Stablecoins are spreading through the machinery of international finance, but regulators are struggling to move at the same speed. According to the World Trade Organization, fragmented rules are keeping their share of global payments at just 3%.
The warning came from Juan Marchetti, director of the WTO’s trade in services and investment division, during a speech in Geneva on Monday marking the release of the organization’s study on stablecoins in world trade.
For Marchetti, the bottleneck is not blockchain technology or payment infrastructure. It is the patchwork of rules governing digital currencies across different markets.
“The constraint is not technology. It is actually regulation and the lack of development of regulatory frameworks,” Marchetti said.
That gap is already visible across jurisdictions. The Financial Stability Board found in an October 2025 report that only 39% of the 28 jurisdictions it surveyed had finalized regulatory frameworks for stablecoins.
For companies moving money across borders, that means the same digital asset can face very different rules depending on where a transaction starts and where it ends.
Stablecoins Could Fix the Friction That Finance Built In
The WTO study points to five persistent pain points in trade finance that stablecoins could potentially ease: high costs, slow settlement, limited access, weak transparency and foreign exchange restrictions.
The appeal is particularly clear in cross-border payments, where moving money internationally can still involve multiple intermediaries, fees and delays. WTO data shows stablecoin payments in cross-border transactions grew 35-fold between 2020 and the middle of 2024.
Yet adoption remains comparatively small. Stablecoins currently represent only 3% of international payments, according to Marchetti, with regulatory fragmentation acting as a major constraint.
The contradiction is becoming harder to ignore: usage is growing rapidly, while the rules needed to support broader adoption remain uneven.
That matters most for emerging economies, where lower remittance costs could have a direct impact on households and businesses. But these are also the markets where regulatory frameworks are often least developed.
“Contribution to trade will depend far less on the technology than on regulatory convergence, interoperability and the surrounding financial infrastructure, especially in developing economies that stand to gain.”
In other words, the future of stablecoins in global commerce may depend less on better code than on regulators agreeing on how that code fits into the existing financial system.
Stablecoins Are Already Moving Into Mainstream Payment Networks
The pressure to solve that problem is coming from the private sector, too.
Major payment companies are increasingly testing stablecoins as a way to improve how money moves across borders. Mastercard, for example, partnered with stablecoin orchestration network Borderless in August to pilot cross-border transfers using its Crypto Credential framework, which is designed to add trust to crypto transactions.
The company had already announced in June that it planned to expand settlement capabilities for card transactions beyond traditional banking schedules, including intraday, weekend and holiday settlement through stablecoins.
Western Union is taking a similarly practical route. In August, it announced a partnership with stablecoin infrastructure provider Rain to launch a digital wallet and Visa-branded card that lets customers hold and spend a US dollar-backed stablecoin across 37 markets.
The company plans to expand that reach to more than 60 markets by the end of the year.
These moves suggest that stablecoins are increasingly being treated less like speculative crypto products and more like another layer of payment infrastructure. The bigger question is whether regulation can catch up with that shift.
For now, the WTO’s message is fairly blunt. Stablecoins may already have the technology needed to make international payments faster, cheaper and more accessible. What they lack is a sufficiently coordinated rulebook.
Until that changes, the internet-native money moving through global finance may remain considerably more borderless than the regulations governing it.