incentives and liability aren’t aligned.
2. Incentives Favour the Status Quo
Banks don’t rush to replace rails they monetise.
Payment networks don’t volunteer to make themselves less relevant.
Adoption usually starts where incumbents can’t serve demand cheaply or quickly enough — not where they already dominate.
That’s why stablecoin settlement shows up fastest in:
- Cross-border payments
- Emerging markets
- Corporate treasury and internal transfers
Not domestic retail payments.
“Stablecoins grow where legacy rails are weakest — not where they’re entrenched.”
How This Actually Plays Out
If stablecoins ever rival ACH or SWIFT, it won’t be because consumers demanded it.
It’ll be because enough institutions quietly decided the old pipes weren’t worth defending.
The more interesting question is this:
Do regulators eventually treat stablecoin settlement as a new category of payment rail — or keep forcing it into frameworks designed for a different era?
That answer probably determines whether stablecoins remain an efficiency layer at the edges, or become part of the core financial stack.
As discussed in the context of stablecoins as dollar infrastructure, the biggest shifts in money don’t arrive with announcements. They arrive when usage quietly outgrows the old system.
Teams Building Across the Stack
Some teams I’m watching across payments, settlement, and stablecoin infrastructure: