B2B payments: stablecoins and blockchain payments

Picture a US importer of auto parts that owes a supplier in Monterrey $50,000. The invoice is in dollars, the supplier wants pesos in its Mexican bank account, and the importer's bank would send a wire that takes a day or more and hides most of its price in the exchange rate. The importer's payments platform now offers another button: pay with stablecoins. A new PM owns that button. What happens to the money, who holds it at each step, what does it cost, and who pays when something goes wrong?

Here's how the pieces fit. The paying company sends dollars, by ACH or wire, to an orchestrator: a company such as Bridge (owned by Stripe), BVNK (owned by Mastercard) or Zero Hash that runs the on- and off-ramps, the services that turn bank money into coins and back. The orchestrator gets coins from the issuer, the company that mints a stablecoin against dollars it keeps in reserve and redeems it later: Circle for USDC, Tether for USDT, Paxos for several coins including PayPal's. It sends the coins over a blockchain such as Ethereum, Solana or Tron, which takes seconds to minutes. An off-ramp in Mexico, usually a local exchange, sells them for pesos and pays the supplier over SPEI, Mexico's 24/7 instant bank rail. Neither company holds a coin; it exists for a few minutes in the middle.

The diagram circles the orchestrator, with the note "most of the cost is at the ends". Moving the coin costs under a cent on Solana and a few dollars at worst on Ethereum or Tron. The importer pays for getting in and out: the bank transfer that funds the payment, the orchestrator's markup and, above all, the spread the off-ramp takes when it sells coins for pesos.

The words you'll hear in week one:

• Stablecoin: a token on a blockchain that its issuer promises to redeem one for one, usually in dollars, backed by cash and short-term Treasury bills. USDT and USDC make up about four-fifths of the roughly $310 billion in circulation.
• Mint and redeem: the issuer creates coins when an approved customer sends dollars and destroys them when it pays dollars back. Everyone else buys and sells on an exchange.
• Chain, gas and finality: the blockchain, the network fee for a transfer, and the point after which the chain won't reverse it.
• On-ramp, off-ramp and orchestrator: a ramp converts between bank money and coins; an orchestrator wraps ramps, wallets, compliance checks and payouts in one API.
• Custody: who holds the keys to a wallet (an address that holds coins): a provider, or the company itself (self-custody).
• Travel Rule: sender and recipient details must travel with a transfer between regulated firms; in the US, for crypto transfers from $3,000.
• Tokenized deposit: a bank deposit recorded on a blockchain-style ledger, still the bank's own liability and outside US stablecoin law.

If you only remember a few things:

1. Domestic invoices: keep them on ACH and real-time payments. A $50,000 US invoice costs the banks under a cent by ACH, while a stablecoin route lands near wire cost and drops the return rules and the invoice reference; see Stablecoins vs bank rails.
2. Cross-border: compare a stablecoin route with a good non-bank FX provider as well as a bank wire. In my numbers it beats the wire and ties the best non-banks, so the case rests on weekends, corridors banks serve badly and recipients who want dollars.
3. The all-in price: ask for the cost from dollars in to local currency out, hop by hop. The chain is a rounding error; the orchestrator's markup and the off-ramp's spread are nearly all of it, and few providers publish either.
4. Checks before the send: confirm the address, the chain and the sanctions screen before the coins move, because an on-chain transfer can't be undone; see How a stablecoin payment runs, step by step.
5. Minutes, not days: convert on receipt unless someone has a reason to hold. Whoever holds the coin carries the freeze, the depeg and a failing custodian, and contracts decide who pays.
6. The rules: plan on the GENIUS Act, the US law, taking effect on January 18, 2027, with your providers holding the licences. In the EU, Brazil and elsewhere the rules are already live and tighter on cross-border use.

Stablecoins for US and Canadian receivables are in B2B payments: order to cash, correspondent banks, local payout rails and FX in B2B payments: cross-border payouts, KYB and KYC in Identity and trust, and AI agents that pay in Agent identity. Crypto trading, DeFi yield and central bank digital currencies are out of scope.

The main players

The companies behind the diagram's parties, layer by layer, in no particular order.

How they make money:

The steady money is the interest on reserves, and the large payment companies are buying the ramps that reach customers. Stripe bought Bridge for about $1.1 billion in February 2025, and Mastercard closed its purchase of BVNK, for up to $1.8 billion, in August 2026. Issuers are buying toward payments too: in September 2026 Circle agreed to buy an Asian cross-border payments company for about $400 million in stock.

As of October 2026. Several of these companies changed owners in the last two years, so treat the list as a map to check.

Back to the importer. On a Thursday it approves the $50,000 payment, sees a quote in pesos held for a few minutes, and funds it by ACH into a virtual account in its own name. When the dollars land the next day, the orchestrator mints 50,000 USDC at Circle, screens the off-ramp's deposit address and sends the coins on Solana, where the transfer is final in about 13 seconds. A Mexican exchange sells them for pesos and pays the supplier's CLABE (Mexico's 18-digit account number) over SPEI. The supplier sees about MXN 920,000, with whatever reference the exchange attached. Most of what the importer paid went to the orchestrator's fee and the exchange's spread. Circle earned under 20 cents of interest, because the coin lived for less than an hour.