Stablecoins Lost Their Way? The Wake-Up Call Crypto Needs in 2025
Stablecoins were meant to be crypto's safe harbor—now they're becoming its biggest paradox.
The Original Promise: Stability in Chaos
Pegged to real-world assets, these tokens were designed to offer traders an escape hatch from crypto's notorious volatility. No more 20% daily swings. Just predictable value, like digital dollars.
2025 Reality: Mission Drift
Algorithmic models flirt with collapse. Reserve audits gather dust. Some 'stable' coins now swing harder than Bitcoin on a caffeine binge. Meanwhile, Wall Street co-opts the tech to move money faster—because why innovate when you can replicate?
The Path Back
Transparent collateral. Ironclad smart contracts. And maybe—just maybe—admitting that 'stable' shouldn't mean 'until our VC funding runs out.'
The irony? The sector chasing decentralization keeps rebuilding the same fragile systems it vowed to replace. Some revolutions eat their young—this one just packaged them into a token with a 2% yield.
Stablecoins ≠ TradFi
Stablecoins and blockchain technology represent the first real opportunity we’ve had in generations to take a hard look at the problems we see in payments and finance today, and apply innovative solutions to solve them. Today, 1.4 billion people worldwide are unbanked. 57% of Africans, for example, do not have any kind of bank account, including mobile money accounts. While unbanked populations tend to be concentrated in less developed markets, this is a global problem. 6% of adults in the U.S. were unbanked in 2024.
Neither stablecoin-linked cards, nor e-commerce stablecoin integration, nor Wall Street buying up Circle shares will do anything to help this group. Yet stablecoins are inherently designed to provide financial access to the unbanked. As Coinbase’s latest State of crypto Report says:
“Anyone with a smartphone and internet connection [is able] to store value, send money, and access global financial networks without needing a traditional bank account.”
This is where stablecoin adoption should be growing. There are already small signs that this is happening. 5% of unbanked adults in the U.S. used cryptocurrency for financial transactions in 2024, up 1% from the previous year and more than double the number of banked U.S. adults using cryptocurrency for payments.
If stablecoin adoption simply mirrors traditional finance, we risk recreating the same problems we set out to solve. We need to see more innovation happening outside of traditional finance to help those who could benefit the most from stablecoins.
Cards alone won’t get us there
We live in a world where we have the technology to pay for goods peer-to-peer, without intermediaries. Yet still, cards are the go-to choice for making day-to-day payments.
This doesn’t have to be the case. There is a huge scope to innovate payments outside of the payment card ecosystem, and it is already happening. For example, in some less developed markets and increasingly in global use cases like travel and remote work, wallets like MiniPay enable people to pay bills, send money internationally, and even subscribe to music streaming services using stablecoins, without touching the traditional financial system.
In Q1 2025 alone, apps within the MiniPay ecosystem collectively generated over 50 million weekly impressions and 5 million weekly app opens with hundreds of thousands of daily interacting users, a clear sign of demand. These apps are also often developed by individuals experiencing financial pain points firsthand, meaning stablecoins are directly solving real-world problems.
A similar dynamic is unfolding with companies like Strike, which uses stablecoins to overhaul the remittance market in regions like Latin America. Strike directly solves a critical financial pain point, offering a cheaper, quicker, and therefore vastly superior alternative to the outdated legacy system.
While these solutions might originate as tools to help those underserved by traditional finance, their impact and utility can potentially be felt by all, wherever they are in the world. What might start out as a stablecoin wallet to help users bypass the high fees and slow speeds of traditional remittance services could end up being used en masse as a travel wallet. Travellers could load their stablecoin wallet to purchase local services, including mobile data, all without the need to exchange currency or incur hefty card fees.
While cards aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, stablecoins give us a unique opportunity to solve payment problems from the bottom up, creating real-world utility from which everyone can benefit.
Keeping crypto’s core premise front and centre
Stablecoins are at an inflection point. Instead of focusing on how to integrate stablecoins into our current payment rails, we should focus our collective efforts on stablecoin solutions that deliver on the Core premise of crypto, to help those let down by the legacy financial system. This means delivering user-friendly ways to help underbanked populations globally access and spend stablecoins in a frictionless way.
We have the potential to upend how we think about payments and create lasting solutions that can benefit everyone, wherever they are in the world and whatever their banking status. We just need to stay focused on the destination, not just the journey.
Murray Neil Spark is the head of commercial and ecosystems for MiniPay, with over 10 years of experience at Opera. He leads MiniPay’s partnerships and ecosystem development, including collaborations with industry giants such as Tether, Celo, and more. From South Africa, Murray previously led Business Development for different divisions of Opera before moving over to MiniPay. When it comes to personal interests, Murray is passionate about his family, wildlife and the outdoors.
