Stablecoins move trillions of dollars a year, but only a small share of that activity pays for goods and services. At Stablecon USA 2026 in Washington, D.C., Pavel Kashuba, Strategic Leader at Coinspaid Solutions, used his main-stage address to explain why and what payment providers can do about it.
As Stablecoin Insider reported from the event, Kashuba pointed to a McKinsey analysis, prepared with Artemis, that estimated annual stablecoin activity at up to $35 trillion. Actual stablecoin payments, based on December 2025 activity, ran at about $390 billion, roughly 1% of total volume.
Merchant interest is not the bottleneck. His session, “Four in Ten American Businesses Take Crypto. Most of Their Customers Never Notice,” cited a Harris Poll survey for the National Cryptocurrency Association showing that 39% of surveyed U.S. merchants accept crypto at checkout, with crypto representing 26% of total sales for those merchants. A second NCA study found that 26.8 million Americans, or 40% of U.S. crypto holders, use crypto to shop and pay. Kashuba called availability a limited yardstick. In his view, adoption becomes real when payments complete and customers return to pay the same way.
To get there, he described four operational decisions. Placement decides whether shoppers see the crypto option at checkout. Currency and network coverage affect the cost and processing time of each transaction. Settlement design governs when merchants receive funds and in what form. Custody establishes who controls the assets and who is responsible for them. For banks, PSPs and acquirers, Kashuba said, these are the choices behind any crypto service they offer to merchants. Each one can be configured well or badly, and a weak choice at any point is enough to keep a technically available option from turning into regular payments.
The framework draws on the experience of Coinspaid Solutions, whose clients’ infrastructure has processed more than €100 billion in volume and over 200 million transactions. At that volume, he explained, the visibility of the checkout option and the choice of network measurably change how many payments are completed, while the settlement setup determines how much exposure a merchant keeps after each transaction. Kashuba reported that more than 70% of businesses settle crypto payments in fiat through automatic conversion into U.S. dollars or euros, so they never need to hold crypto. That settlement is delivered by regulated entities or licensed banking partners, and availability differs from one jurisdiction to another. Because blockchain transfers fall outside the card chargeback system, refunds remain a separate process run by the merchant.
On custody, Kashuba said the right choice depends on how much control a business wants and how much infrastructure it can handle. In the enterprise model Coinspaid Solutions has developed, financial institutions operate under their own regulatory framework and keep control of transaction signing. Coinspaid deploys and maintains the technology, which lets institutions preserve their customer relationships and operating models. Kashuba described control, security, compliance and operational capacity as parts of one system that should be designed together.
The next test may come from artificial intelligence. Amazon’s Buy for Me and Google’s Universal Cart already let AI systems make purchases for users, and the x402 protocol has recorded more than 100 million transactions on Base. Kashuba argued that this kind of autonomous commerce will rest on the same base as today’s checkout: visible payment options, suitable network coverage, reliable settlement and clearly assigned custody. His closing point tied the whole talk together. Crypto payment infrastructure matters when it takes the demand that already exists and turns it into steady, repeat usage.
