what stablecoins can actually do for businesses

This edition explores where stablecoins create practical value inside a business - from payments and working capital to treasury, liquidity and onchain financial assets

A company can send a contract from Mumbai to New York in seconds. The payment can still spend days crossing the banking system.

Business has become global and software-driven. Invoices, procurement, inventory, communication and delivery increasingly move across borders in real time. Money still passes through banks, correspondent relationships, cut-off times, FX desks and reconciliation systems.

Stablecoins give businesses another way to move dollar-denominated value. The question is what changes elsewhere in the company once money moves faster and can plug more directly into software.

In a recent un# podcast conversation, Sri Misra asked Santiago Santos what these rails can actually improve inside an ordinary business.

Santiago - Santi to most - spent much of the last decade investing in digital assets and now runs Inversion, a holding company looking to acquire profitable businesses with customers and cash flow, then use technology to improve their economics.

His starting point on stablecoins was simple:

“Stablecoins allow you to just move money faster... the B2B use case I think is real.”

A smaller exporter or software company may receive dozens of international payments, pay overseas suppliers and operate with tighter cash buffers than a multinational. At smaller transaction sizes, fees matter more and settlement delays can constrain day-to-day cash flow.

Santi connected the two directly: “If you're moving money much faster, you can release working capital.”

A receivable that arrives sooner becomes cash that can be used sooner. This makes settlement speed an operating issue rather than a payments feature.

A simple way to see the difference is to follow a single $50,000 cross-border payment through both systems.

McKinsey and Artemis estimate that B2B payments represented roughly 60% of identified stablecoin payment volume in 2025, or about $226 billion. That remains small beside global B2B payments, but the direction is clear enough to watch.

Consider a business in an emerging market that earns revenue from American customers, buys software in dollars and imports equipment priced in dollars. Traditional banking can force repeated movements between domestic currency and dollars, with separate providers and settlement steps each time.

Stablecoins can let part of that commercial balance remain dollar-denominated between transactions, subject to local regulation and the company's own currency needs.

SpaceX offers a useful example. Santi mentioned it during the conversation as a significant stablecoin user. Public reporting supports a specific use case: Stripe says Bridge has been used by SpaceX to repatriate funds from Starlink sales in Argentina, Nigeria and other markets.

Starlink customers never need to see the treasury rail. SpaceX simply needs a practical way to move commercial proceeds from markets where traditional money movement can be difficult.

The same logic applies to exporters, marketplaces and companies paying international contractors. The payment becomes part of a broader cash-management workflow.

A multinational company may have balances distributed across subsidiaries, currencies, banks and countries. One entity has excess cash while another needs liquidity. Treasury teams maintain buffers because money cannot always be moved exactly when needed.

Stablecoins allow approved counterparties to move liquidity continuously and can reduce some prefunding and timing constraints built around traditional settlement windows. Reconciliation can also become more automated when payment data are available to the software running the workflow.

The most interesting implementations can be almost invisible to the business user. In July 2026, Ramp added stablecoin payments to Bill Pay using Stripe's Bridge infrastructure. A business can fund a payment from its bank account; Bridge handles the conversion and sends the stablecoin to the recipient wallet. The payer stays inside a familiar finance workflow.

Cash and short-duration investments often sit across separate accounts and systems. Treasury teams move money into money-market funds or government securities, then redeem those assets when liquidity is needed elsewhere.

Tokenized U.S. Treasury products have now grown to roughly $16 billion. As more of these assets become accessible onchain, stablecoins can increasingly serve as the cash and settlement layer around them.

The workflow becomes tighter: stablecoin liquidity can be allocated into a yield-bearing asset and brought back into payment liquidity without moving through completely disconnected financial infrastructure. Eligibility, custody and regulation still determine which businesses can use these products, but the architecture is becoming real.

> in practice

Businesses, treasuries and investors holding idle stablecoin liquidity can allocate capital through an agentic framework designed to pursue onchain yield opportunities with risk management embedded into the process.

As Treasuries, credit and other financial assets move onchain, the same infrastructure can connect stablecoin liquidity to a broader set of tokenized yield opportunities. More at aarna.ai

The stablecoin market sits around $300 billion, and the infrastructure forming around that liquidity is becoming increasingly consequential.

Visa's stablecoin settlement pilot reached a $7 billion annualized run rate in April 2026 and now supports nine blockchains. Stripe gives businesses in more than 100 countries access to dollar-denominated stablecoin balances, while Bridge handles stablecoin orchestration underneath products such as Ramp.

These developments place stablecoins inside systems businesses already use. A finance team can interact with a familiar payment or treasury product while the provider handles blockchain selection, conversion and much of the operational complexity.

There is still an awkward transition between the two systems.

Many businesses ultimately need local fiat, which means off-ramps can reintroduce banking delays, FX spreads and traditional compliance checks.

But as more financial activity moves onchain, compliance can move with it - wallets and counterparties can be screened programmatically, transaction histories monitored continuously, and eligibility rules embedded directly into financial workflows. The friction does not disappear; more of it becomes software.

The progression begins with a payment. Faster settlement makes receivables usable sooner. Dollar liquidity can move across markets. Treasury can become more responsive. Excess cash can move into tokenized financial assets and return to payment liquidity on the same broad infrastructure.

Each step makes the next one more useful.

Stablecoins are becoming the cash layer of a larger onchain financial system. Their business value will come from how naturally that cash can move through the rest of a company's financial life - payments, working capital, treasury and investment.

As more finance moves onchain, money itself starts to behave more like the software already running the business.

This issue grew out of a conversation with Santiago Santos, founder of Inversion Capital, on stablecoins, business adoption, onchain credit and Inversion's approach to bringing new financial rails into companies that already have customers and cash flow. The full episode is on Unhashed.

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