The post Why the next phase of stablecoin payments is all about user relationships and distribution appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

You can’t have missed the stablecoin vibe. While bitcoin BTC$63,709.23 and the rest of the crypto market are in the doldrums after falling from record highs in October, everyone else is talking about issuing tokens whose value is fixed, pegged to a real-world asset. Mostly the dollar. Not only the dollar, of course. This week alone, AllUnity, a German joint venture between DWS, Galaxy, and Flow Trader, issued a Swiss franc-based token (CHFAU) and SBI Holdings and Startale Group introduced a yen version (JPYSC). Earlier this month, Agant said it’s working on a pound stablecoin, and Hong Kong said it plans to start handing out stablecoin licenses in March. Then there’s the revelation that Mark Zuckerberg-led Meta (META) is looking to add stablecoin-based payment capabilities early in the second half of the year. The company famously tried and failed to introduce the Libra stablecoin, renamed Diem in 2019, in the face of stiff opposition from lawmakers and regulators. But Meta’s proposed return to stablecoin-based payments later this year bears little comparison with Libra/Diem, according to the co-creator of Libra, Christian Catalini, who is now a professor at MIT and the founder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab. What’s different now, says Catalini, is that stablecoins are fading into the background, offered by multiple providers and becoming part of the payments infrastructure. The once-hyped businesses of stablecoin issuance and orchestration, or the coordination of payments across different blockchains and conversion between token and fiat for payment purposes, are becoming a commodity, he said. “Not just Meta, but also Google, Apple, all of them will be using multiple providers, as is the case when they do disbursements of payments,” Catalini said in an interview with CoinDesk. “So I would expect the market to be commodified in the future, rather than a branded stablecoin.…

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Filed under: News - @ February 28, 2026 6:12 pm