The Missing Link in Stablecoin Remittances: True Payment Messaging and Settlement Interoperability
Author: Emilio Rivero Coello, Product Payments Lead at Aptos Labs
Cross-border remittances have long been a focus for policymakers, NGOs, and fintech advocates for one simple reason: millions of people around the world rely on them as a primary or secondary source of income. Migrants move in search of better opportunities so they can support their families back home, yet they are forced to pay an average of 6.49% in fees, and in some corridors, costs can reach up to 50%. This is not only wildly inefficient, it’s fundamentally inhumane.
In January 2020, I wrote an article arguing that cryptocurrencies were already making cross-border remittances faster, cheaper, and more accessible than traditional rails, and that with the right regulatory environment they could unlock billions in savings for low-income Mexican families and eventually dominate the remittance space. Interestingly, you won’t find the word “stablecoins” anywhere in that piece, most, if not all, activity was happening in non-stable crypto assets, and total stablecoin supply was still under $4 billion.
Today, we’re in a very different place: the technology is more mature, regulatory clarity has improved, and liquidity has grown significantly. This year, total stablecoin volume surpassed $50 trillion, and even on an adjusted basis, it still represents around $10 trillion in annual stablecoin volume. That’s a staggering figure when compared to the roughly $900 billion in officially recorded remittances reported by the World Bank. While we don’t have accurate data from key service providers that can tell us what percentage of stablecoin volume is actually captured by remittance payments, we know that the current gap is far too wide for the inherent product market fit.
It is widely accepted that stablecoins are the best way to move money across borders and the liquidity is finally here – so why haven’t remittances moved onchain? There are still missing pieces we need to address before realizing a stablecoin dominated remittance economy. Below I outline the major issues facing this convergence, and argue why interoperability of payment messaging and settlement is the biggest hurdle to overcome.
Continuous improvement and broader adoption of robust on/off-ramps
We’ve seen tremendous growth in the underlying infrastructure: payment service providers, stablecoin orchestration platforms, on/off-ramps, and exchanges have all made real progress competing with traditional correspondent banking. But there is still a lot of room for improvement, and crypto companies know there’s plenty of work left to do.
Increased liquidity against key fiat pairs
As long as most payouts are still disbursed in fiat, we’re constrained by the existing FX rails. Ideally, over time, non-USD currencies will also come onchain and we’ll see fully global FX markets running onchain (read more about this), removing the need for pre-funding and enabling real-time atomic settlement. Until that happens, we need deep, reliable liquidity between USD stablecoins and local currencies—and that remains costly and operationally difficult, especially when most flows are unidirectional and liquidity is hard to rebalance.
Improved cross-border compliance
On the compliance side, travel rule solutions have made meaningful progress but still fall short of broad, interoperable adoption. A more complete framework will likely require primitives like decentralized identity (DID) and verifiable credentials (VCs) to support onchain KYC, AML, CFT, and other compliance processes—and those are still early.
Interoperability of payment messaging and settlement
This is where a lot of the real unlocking can happen, so let’s dive into it. For decades, global finance has run on message-based systems. Instead of transmitting value directly, banks send instructions on how to move and reconcile value on their ledgers. This model fits the technology of its time, but it’s inherently inefficient: it depends on layers of intermediaries, introduces settlement delays, fragments liquidity, and creates heavy reconciliation overhead. The result is a global payment system that is slow, costly, and fragile.
What do stablecoins and cryptocurrencies solve? With a shared, distributed ledger, you no longer need a web of intermediaries to keep separate books in sync. However, stablecoins by themselves don’t solve the equally important problem of how payment instructions are coordinated and delivered in the receiving country. There is still no native, widely adopted standard for expressing and routing those instructions onchain.
By contrast, the correspondent banking industry has spent decades improving the way it communicates value transfers, using standards like ISO 20022—a relatively new, structured financial messaging format that is still being adopted globally, but already enabling greater interoperability between institutions and smoother local ledger reconciliation.
For blockchains and stablecoins to truly take over cross-border payments and remittances, they need their own ISO 20022 moment. That standard is powerful not because it moves money, but because it gives every institution a shared, structured language for describing and routing payments, which is what makes traditional rails more interoperable and easier to reconcile locally. Stablecoins today have the settlement asset and the shared neutral ledger, but they still lack that common, machine-readable messaging layer: a standard way to express who is paying whom, for what, under which compliance rules, and how funds should be delivered into the receiving country’s banking system or wallet infrastructure.
The real unlock will come when the industry converges on open, ISO-style onchain standards for payment instructions, embedded compliance, and counterparty discovery—so that moving money with stablecoins feels as seamless and predictable as today’s best domestic payment systems, just cheaper, faster, and truly global by default.
