On-chain payments: what treasurers really need to know

There’s a new payment channel in town, and this development might be especially interesting for treasury leaders who face high friction and excessive costs when sending cross-border payments. Despite being an available channel for over a decade, on-chain (aka Blockchain) payments with stablecoins have made a recent splash in the corporate finance community, driven in part by Ripple’s acquisition of GTreasury, a US-based treasury management system. Their entrance into treasury management was a signal to some influencers that full scale corporate adoption of on-chain payments was imminent and primed for take-off. 

While the future of payments is on-chain and tokenized assets offer a fantastic opportunity to modernize liquidity performance, corporate treasurers remain reluctant to jump in, in part because they see more risk than value. 

But is there really more risk when using digital wallets and stablecoins as part of your payment journey? This is the very question that CFOs, Treasurers and payment leaders are looking for a trusted answer to.

On-chain payments

First, let’s explore the use cases for on-chain payments. The most popular amongst Kyriba’s customers is the ‘stablecoin sandwich’ (one of my favorite phrases of 2025, by the way). The sandwich is made up of two fiat currencies and a stablecoin in the middle. It might be EUR to USD or USD to MXN. It doesn’t really matter what the currencies are, in fact, so long as the digital wallet or exchange has liquidity in both currencies to facilitate an instant transaction. The stablecoin in the middle of the sandwich can be any number of stablecoins.

If we’re talking about the US Dollar, then USDC and Tether are the two most popular by a wide margin. But there are emerging stablecoin issuers such as Paypal (PYUSD) and TrueUSD that are targeting the corporate space as well, alongside other currencies such as the Euro and Yuan that feature stablecoin versions.

Stablecoin sandwich

The entire premise behind a stablecoin sandwich is that the transfer is instant, meaning that even though there is a stablecoin in the middle of the transaction, the payer is not holding a position in that stablecoin. The on-ramp into and off-ramp out of the stablecoin happens near simultaneously, so that the payee receives the currency of their choice. 

In the future, payees may be more inclined to be paid in stablecoin instead of their local currency, especially in the cases of emerging markets with high volatility currencies. That ‘open-faced stablecoin sandwich’ (not a real term) is growing quickly in popularity in retail circles and, if it catches hold in B2B too, would be the inflection point that every digital exchange and stablecoin issuer has been waiting for. 

Liquidity risk

Proponents and critics of on-chain payments will both point to liquidity within the entire payment journey as a critical requirement to ensure payment certainty. The concern is around “what if” the digital wallet/exchange lacked the liquidity to make the transfer instantly. Perhaps the destination currency was not immediately available, meaning that the payee unintentionally holds the stablecoin in the middle longer than expected. Perhaps payment could not be made at all because of a vendor issue. Or perhaps these issues arose because the stablecoin lost its peg, i.e. the value of a stablecoin dropped to less than 1:1 to the currency it is intended to be pegged to. To be fair, while de-pegging does happen with new and less popular decentralized stablecoins, the last time this happened for a market leading stablecoin such as USDC was when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in 2023. And even then, the effect was temporary. 

Even if de-pegging isn’t likely, however, if it were to occur then the payment transaction would either deliver reduced foreign currency or fail altogether. And that possibility—again, even if not a probability—freaks treasurers out. 

Choice matters

For corporate finance teams to even consider adopting on-chain payments and stablecoins, they need to trust that their payment transactions are certain to occur. 99.99% isn’t 100% and while this risk may seem minimal and inconsequential, those responsible for ensuring payments get where they need to go for their organizations are still shying away until they see complete assurance backed up by guarantees that they believe in.

This is why being stablecoin agnostic is so important.

The right choice of stablecoin and the right choice of digital exchange and/or bank to transact through is situational. The perfect fit for a specific use case very much depends on the services offered, regional coverage and other terms of service that match the needs of the finance organization in that situation. Finance teams will have multiple use cases. And they will seek redundancy to ensure that their meets are met, especially as they get comfortable with stablecoins and chain transactions.

Corporates have multiple bank relationships for the same reason. One size does not fill all and especially when it comes to digital assets and on-chain payments: choice matters.