Even at the depths of the recent crypto winter, stablecoins stood out as a rare beacon of optimism. Investors and startups hail them as the industry's long-awaited killer application, and even crypto skeptics concede that stablecoins are a superior technology for moving money—especially after the 2025 passage of the GENIUS Act, the first U.S. federal framework for payment stablecoins, which created a predictable regulatory environment for using the tokens and helped usher mainstream financial and tech players into the market. Yet if stablecoins are so great, why is it so hard to figure out who is actually going to use them?

That question came up last week in a conversation with Dan Kim, VP of Product at the emerging fintech giant Airwallex. Before joining Airwallex, Kim held a senior business development role at Coinbase, where he led efforts to persuade merchants to adopt stablecoins. It was a tough sell. On many occasions, Kim recalls, merchants worried about who would handle chargebacks, or simply balked at adding another layer of complexity to an already-complicated payment system. That friction points to a broader gap in the stablecoin ecosystem: the tokens settle quickly and cheaply on blockchains, but consumer protections such as chargebacks and dispute resolution—long standard in card networks—are still immature. "I ran into a blocker for how to make stablecoins useful … It was a dead end," Kim said.

Kim may have a point. While stablecoins are useful in the world of crypto trading, there is little apparent need for them in everyday life in North America. Sending money to a friend or a local business is already well served by Venmo and Zelle, and even if Coinbase can build a robust ecosystem of stablecoin rewards—which it is attempting to do with USDC—it is hard to see those rewards becoming more lucrative than the rewards consumers already accrue on their credit cards.

The picture is different in other countries. For proof, look at the $183 billion stablecoin business that Tether has built by serving consumers in developing countries who want a reliable way to hold U.S. dollars—a use case rooted in places where local currencies are volatile or dollar access is limited. Meanwhile, in regions such as Northern Europe, where many consumers favor debit cards, stablecoin rewards could potentially find traction. But in North America, it is difficult to see why consumers would seek out stablecoins anytime soon.

That leaves cross-border business payments, which appear to be a natural use case for stablecoins, since they enable much faster and more secure transfers than wires and other legacy technologies. The appeal is straightforward: cross-border payments have long been slow and expensive, which is exactly the problem that companies like Wise and Airwallex built their businesses solving with local-currency pools and financial licenses rather than blockchains. But this too is more complicated than it looks. As Kim pointed out, large companies are well positioned to adopt stablecoins, but the same may not hold for the smaller vendors that serve them. In some markets, those vendors may face regulatory restrictions on accepting crypto or U.S. dollar payments, and in any case they still need to operate in their country's native currency.

In theory, these bottlenecks could be resolved by the adoption of various national stablecoins—a real stablecoin in Brazil, a Canadian dollar stablecoin in Canada, and so on. In reality, even though such tokens do exist, roughly 98% of stablecoins in circulation are backed by U.S. dollars—and that has been the case for years, reflecting how deeply the dollar's dominance in global trade and finance carries over into the tokenized world.

All of this helps explain why Airwallex CEO Jack Zhang said in 2024 that he was skeptical of stablecoins entirely, and believed his company—something like a Wise for the B2B crowd—was well served by its existing business model. That model revolves around acquiring financial licenses and holding large pools of local currencies around the world in order to provide companies with low-cost foreign exchange transfers.

A lot can change in two years, however, and Airwallex has begun to change its tune on stablecoins. It is not alone: established payments players, including Visa—which invested in Airwallex—and Mastercard have been building stablecoin settlement capabilities, and Stripe acquired the stablecoin infrastructure startup Bridge. According to Kim, stablecoins are now so widespread that Airwallex has created a service focused on the "last mile"—namely, helping customers convert U.S. stablecoins into local currency.

Airwallex—which has received a sizable investment from Visa—is also backing a startup called Metal, which is building a blockchain designed to be compliant with all local financial regulations right out of the box. Kim also noted that stablecoin use is expected to grow in the coming era of agentic commerce, in which bots handle a portion of consumers' shopping—an area where programmable, always-on payment rails could fit naturally with machine-to-machine transactions.

So what to make of all this? On one hand, Airwallex makes a compelling case that it is entering the stablecoin market at the right time and with the right business model. On the other, it is fair to ask whether the company simply decided that better late than never was the prudent course. Either way, Airwallex will face tough competition on the last-mile front from the likes of Rain and MoonPay. Meanwhile, agentic commerce remains in an early-adopter phase, with a long list of companies—including Coinbase, Robinhood, and Stripe—racing to figure it out first.

For now, the only thing that is really clear is that it is too soon to say how any of this will turn out.

By Jeff John Roberts (jeff.roberts@fortune.com, @jeffjohnroberts)

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.