Stablecoins: The Rail Above Rails
Stablecoins power trillions of dollars every year1. They’re evolving from niche instruments into a critical layer of financial infrastructure, outpacing many traditional payment networks. That growth tells us something important: businesses and users alike are demanding faster, programmable, and globally interoperable ways to move money—capabilities that legacy systems simply can’t deliver.
Why does this matter? Because the way money moves today is still too complex. Multiple intermediaries, disparate ledgers, and back-office processes add friction and cost. While stablecoins offer a strong foundation, they largely exist in a separate world from where most money lives—creating a gap that limits adoption and keeps two systems apart.
Some companies have tried to close this gap by building layered technology stacks that try to weave traditional systems and crypto systems together, and move flows behind the scenes. This approach has helped boost adoption, but it comes with assumptions and trade-offs. The best solution is full interoperability, where the two systems work together directly.
That’s what Cross River delivers with stablecoin payments. We’ve integrated stablecoin rails directly into our core banking system, making them interoperable with other rails. Imagine receiving ACH and converting it into stablecoins within the same account or accepting stablecoin funding and pushing it to a card in real time. This is how we make money practical, secure, and scalable.
Stablecoins do not replace existing rails; they extend them. Banking ledgers are highly reliable within their networks, but they were designed for batch-based processes and messaging standards that work well in closed environments. Stablecoins introduce a complementary layer built on deterministic, open-source protocols (like ERC-20), enabling 24/7 settlement finality and global interoperability. They function as the "HTTP of finance" - a universal transport layer that connects previously siloed systems, allowing us to extend our liquidity and services into a global, always-on environment.
I spoke about this recently with Simon Taylor on his Fintech Brainfood Tokenized podcast. We explored how stablecoins act as a “rail above rails,” creating a unified global payment layer that accelerates transparency. In practice, this enables interoperability, allowing value to move across both banking networks and blockchains.
As a result, stablecoins are emerging as a first-class payment rail alongside RTP® and FedNow®, delivering programmability and global reach that traditional systems weren’t designed to provide.
At Cross River, we’re building the foundation for onchain finance, where payments, lending, and treasury operations run on programmable infrastructure. This unlocks new capabilities: real-time liquidity management, tokenized assets that settle instantly, and credit that moves at the speed of software—the building blocks of the next generation of finance.
You can learn more about our stablecoin launch here and explore our broader crypto offering here.
1 Stablecoin Transactions Surge 47% to $20.2 Trillion in 2025
