2026 Turning Point: 3 Forces Reshaping Payments & Stablecoin Impact
The structural flaws of the traditional cross-border payment system are becoming increasingly apparent. Taking Volkswagen Group's supply chain finance case in 2024 as an example, when paying a Mexican parts supplier, the payment involved multiple layers of intermediaries—the opening bank, two agent banks, and the receiving bank—resulting in a 6.8% fee and exchange rate loss, with funds taking up to 3.5 business days to arrive.
Ordinary consumers also incur 2%-3% currency conversion fees for overseas credit card spending, while the payment cost of compliant stablecoins is less than one percent of traditional methods.
Digital stablecoins have achieved substantial breakthroughs in multiple scenarios:
JPMorgan Chase's JPM Coin system, developed based on a private blockchain, maintains a daily transaction volume of $30-35 billion, providing multinational corporate clients with 24/7 real-time cross-border capital transfers, reducing the amount of funds tied up in transit by approximately 30%; expatriate workers in South Asia have reduced the overall cost of transferring money home using stablecoins from 6%-8% to negligible levels, and shortened the arrival time from several days to minutes; a digital payment system of a Middle Eastern energy company has reduced settlement costs across hundreds of its branches by 35%, and increased transaction efficiency several times over.
The establishment of a regulatory framework is the primary driving force.
The EU's Crypto Asset Markets Regulation (MiCA) has been fully implemented, clarifying the reserve asset requirements, information disclosure, and compliance obligations of stablecoin issuers; key progress has been made in related US legislation, establishing norms from dimensions such as market access, custody, and liquidity management; more than 30 countries, including the UK, Singapore, and Japan, have also introduced or are accelerating the development of targeted regulatory systems, defining clear boundaries for industry development.
Mature underlying technology lays the foundation for large-scale deployment.
Privacy-enhancing technologies such as zero-knowledge proofs have been commercially deployed, protecting transaction privacy while meeting regulatory audit requirements; the security of cross-chain interoperability protocols has been significantly improved, with asset losses due to security incidents decreasing by more than 80% year-on-year; enterprise-grade digital asset custody solutions integrate multi-party secure computation and hardware isolation technologies, greatly reducing the risks of private key management.
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