Stablecoins Are the Trojan Horse of Financial Inclusion — and Who's Threatened by That
The story of stablecoins has been told, for the most part, as a crypto story. A new asset class. A DeFi primitive. A dollar-denominated instrument for on-chain traders who didn't want volatility exposure between positions. That framing captured something real in the early years — and missed almost everything that's actually happening now.
What stablecoins have quietly and without much fanfare become is the most effective financial inclusion technology deployed at scale since the mobile phone. And what that means — for the 1.3 billion adults still locked out of the formal financial system, and for the institutions whose business models depend on those people staying locked out — is a tension that is only beginning to resolve.
The Scale of the Problem Stablecoins Are Solving
According to World Bank estimates, roughly 1.3 billion adults — representing 21% of the global adult population — remain unbanked. Approximately 73% of these individuals live in low- and middle-income countries, with more than half concentrated across just eight countries. They are people the financial system has chosen not to serve, because the cost of serving them, through legacy branch infrastructure and correspondent banking networks, exceeds the revenue they would generate.
That calculus breaks entirely with stablecoins, which provide expanded access and financial inclusion to the world's unbanked population precisely because they are wallet-based rather than account-based. A mobile phone with Internet access is sufficient. There is no branch visit, credit history requirement, minimum balance, or monthly maintenance fee. In the US alone, close to 25 million households are unbanked or underbanked, with no or limited access to payment and credit services. Globally, the numbers are an order of magnitude larger — and the mobile infrastructure to reach them already exists.
Africa illustrates the trajectory most clearly, having the highest penetration of mobile money globally, demonstrating existing demand for alternative financial solutions that can act as a stablecoin settlement layer, converting everyday prepaid payments — mobile data, bank transfers, mobile money — into USDT, providing 400 million unbanked and underbanked Africans with a means to hedge against currency devaluation and opening avenues for savings and credit beyond traditional banks.
The Remittance System Is the Clearest Casualty
Global remittances reached an estimated $685 billion in 2024, per World Bank data, with low- and middle-income countries capturing the bulk of inflows. Moreover, the average cost of sending $200 across borders through traditional cash-to-cash networks was through the roof back then, as it stood at 6.6% in Q1 2024 — more than double the 3% target outlined in the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.
That sort of fee is not a rounding error: on a $685 billion annual flow, it represents approximately $45 billion extracted annually from some of the world's poorest households — paid to intermediaries whose primary value proposition is access to a network that now has a cheaper competitor. Stablecoin-native remittance platforms are settling the same transfers in minutes at sub-1% fees. The technology case for the old model has collapsed, and what remains is regulatory friction, distribution reach, and inertia.
The incumbents know this. Western Union launched USDPT, a dollar-backed stablecoin on Solana, issued by Anchorage Digital Bank, for 24/7 settlement with agents and partners. The company will initially use USDPT behind the scenes as an alternative to the SWIFT interbank network, aiming for real-time, around-the-clock settlement, and that could weaken the old lines between remittances, consumer payments, and bank settlement — merging flows that previously required separate infrastructure and intermediary chains.
The irony is quite precise: Western Union — the company whose fee structure was the problem stablecoins were designed to solve — is now building stablecoin infrastructure to avoid being disintermediated by it. The company saw a 22% drop in app downloads, while MoneyGram is using Circle's USDC on Stellar, and Stripe launched its own stablecoin payments infrastructure. The outcome is clear: the remittance giants are not fighting the technology as they are trying to absorb it before it absorbs them.
The Disruption Radius
Remittance companies are the most visible casualty, but the disruption radius is wider. Smaller banks face rising digital infrastructure costs and reduced access to low-cost deposits as stablecoin adoption grows. Meanwhile, interchange fees charged by Visa and Mastercard — typically 2% to 3% — face pressure as merchants and consumers turn to direct stablecoin payments. In 2024, stablecoin transactions totaled more than $28 trillion, surpassing the combined volume of Mastercard and Visa, according to Deutsche Bank.
That crossover happened faster than almost any incumbent predicted, and its implications for card network economics have not been fully absorbed by markets yet.
The political dimension adds a layer of complexity that the pure fintech narrative tends to skip. Senator Elizabeth Warren's warning that the GENIUS Act could enable tech billionaires to issue private currencies that track purchases, exploit data, and squeeze competitors reflects a legitimate concern that the democratization story can coexist with a consolidation story. Walmart and Amazon have both been examining stablecoin issuance strategies following the Act's passage.
For example, a possible Walmart stablecoin that works inside Walmart's ecosystem, earns loyalty points denominated in Walmart's digital currency, and charges merchants for settlement is a financial inclusion tool for some people and a platform lock-in mechanism for others simultaneously.
The tension is real here as stablecoins lower the floor for financial access — that is genuinely valuable, and the data supports it. They also create new concentrations of private monetary power that didn't exist under the previous system. Both things are true, and the regulatory frameworks being built right now are attempting to navigate between them.
The Inclusion Data That Doesn't Get Quoted Enough
Binance data suggests that crypto adoption continues to accelerate most rapidly in emerging markets, which accounted for 49% of Binance's user base in 2020. By 2026, that figure had increased to 77%. That shift from a user base dominated by developed-market traders to one where three in four users are in emerging markets is the clearest single data point on where stablecoins are actually being used and why.
Projections put stablecoins at 3% of all US dollar payments in 2026 and 10% by 2030. Those numbers describe a trend but not what is already happening in Argentina, Nigeria, Turkey, or Venezuela — where inflation has made local currency savings a liability and stablecoins a rational response to monetary conditions, not a fintech preference. The distinction matters: in developed markets, stablecoins are a product. In inflation-ravaged economies, they are a workaround for a system that has already failed the people using them. Western Union's own stablecoin card is designed specifically for inflation-sensitive markets — storing remittance value in USD-pegged stablecoins so that families in countries like Argentina can hold their funds without watching purchasing power evaporate before they spend it. A 175-year-old money transfer company building inflation-protection products for the world's poorest households is a story about what happens when the technology becomes impossible to ignore.
The Trojan Horse Analogy, Made Precise
The Trojan Horse reading of stablecoins is this: they entered the financial system wearing the costume of a crypto product — volatile, speculative, associated with DeFi and trading desks. While the incumbents debated whether to engage with them on those terms, the actual use cases were building underneath: remittances, inflation hedging, cross-border payroll, merchant settlement, savings for people without bank accounts.
By the time the threat became legible to legacy institutions, the infrastructure was already deployed at scale, and current numbers represent capital that has already moved outside the correspondent banking system, outside the card networks, outside the remittance chains — and found ways to serve populations those systems had structurally excluded.
The incumbents are now building stablecoins themselves, which is the surest sign that the Trojan Horse has already done its work. The stablecoins have become a part of global financial infrastructure, but will regulatory frameworks being built around them — the GENIUS Act in the US, MiCA in Europe, the Stablecoins Ordinance in Hong Kong — be designed to preserve the inclusion potential that drove organic adoption in the first place, or will they be captured by the incumbents now racing to embrace the technology they spent years dismissing?
More than 1.3 billion unbanked adults don't have a seat at that table, but the decisions made there will determine whether the Trojan Horse delivered what it promised — or simply changed who controls the walls.
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This article is intended for general informational purposes and should not be construed as financial, investment, or legal advice.