Stablecoins Solved Cross-Border Payments But Evgeny Skigin Says Day-to-Day Transactions Are the Final Test for Crypto
Stablecoins face two separate payments problems, and only one of them has genuinely been solved. The first is moving money across a border, instantly and cheaply. The second is turning that money back into something a person can actually spend at a till. According to Evgeny Skigin, an entrepreneur who has spent more than a decade building crypto payment infrastructure, mixing those two problems up is why so much of the commentary around stablecoins misses what’s actually holding the industry back.
A freelancer overseas can now receive a stablecoin payment from a client on another continent in seconds, for a fraction of what a wire transfer costs. That part of the problem, according to Skigin, is essentially solved. What isn’t solved, he says, is what happens next: that same freelancer still can’t easily use those funds to buy groceries or pay a subscription without routing through an exchange, selling for local currency, and waiting for a bank payout.
“I don’t need to ask my bank to do the transfer and fill out a million forms for a $500 transaction. I can just pay someone $500 — or $5 million,” Skigin says of the payment he believes actually changed things, not a new blockchain, but the stablecoin. “The killer app for crypto has been stablecoins. Everybody can get on board with that, it doesn’t matter whether I hold US dollars or US dollar tokens. It’s one to one.”
The settlement layer already works
It’s worth being precise about what’s already been achieved, in Skigin’s account. A stablecoin is a token pegged one to one to a currency like the dollar, and it can move between two parties anywhere, at any hour, without a correspondent banking chain or a cut-off time in the way. For cross-border payments specifically, the use case traditional finance handles worst, in his view — that’s a genuine step change. Research from the Bank for International Settlements backs up what he says he’s observed directly: in regions with high remittance fees, cross-border transactional need, not speculation, is driving stablecoin adoption now.
What doesn’t yet work reliably, according to reporting on the industry’s current bottleneck, is the last mile, the moment a digital balance has to become an ordinary purchase. Converting funds still typically means moving to an exchange, selling for fiat, and waiting for a payout, friction that gives merchants little reason to build crypto acceptance into checkout even when customers already hold digital balances they’d spend if they could.
The winning approach hides the part that makes it work
The platforms actually closing that gap, industry reporting suggests, aren’t trying to get merchants to accept crypto directly, they’re doing the opposite, hiding the blockchain and settling quietly into rails that already exist. One model links a user’s digital balance directly to existing card acceptance networks, so a stablecoin balance spends like an ordinary card at checkout while the conversion happens invisibly behind the scenes. Visa and Mastercard are reportedly moving the same direction, partnering with fintech providers on real-time conversion rather than waiting for merchants to adopt something new.
That pattern doesn’t surprise Skigin, who has long argued that crypto’s advantage isn’t ideological but practical. “Tell me, how does the pound work?” he says, describing how he explains the underlying idea to newcomers. “You use it all the time. You don’t know how it works. I don’t know how mine works. It just works.” Money, in his framing, is technology that succeeds by disappearing, nobody thinks about how a video stream finds its route across the internet, and a payment rail that actually wins will work the same way, doing the settlement invisibly while the person at the register just taps a card.
Why he sees this as the real frontier
Skigin argues that this last-mile problem, not new tokens or protocols, is where most of the practical work in crypto payments now sits — and that it matters more than anything happening at a more speculative layer of the market. The settlement breakthrough, in his view, already happened. What determines whether it reaches ordinary spending is whether someone builds the unglamorous plumbing connecting a digital balance to a payment terminal that hasn’t changed its interface in decades.
It also shapes where he thinks regulation needs to focus next. Europe’s MiCA framework gave crypto businesses a licensing path, which he considers meaningful, “banks are their own governments now,” he says of the resistance that preceded it. “They look at it and say, we don’t want anything to do with this, and we don’t have to, so we won’t.” But he expects that posture to flip, and soon. “Banks won’t just open your account, they’ll want to integrate your platform into theirs, because they understand that if they’re not getting onto this train, they’ll be left behind.”
None of this, Skigin is careful to note, requires anyone to have a view on where a token’s price is headed. It requires recognizing that the industry’s most consequential current work is closing the distance between holding a digital dollar and spending it and that the businesses solving that unglamorous problem, in his assessment, are doing more for adoption than anything happening in a flashier corner of the market. “Crypto is absolutely going to explode in the next five years,” he says. Cross-border settlement, in his telling, was the proof of concept. Everyday spending is the test still being run.
