Stablecoins are no longer a side conversation in digital finance. With transaction volumes rising, regulators moving faster and major institutions building around blockchain-based settlement, the question for investors is now where the pressure lands first.
Dinis Guarda argues that the biggest shift is already under way. As Founder and CEO of ztudium, he has spent more than two decades working across fintech, blockchain, artificial intelligence and digital transformation, with experience spanning financial platforms, advisory work and global technology ecosystems. His work has been recognized by Thinkers360, Forbes and Cryptoweekly, and he is widely positioned as a voice on the future of digital finance and emerging technology.
In this exclusive interview with the Champions Speakers Agency, Guarda discusses why stablecoins are becoming part of mainstream financial infrastructure, which sectors face the most disruption, and why regulatory clarity around the GENIUS Act and CLARITY Act could shape the next phase of institutional digital asset adoption.
Q1. Stablecoins are moving closer to mainstream payments and financial infrastructure. Which sectors are most exposed if adoption keeps growing: banks, payment networks, exchanges, remittance firms or fintech platforms?
This question contains its own answer: stablecoins are not moving closer to mainstream — they are already there. The data makes this abundantly clear. Total stablecoin transaction volume hit $33 trillion in 2025, up 72% year on year.
By August 2025, stablecoins accounted for 30% of all on-chain crypto transaction volume — their highest annual share on record — and the Federal Reserve has noted aggregate market capitalisation reaching $317 billion by April 2026, representing more than 50% growth since early 2025.
Citi GPS has revised its 2030 stablecoin issuance forecast upward to a base case of $1.9 trillion, with a bull scenario of $4.0 trillion.
The real challenge is not adoption velocity. It is the way the market is deeply fragmented and there is an alarming absence of coordinated institutional governance.
What we are witnessing is a two-speed adoption dynamic: major institutional players — Visa, Mastercard, JPMorgan, BlackRock, Coinbase, Circle — are building stablecoin infrastructure at scale, whilst regulatory frameworks, interoperability standards, and cross-border settlement corridors remain deeply uneven across jurisdictions.
This creates structural inequality. Those with the capital and compliance infrastructure to operate within the emerging regulatory perimeter — the GENIUS Act in the US, MiCA in Europe, Hong Kong’s Stablecoin Bill — will consolidate market position rapidly. Those outside it will either follow the leaders or operate in grey zones of increasing legal and operational risk.
In terms of sector exposure, I would highlight that remittance firms face the most existential pressure, since stablecoins already offer cross-border transfers 500 times faster than legacy rails at a fraction of the cost. South Asia saw stablecoin-driven volumes rise 80% to $300 billion in the first half of 2025 alone, and in Latin America, 71% of stablecoin activity is already tied to cross-border payments.
Payment networks face structural disintermediation of the middle layer, though the smarter ones — Visa’s annualised stablecoin settlement alone run rate reached $4.5 billion in January 2026, up 460% year on year.
The payment industry players are pivoting to become stablecoin settlement infrastructure rather than fighting the tide. Traditional banks face a dual threat: margin compression on their correspondent banking and FX operations, and the cultural challenge of integrating programmable, 24/7 digital money into institutions built around batch processing and business hours.
DeFi and non-regulated stablecoin operators represent the structural risk that no one is adequately tackling. USDT and USDC together account for over 84% of stablecoin market capitalization, but there are 291 stablecoins in circulation, many operating outside any meaningful regulatory framework.
As I have argued across my research, including in published work on blockchain and fintech innovation, that we urgently need both innovation and integration of stablecoins related technologies and infrastructure must be allowed to flow — but without coordinated global governance frameworks, we risk encoding financial fragmentation into the infrastructure of the next monetary system.
Q2. What is the biggest regulatory catalyst investors should watch in digital finance over the next six to twelve months, and which part of the market would react first if clearer rules arrive?
The single most consequential regulatory development to track right now is the passage and implementation of the US CLARITY Act, in conjunction with the operational bedding-in of the GENIUS Act. The GENIUS Act — signed into law in July 2025 — established the first federal regulatory framework for stablecoins, requiring full-reserve backing and monthly disclosures from issuers.
The CLARITY Act, which passed the US House 294–134 in July 2025 and cleared the Senate Agriculture Committee in January 2026, is targeted for Senate Banking Committee markup imminently. Its passage would enshrine the commodity-versus-security classification framework into statute and make it resistant to future regulatory reversal.
But this is a globally important story. The WEF’s January 2026 digital assets outlook identifies regulatory certainty as the primary accelerant for the entire digital asset ecosystem, noting that Singapore, the UAE, Hong Kong, and the EU have all moved decisively.
The convergence of these frameworks is creating what the IMF’s Financial Counsellor Tobias Adrian described in April 2026 as not a marginal efficiency improvement, but a fundamental reconfiguration of how trust, settlement, and risk management are organised across the global financial system.
Investors should understand that the market reaction to regulatory clarity will not be uniform. The parts that will react first and most strongly are tokenised real-world assets and institutional custody services.
Once the CLARITY Act provides statutory certainty on asset classification, institutional allocators — pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, insurance companies — who have been sitting on the sidelines precisely because of legal ambiguity will begin moving capital.
The OCC has already issued charter guidance covering Circle, Ripple, BitGo, Paxos, Fidelity Digital Assets, and Coinbase, creating federally regulated custody infrastructure. This is the plumbing that enables the flood.
The risk investors must price carefully is the gap between regulatory clarity in developed markets and the continued fragmentation of cross-border corridors.
Without harmonised frameworks between the US, EU, Asia, and the Global South, we will not get a single coherent digital financial system — we will get three or four competing ones, with different rules, different interoperability standards, and different default risk profiles.
I have consistently argued in my editorial work on Intelligenthq.com and in public conversations with blockchain infrastructure founders that the deepest structural risk in digital finance is not volatility — it is jurisdictional fragmentation becoming permanent.
Disclosure: Champions Speakers Agency represents Dinis Guarda only for speaking engagements. The views expressed in this interview are for informational purposes only and should not be treated as financial, investment or legal advice.
Benzinga Disclaimer: This article is from an unpaid external contributor. It does not represent Benzinga’s reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.
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