Stablecoins cited as a workaround for unbanked businesses in trade
A guest post argues that correspondent banking failures are pushing emerging-market businesses toward stablecoin settlement to reduce fees and delays. (Read More)
Asanat Analysis — Why it matters
Correspondent banking friction—where intermediary banks charge layers of fees and introduce multi-day settlement delays—has long been a structural pain point in cross-border trade, particularly for SMEs in emerging markets. Stablecoins bypass this architecture entirely by enabling direct, real-time settlement on public blockchains, effectively disintermediating legacy banking rails. This use case is less about speculation or yield farming and more about basic financial infrastructure repair, which signals genuine product-market fit in regions where banking access is scarce or expensive.
The relevance here extends beyond individual merchant adoption. If stablecoins gain traction as settlement layers for B2B trade in emerging markets, it reduces pressure on unbanked populations to accumulate fiat reserves for payment security and creates a parallel system that competes directly with correspondent banking margins. This could accelerate central bank digital currency (CBDC) work in those regions, either as a response or as a standardized alternative. The sector signal is that stablecoin utility is increasingly decoupled from DeFi hype and anchored to tangible friction points in traditional finance.