Small Startups Are Fueling Stablecoin’s Engine (2025)

The vibrant, booming stablecoin sector comprises of visionary Small and medium-sized enterprises that are tackling significant challenges within the current payments infrastructure. Yet, they are to a large extent eclipsed by a handful of large players, such as Circle and Tether, which are center stage in the current Washington legislative debate.

The bills advancing in both chambers of Congress focus on standards for issuance, liabilities, disclosures, guardrails. Specifically licensing requirements, guidelines for guaranteeing reserves, consumer rights, and others related matters.

Innovation is already fostering growth. The benefits towards a U.S. digital dollar were deliberated over the last five years and policymakers are finally on the cusp of implementing rules pertaining to federal, state, and foreign-issued coins used by Americans.

Stablecoins, decentralized tokens pegged to an asset like the U.S. dollar, already make up a robust global market, valued at over $220 billion according to Forbes. And the industry is being fueled by small builders all over the world, including in America. Some startups facilitate creation, others power the system.

Small Operators Deliver Big Gains

“Fintechs and financial institutions worldwide are waking up to the idea of introducing protocols and stablecoins into their tech stacks to increase efficiency and revenue,” Brale Founder Ben Milne recently shared during Fintech Meetup in March. His state-regulated firm helps entities create and integrate stablecoins into their business. Milne, who serves on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission Technology Advisory Committee, boasts about the ease of anyone being able to design a stablecoin in just five steps using his company.

There is broad optimism about the ways that stablecoins are bridging the gap between decentralized and centralized finance.

“Kura is using USDC to make immense progress toward driving down the cost of remittances, while increasing utility by enabling beneficiaries to spend these digital dollars in the real economy. Their cross-border payment solution enables instant settlement for merchants, instant spending for beneficiaries and transparency on all transactions through point-of-sale data,” Circle, the largest stablecoin issuer in the United States, cited in a recent report.

Kura was a finalist in Circle’s Unlocking Impact pitch competition in Washington, DC last year. Founded by Harvard and MIT scholars Stephanie Joseph and Clifford Nau, the US-based startup provides an alternative method for merchants in the Caribbean and Central America to capture cross-border payments.

“Traditional payment and banking rails no longer suit our digitally-connected world. We leverage blockchain technology to execute near-instant transfers of value across borders while mitigating fraud for merchants at the points of sale. Leveraging stablecoins as a payment utility for cross-border transactions offers the advantage of enabling secure, transparent, and near-instantaneous transactions, reducing costs associated with currency conversions and settlement times,” Joseph and Nau told me in a statement.

Stablecoin Boom On The Horizon

Other stablecoin founders like Seree CEO Lance Davis are monitoring Washington’s progress towards getting a bill across the finish line. The Senate is expected to schedule a vote on the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act shortly after Congress is back in session next week.

New capital investments are flowing into the exploding marketplace, and micro enterprises and large companies alike are getting ready for the next stage of growth once a reconciled bill is signed into law later this year.

* Cleve Mesidor spoke on a panel with Ben Milne during Fintech Meetup.

* This is the 2nd in a series of articles on stablecoins by this author.