Stablecoins At The Crossroads: Nkiru Uwaje On The Shift From Experimental Use To Everyday Business Infrastructure

In Brief

Stablecoins saw fast adoption in 2025. In an interview MANSA COO Nkiru Uwaje discusses how businesses are leveraging them for payments, treasury, and operational efficiency.

TRM Labs reports that stablecoin transaction volumes exceeded $4 trillion between January and July 2025, representing an 83% year-on-year increase in annualized activity. Industry surveys and consulting research further indicate that institutional interest is quickly converting into real adoption, with 13% of financial institutions and corporates already using stablecoins, and more than half of remaining organizations planning to adopt them within the next 6 to 12 months. On-chain data further illustrates the scale: leading USD-pegged tokens processed monthly volumes in the hundreds of billions, with USDT alone routinely handling roughly $700 billion per month at peaks in 2025, highlighting why treasuries and payment teams are treating stablecoins as a viable settlement tool.

In this exclusive interview, Nkiru Uwaje, COO and co-founder of MANSA, a global settlement and liquidity company, examines how and why stablecoins entered mainstream business use in 2025, with a focus on their expanding role across payments, treasury operations, regulatory frameworks, and real-world applications in both developed and emerging markets.

Why did stablecoins finally go mainstream in 2025? What factors allowed stablecoins to scale?

“Mainstream” doesn’t mean every payment moved on-chain overnight. It means stablecoins stopped being something you had to justify and became something you can pilot without rewriting your entire operating model.

A few things converged. The first is plain market pull. Cross-border money movement still has cutoffs, intermediaries, and settlement lags, while stablecoin transfers don’t care about banking hours. That difference matters a lot when you’re running payroll, paying suppliers, or trying to smooth working capital across time zones.

The second is that the data began to reflect real operational usage, not just trading flows. Even though overall stablecoin activity is still dominated by market plumbing, B2B payment volumes grow fast through 2025.

And the third is confidence. The past year is also the time regulations started to look like a set of standards you can build around. In payments, clarity is oxygen.

Which use cases and sectors are driving stablecoin adoption today?

The biggest growth I see is still unglamorous: it’s paying and getting paid across borders in a way that’s predictable.

Supplier payments are a good example. When you’re settling invoices internationally, the pain isn’t the headline FX rate; it’s timing uncertainty, intermediary fees you can’t forecast cleanly, and the operational cost of tracing payments when something goes missing. That’s why B2B use cases show up so strongly in enterprise surveys.

The other big driver is high-frequency payouts such as platforms paying contractors, marketplaces paying sellers, and businesses paying distributed teams. Those flows are operationally sensitive. If you miss a payday or a supplier deadline, it becomes a trust problem, not a “finance” problem.

Treasury is the quiet engine behind all of this. When teams start treating stablecoins as a settlement instrument, like something you move to complete obligations, adoption becomes less ideological and more of a process improvement.

How do SMEs and large enterprises use stablecoins differently?

SMEs usually adopt from the edge inward. They feel friction first, and they’re willing to change behavior quickly if it reduces friction.

So an SME example is a business that imports inventory and needs to pay a supplier abroad on a tight timeline. Instead of waiting through correspondent banking and cutoffs, they settle in stablecoins. Then the supplier converts locally or uses it directly for their own obligations. The “win” here is about time and certainty.

Large enterprises are different. They don’t adopt because a single payment is painful, but because the system is expensive. Enterprises care about controls, policy, auditability, and integration into existing treasury and ERP workflows. That’s why you see them talk about pilots, approved counterparties, clear operational risk ownership, and bank relationships as much as they talk about the asset itself.

Both matter because they reinforce each other. SMEs create real transactional density in corridors. And enterprises create the standardization pressure that turns “useful” into “repeatable.”

What impact have the GENIUS Act and MiCA had on stablecoins?

Well, these frameworks at their best turned “trust” into requirements. The GENIUS Act sets expectations around reserve backing, public reserve disclosures, marketing rules, and brings issuers clearly into AML and sanctions compliance obligations. That changes procurement conversations inside companies, because now legal and compliance teams can map stablecoin usage to a recognizable rulebook.

In turn, MiCA defines the regulatory perimeter for stablecoin-like instruments and makes stablecoin issuance and service provision look more like regulated financial activity, with authorization and disclosure requirements and clear timelines for applicability.

Do companies reshape offerings? In practice, yes, but usually in boring ways like clearer disclosures, more conservative policies around reserves and redemptions, more structured onboarding, and more investment in compliance operations. That’s exactly what enables scale. Payments don’t grow on “belief”; they grow on repeatable compliance and operational certainty.

Why does stablecoin adoption today look more like operations and treasury than crypto trading?

Trading is optional, and payroll is not.

When stablecoins are treated as a settlement tool, the buyer is usually an ops or treasury leader trying to hit service levels: “Can I pay on time, reconcile quickly, and reduce trapped cash?” That’s why this feels like an operation.

Take cash concentration. Multinationals routinely leave buffers sitting in local accounts because moving money is slow, has cutoffs, and creates uncertainty. Stablecoins can compress that cycle through moving value between entities without waiting for banking windows. Thus, the treasury can manage liquidity with more real-time awareness.

It works differently for cross-border payroll. If you operate in multiple markets, you’re constantly balancing speed, cost, and compliance. Stablecoins don’t remove the need for controls, but they can shorten settlement time and reduce the transition period where you’re blind or waiting. That’s an operational upgrade, not a speculative one.

How are stablecoins being used in emerging markets, especially Africa?

In many emerging markets, the stablecoin story is now much more about access and continuity than about crypto.

We have growing evidence that usage is material relative to local economies. Working papers estimating cross-border stablecoin activity find that, relative to GDP, regions including Africa and the Middle East stand out compared with advanced economies.

On the ground, that looks practical. Businesses use stablecoins to pay international suppliers, to receive revenue from abroad with fewer delays, and to manage currency exposure more predictably. Banks and regulated payment providers engage when they can structure it responsibly, because customers are asking for something that works on weekends, holidays, and across borders.

What needs to happen in 2026 to keep stablecoins growing?

I think the next phase is finishing the boring integration work. Stablecoins only become “infrastructure” when they sit cleanly inside the tools companies already run. That includes tighter integration with KYC/KYB, better reconciliation tooling, and clearer operational standards around approvals and limits.

Interoperability matters too, but not as an abstract ideal. What teams want is the ability to move value between trusted counterparties without stitching together fragile processes across multiple providers. When those connections are standardized, finance teams spend less time on exceptions and more time on decisions.

Which companies or industries do you see leading the stablecoin charge?

The leaders tend to be the businesses that feel settlement friction every day: payment providers, global platforms that run mass payouts, import/export businesses, and companies operating across volatile currency corridors.

What’s been interesting in 2025 is seeing stablecoins show up in places that historically kept crypto at arm’s length. Some fintechs have publicly described stablecoin plans aimed at lowering internal cross-border settlement costs.

Looking ahead, what could potentially undermine or enhance stablecoin momentum?

Momentum builds when stablecoins operate like a well-run money movement rather than a separate universe. That momentum is driven by clearer standards, tighter integration with treasury and compliance workflows, and predictable on- and off-ramps that avoid delays and uncertainty.

The things that slow adoption are also straightforward. These are operational fragility, unclear governance around reserves and redemption, and poor integration that pushes workload onto already-stretched finance teams. When stablecoins add work, they don’t scale; when they remove work, they do.

2025 was the year stablecoins proved they can be used for real payments at a meaningful scale, even if that’s still a subset of total activity. 2026 is the year they either mature into routine infrastructure or stay a collection of promising point solutions.