Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️

“Money should travel at the speed of the internet. Stablecoins make that possible.”

— Chris Harmse, Co-founder & CBO of BVNK

BVNK, a leading stablecoin payment infrastructure provider, just hit $20 billion in annual transaction volume with 320 employees.

In May, they partnered with Worldpay, which processes $2.3 trillion annually for 1M+ merchants, to enable stablecoin payouts across 180+ countries.

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🎧 Jump to the best parts

(08:28) → The new financial stack: Chris outlines the six core ‘payment primitives’ (send, receive, store, earn, spend, comply) driving adoption and explains how companies can now build entire neobanks on top of stablecoin rails, reaching 200 markets instantly.
(15:13) → The three catalysts behind the 2025 Stablecoin summer: Why did the market explode this year? Chris pinpoints the trifecta of regulatory clarity, massive payment volumes, and a critical mass of global users that created the perfect storm for enterprise adoption.
(20:41) → Competing with giants like Stripe: As big players enter, Chris explains why fragmentation creates opportunity and how BVNK’s value proposition is to abstract away all complexity, making blockchain payments as seamless as using a credit card.
(29:15) → Regulation, regions, and the next 3 years: Why LatAm, Africa, and Southeast Asia are leading adoption from the bottom up, and why regulatory clarity has turned from headwind to tailwind for global enterprises.

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We sat down with Chris Harmse, Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer at BVNK, to explore the surge in demand for stablecoins for payments and their transformative impact on global finance.

Why it’s important: Stablecoins have crossed $300B in supply, putting them on par with some of the largest U.S. retail money market funds and regional banks. Initiatives like Stripe’s Open Issuance, BVNK’s WorldPay partnership and Circle’s Payment Network CPN show that money movement on blockchains is hitting mainstream.

BVNK: Founded in 2021, BVNK is a London-based fintech company that provides a full-stack stablecoin operating system for businesses, enabling them to integrate stablecoin payments and treasury solutions into their operations. It has processed $20B+ in transactions and is valued at $750M, backed by top investors and enterprise partnerships across 180+ countries.

Where to find Chris Harmse:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisharmse/

X: https://x.com/chrisharmse89

Website: https://bvnk.com/about-us

🎙️ In our conversation, we discussed:

Why traditional payment rails are broken and fragmented
The evolution of stablecoins from niche to enterprise-scale
Which use cases (payouts, commerce, treasury) are scaling fastest
How BVNK differentiates in an increasingly crowded market
Why regulatory clarity flipped the narrative in 2025
The WorldPay partnership and its network effects
How emerging markets are driving adoption from the bottom up
Where value will accrue across the payments stack (issuers vs. distributors vs. L1s)
Navigating the complexities of KYC and compliance in a blockchain world
Future outlook: Regulation and enterprise adoption

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My biggest takeaways from this conversation:

1. Enterprise adoption has matured

1. Enterprise adoption has matured—the conversation shifted from education to execution

The pilot phase is over. Chris argues that enterprises no longer need stablecoin 101 - they’re architecting specific use cases. The traditional financial system, with fragmented domestic schemes and SWIFT-dependent cross-border rails, can’t compete with instant, 24/7, low-cost blockchain infrastructure.

“Two to three years ago, people were thinking about pilots. That has shifted to today where they’re going live and they’re doing billions and billions of dollars of TPV.”

E-commerce is the next inflection point:

“We’re starting to see the early signs... around e-com platforms really starting to accept stablecoins at checkout, which I think is what you really need to get that use case to go vertical.”

The recent initiatives by incumbents are validating it:

SWIFT will launch a blockchain-based ledger on Ethereum. Full story
Circle and Stripe are building blockchains to move money. Full story
Stripe launched stablecoin-as-a-service. Full story
Visa announced a pilot for stablecoin prefunding on Visa Direct. Full story

and much more.

Other than payments, Chris sees stablecoins enabling neobanks to launch globally, offer wallets, yield, and spend, beyond traditional banking limits:

“You can actually launch banking products on top of stablecoin infrastructure, not just do payments, pay-ins, pay-outs.”

2. Three catalysts converged in 2025 to unlock institutional scale

Chris identifies the trifecta that flipped stablecoins from experimental to essential:

Regulatory clarity: MiCA in Europe, GENIUS Act in the US (signed July). 73% of organizations cited regulatory uncertainty as their top barrier—that barrier just collapsed.

“I can’t overestimate the impact that regulatory clarity has had on just people willing to interact with stablecoins, enterprises now having a clear framework.”

Critical mass of TPV: From $27T (2024) to $40T projected in 2025. Strip out crypto trading and $5.7T came from real payments use cases in 2024—3x PayPal’s volume. Liquidity begets liquidity.

“You needed a critical mass of TPV... that’s already gotten to 10 trillion, which is like three times the size of PayPal, almost rivaling Visa’s kind of transaction volume.”

User adoption in emerging markets: 500M+ global wallet addresses, growing 30% YoY. Users in Argentina, Nigeria, Southeast Asia are demanding digital dollars.

“There was high young populations, high adoption of digitally native, lack of access to traditional financial products but also lack of access to dollars, and stablecoins solved that problem.”

2. Distribution is the multiplier

Everyone obsesses over issuers like Tether ($13B annual profit). Chris delivers the uncomfortable truth: issuance margins compress as competition intensifies. Like money market funds, issuers will compete away treasury yield to distributors and end users.

“Long-term I think issuance ends up similar to money market funds... you’ll take a small fee for providing that wrapper, which is more like a management fee, and not be able to keep all of that yield.”

The real value accrues to orchestration platforms that abstract blockchain complexity for enterprises that refuse to become crypto companies. As Stripe launches its own blockchain (Tempo) and more chains proliferate, fragmentation increasesthe need for abstraction layers.

“The more blockchains there are, the more complexity, the more fragmentation. And therefore, the more businesses like ours can work with enterprise customers to not worry about what blockchain it runs on and just be able to make a payment seamlessly.”

Chris’s view: enterprises don’t care about specific blockchains, just like they don’t care about Visa’s network topology. They want instant, cheap, compliant payments. Period.

“No one cares how the underlying Visa network works. They just want their card to work basically.”

This is the BVNK/Stripe playbook: own the orchestration layer, stay blockchain-agnostic, let issuers compete on yield. Stripe’s $1.1B Bridge acquisition and vertical integration intensifies competition, but also proves the thesis. It’s the AWS vs. multi-cloud debate: enterprises hate lock-in.

Chris’s bottom line: The winners will abstract that complexity entirely and capture margin in the process. The stablecoin wars aren’t about which coin. They’re about who moves them.

Take care,

Marc

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