Stablecoin infrastructure needs an upgrade to power payments at scale

Payments are stablecoin’s killer use case

2024 is the year that stablecoins emerged as the world’s new high-speed payments rail, enabling always-on, near-instant transfer of value globally.

Thanks to recent infrastructure upgrades, blockchains can now process payments at scale, with costs reduced and 50 times as many transactions per second. The ecosystem is also getting safer as new regulatory frameworks bring safeguards and oversight. Big name financial institutions and PSPs have moved into the space (most recently Stripe), and fintechs that had been eyeing stablecoins from afar are starting to get local crypto licences and integrate stablecoins into their products.

But, to accelerate adoption in 2025 and beyond, we need to make stablecoin payments easier to manage.

It’s time for the next phase of the stablecoin revolution: payments orchestration.

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Payments need more than wallets

Blockchains are not advanced payment systems out-of-the-box.

To manage stablecoin payments, you need to work out how to deal with multiple different networks and tokens, each with their own behaviours, rules and data structures.

In the last decade, a first generation of wallet solutions have come to market to tackle this. These generic-purpose solutions were designed for early adopters, at a time when stablecoins were mostly used to facilitate crypto trading.

They offer a standardised API interface to blockchains: a way to receive and send blockchain assets across networks, create new wallet addresses and read and write transactions easily. They support businesses in securely managing private keys (aka digital asset custody), and simplify integrations with AML compliance systems so transactions can be risk-screened.

Some have added payments functionality on top – but these features require significant configuration and typically aren't automated.

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At their core, these systems are built for holding funds, not moving them. They’re designed for managing wallets, not managing payments.

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That means the fintechs and PSPs who use them need to first develop blockchain expertise, then configure these wallet solutions to make them work for their payments use cases. This requires understanding the nuances of:

• wallet configuration (eg deposit wallets, omnibus wallets, payout wallets or segregated wallets)
• wallet funding, fee and liquidity management (eg various gas station setups for different networks)
• how to move funds between those wallet setups efficiently, with minimum fees

All of this can mean months of design work before PSPs and fintechs can go live.

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Making blockchain work for payments (at scale)

A new generation of digital asset infrastructure is emerging, optimised for payments at scale.

This infrastructure abstracts away complexity and makes sending and receiving blockchain payments as simple and automated as bank payments.

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This is payments orchestration for stablecoins.

And BVNK is driving this change with Layer1.

For the past five years, BVNK has gathered our learnings from building payments systems across blockchain and traditional payment rails. Layer1 is the culmination of those learnings: a self-hosted, self-custody digital asset platform, built for payments.

Powering our own crypto processing today, Layer1 enables fast deployment, with pre-built logic and automated workflows designed for payments use cases. It also comes with trading and liquidity management all in one place.

It differs from our core BVNK payments platform, which is designed for businesses who don’t have their own crypto licences and who are looking for an all-inclusive solution. Layer1 is built for financial services providers who are looking for complete autonomy over their payments infrastructure: manage your own keys, bring your own crypto licensing, and integrate your chosen liquidity partners.

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Layer1 represents a strategic shift in how we think about payments, where stablecoins and fiat currencies coexist seamlessly, and payment orchestration becomes the key to unlocking new efficiencies.

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Over the coming weeks I’m going to examine this shift in more detail. I’ll cover what self-custody stablecoin infrastructure looks like today, and explain why these solutions don’t always work for payment use cases. Then I'll show how Layer1 is built for self-custody stablecoin payments at scale.

I’ll also look at what’s coming next.

At BVNK we believe in the power of stablecoins to accelerate global money movement, but we also believe the future of payments is multi-rail, with stablecoins and fiat currencies coexisting.

The next phase of our Layer1 vision is all about multi-rail payments orchestration.

Here, we’ll empower payments companies and enterprises to move further up the payments stack, by automating stablecoin and fiat payments with a single payments SDK.

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