For the past two decades, many retail payment innovations have improved the user experience on top of existing account- and card-based ecosystems. Tap-to-pay builds on card networks, while services like Zelle and Venmo have simplified account-to-account movement. More recently, instant payment infrastructure such as FedNow Service has begun to introduce new real-time settlement capability rather than simply repackaging older batch processes.
Stablecoins, and in some jurisdictions, future forms of CBDC, could break that pattern by introducing payment models that are not inherently dependent on card networks or ACH-style batch settlement.
Payments firms expect 24% of payment volume to flow through blockchain-based rails by 2030, according to AutoRek’s Future of Payments Operations 2026 Payments Report. Respondents named CBDCs the most impactful instrument of the next five years, with US firms placing them especially high. Stablecoins for payments and settlement followed close behind. A quarter of volume is large enough to plan for and early enough to design for.
The reason this technology cycle matters is that blockchain rails break three assumptions the existing payments stack has run on for decades: settlement reversibility, data location and unit economics.
Cards and ACH were designed around the assumption that payments can be unwound. Chargeback windows on card networks and return windows on ACH exist because errors, fraud and disputes are unavoidable in any large payments system. A stablecoin transfer on a public blockchain can become technically irreversible once sufficiently finalized on-chain, but that does not create a native equivalent of card-style chargebacks or ACH return windows. Fraud, dispute and exception models built on the assumption of reversibility have to be rebuilt for an environment without it, which means moving from post-event correction to pre-event prevention as the primary control.
The recent FDIC proposal under the GENIUS Act, which would require certain issuers to complete redemptions within two business days, highlights the growing need to reconcile on-chain activity with reserve management and fiat-side operational controls. Firms running T+1 and T+2 settlement infrastructure will be reconciling token-to-reserve positions against rules written for near-real-time finality. Data security and regulatory risk rank as payments firms leading concern with new technology adoption and stablecoin operations compound.
Beyond reversibility, payment volume on a blockchain rail creates a new reconciliation problem. For fiat-backed payment stablecoins, each token in circulation is expected to be matched by corresponding reserve assets off-chain which means continuous matching between on-chain movement and the fiat or reserve positions held in traditional infrastructure. This is a control problem most payments operations were not designed to handle, and the dual-data structure does not have a clean analogue in cards or ACH.
The economics are the deeper structural problem underneath the technology and regulatory debate. Card interchange and more broadly, fee structures embedded in traditional payment rails, have underpinned payment-sector economics for decades. Stablecoin and CBDC transfers do not produce the same revenue per transaction, which makes the business model question one of the harder problems payments firms have to solve as volume migrates. Interchange-dependent business models face the most exposure. Subscription and value-added service models face the least. The middle of the market is where the model has to be reinvented from scratch.
Commercial activity is outpacing central bank action in the United States. Recent regulatory progress and rising institutional activity suggest stablecoins are moving deeper into mainstream financial infrastructure. In the United States, CBDC activity remains in research and experimentation rather than deployment. A US dollar CBDC follows a longer regulatory and technical path than a bank-issued stablecoin entering circulation, and the research bears that out. Respondents named CBDCs the most impactful instrument over five years and treated stablecoins as the instrument they need to operate around in the next twelve to eighteen months.
There is no operational template for a bank-grade stablecoin at scale. The institutions building one in 2026 are currently writing it. Mid-tier banks, regional payments firms and many international operators are watching the first movers closely. The reconciliation, reporting and compliance design choices made in the next year will become the reference architecture the rest of the industry inherits.
The same research report also shows 96% of payments firms use AI in some capacity, up from 89% a year earlier, with 61% citing data security and regulatory risk and 46% citing legacy integration as the leading barriers to deeper adoption. Adoption has moved faster than integration. The same dynamic is playing out on blockchain rails, and at higher cost.
What payments firms should decide now starts with rail selection. A firm projecting a quarter of its 2030 volume on blockchain infrastructure must specify which blockchain infrastructure it intends to support. Stablecoin issuance is concentrated today in dollar-pegged instruments and likely to diversify, while CBDC timelines vary substantially by jurisdiction. Treating these as a single category could produce the wrong investment plan, with capital committed to instruments that do not deliver projected volume.
Rail selection feeds the next decision, which is between building, partnering or waiting. Each path carries a cost. Building is expensive in capital and time. Partnering creates dependency on a counterparty’s roadmap. Waiting means renting access from an institution that did not wait, and that rent compounds over time. All three approaches are defensible, and none of them are free.
Whichever approach a firm chooses, the timing of compliance and reconciliation design shapes how much it costs in 2028. Designing them alongside the product tends to get postponed because the costs surface last. Controls built at launch cost a fraction of what the same controls cost retrofitted two years later, and postponing the work means rebuilding it twice, once at launch and again while volume is moving through the rail. Half of payments firms cite implementation and maintenance costs as a barrier to AI adoption. The transition cost profile can run higher, particularly where firms need to build new reconciliation, compliance and control capabilities around blockchain-based rails.
The same research report found that firms expect 24% of payment volume to flow through blockchain-based rails by 2030, which tells payments operators where the volume is going. Three decisions sit underneath it:
- Which rails to support
- Whether to build, partner or wait
- When to design the reconciliation and compliance controls
The deadline is internal on all three, set the moment a firm decides to enter a blockchain rail. While it remains up for debate, card and digital networks continue to develop to keep up with the changing times, which leads the market to believe that most payment volume in 2030 will still move through cards and ACH.
What changes is everything else. Stablecoins are forcing payments firms to design a settlement environment with different assumptions around finality, interoperability, reserve management and control architecture.
This article was written by: By Nick Botha, VP Payments and Retail Banking, AutoRek