Stablecoins Are Back — But Are We Rebuilding the Same Old Walled Gardens?

Everyone in my feed is suddenly excited about stablecoins again.

Payments. Remittances. Treasury. B2B settlement.

Which is… interesting, because stablecoins and these use cases aren’t new. Tether’s USDT has been around since 2014. Circle’s USDC since 2018. We’ve been moving dollars on-chain for a long time.

What is new is who’s talking about them.

Banks and payments companies like SoFi, Visa, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and PayPal are now launching or testing their own branded dollars. Even non-financial companies like Sony, Cloudflare, and Klarna are signalling upcoming stablecoin plans.

That’s where things start to get confusing.

“If the goal is efficiency, why fragment the dollar?”

When Efficiency Turns into Fragmentation

Why should a merchant accept one institution’s stablecoin but not another’s because of a partnership agreement?

For B2B settlement, doesn’t reconciliation get harder when every counterparty turns up with a different branded USD?

That feels like the opposite of progress.

I hold USDC, but a merchant only accepts PYUSD. I can’t pay.

My company settles in one bank-issued stablecoin, but a supplier only wants USDC on Solana or Polygon. We haven’t removed layers — we’ve added them.

As I’ve written previously about stablecoin adoption and payment rails, the value of programmable money comes from interoperability, not branding. Without that, speed alone doesn’t solve much.

Why Institutions Are Doing This Anyway

There are rational reasons behind this behaviour.

The Federal Reserve has already flagged deposit outflows as stablecoin adoption increases. Every dollar that moves on-chain is a dollar banks can’t lend.

Issuing their own stablecoin keeps deposits inside the perimeter and preserves control of the rails.

Survival, framed as innovation.

At the same time, blockchains are competing aggressively. Arbitrum, Optimism, Coinbase (Base), and Aptos all market throughput and settlement speed.

But once you’re under a few seconds, does it actually matter?

Compared to wires, cut-off times, weekends, and correspondent banking delays, stablecoins already feel instant. Whether settlement is 400 milliseconds or four seconds is irrelevant to users.

“Speed stopped being the bottleneck a while ago.”

Compatibility Is the Real Constraint

The real friction is compatibility.

Why USDC on Ethereum doesn’t work where only USDC on one specific chain is accepted. Why white-labelled stablecoins claim to be interchangeable — but only within approved ecosystems.

Crypto promised permissionless, composable money.

Instead, we’re rebuilding walled gardens, just with better branding.

To be fair, institutions aren’t acting irrationally. Regulatory clarity, balance-sheet control, new revenue streams, and brand ownership all make sense — for them.

For users, the benefits are almost invisible.

Trading One Set of Intermediaries for Another

What we’re watching is the institutionalisation of stablecoins. It was probably inevitable.

But it increasingly looks like trading one set of intermediaries for another — rather than removing them.

The original idea was simple: programmable dollars that work everywhere, instantly, without partnerships.

That idea feels increasingly distant when every dollar comes with a logo — and a list of where it’s allowed to work.