Key Highlights
- Stellar stablecoins settle in ~9.5 seconds at near-zero cost, already outperforming the G20’s 2027 targets.
- Major players like PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard are integrating Stellar for real-world payments.
- Stablecoins are emerging as a faster, transparent alternative to legacy cross-border payment systems.
The G20’s ambitious cross-border payments roadmap, laid out in 2020 with a target deadline of 2027, aimed to make international transfers faster, cheaper, more transparent, and more accessible.
The benchmarks included goals like settling 75% of wholesale cross-border payments within one hour and bringing remittance costs below 3%.
But in a recent post on X, Stellar Development Foundation CEO Denelle Dixon made a pointed observation: stablecoins running on the Stellar network are not just on track to meet those targets—they’ve already surpassed them.
And the data backs her up.
Stellar’s numbers speak for themselves
The Stellar network currently settles transactions in roughly 9.5 seconds at an average cost of $0.0007667 per transaction, according to its own dashboard. That is a far cry from the multi-day settlement windows and layered intermediary fees that define traditional correspondent banking.
The network now supports cash-to-crypto on-ramps in over 90 countries and has processed more than $23 billion in real-world asset payment volume to date.
By contrast, the European Central Bank (ECB) noted in 2024 that one-third of retail cross-border payments still took more than one business day to settle, and nearly one-quarter of global corridors had costs exceeding 3%. The G20’s own Financial Stability Board has acknowledged that the roadmap is struggling to translate ambitious targets into measurable progress.
The gap between what the G20 envisioned and what stablecoins on Stellar are already delivering is becoming harder to ignore.
How Stellar got here
Stellar wasn’t always in this position. But a string of high-profile partnerships and ecosystem milestones over the past 18 months has turned the network into one of the most credible blockchain-based payment infrastructures in the world.
In June 2025, PayPal announced the launch of PYUSD on Stellar, expanding its stablecoin’s utility for real-world payments, remittances, and what it calls “Payment Financing” or PayFi. Days later, Visa added Stellar to its stablecoin settlement platform, alongside Ethereum, Solana, and Avalanche. That integration alone positioned Stellar within the infrastructure of a company that processes trillions of dollars in payments annually.
MoneyGram, which has been operating on Stellar since 2021, now enables crypto-to-cash services in over 170 countries through its Ramps API. Meanwhile, AirTM, which moves USDC on Stellar via Bridge (a Stripe company), processes over $1 billion in stablecoin payments every few months and claims to cut cross-border payroll costs by 20–25%.
More recently, in November 2025, U.S. Bank launched a pilot for bank-grade stablecoin issuance on Stellar, built in collaboration with SDF and PwC. The pilot included features like asset freezing, reversibility, and transparent reserve visibility—essentially demonstrating how regulated digital money can be issued and settled safely on a public blockchain.
In March 2026, both Mastercard and Bitget Wallet announced integrations with Stellar for payment and settlement infrastructure, further deepening the network’s ties with traditional financial rails.
The G20 problem: Why legacy rails keep falling short
The G20’s Enhancing Cross-Border Payments report set targets around price transparency, speed, and full-value delivery. But as The Payments Association noted in its 2026 analysis, the $195 trillion that crossed borders in 2024 still encountered significant friction from foreign exchange conversion, correspondent banking fees, and liquidity management challenges.
Traditional cross-border transfers rely on nostro and vostro accounts spread across multiple currencies and jurisdictions, tying up capital and exposing institutions to FX volatility. Delays frequently occur when liquidity is unavailable in a given corridor, and costs often remain hidden until after settlement. For smaller institutions and remittance senders in emerging markets, the experience is even worse.
Stablecoins flip this model. Fees are visible on-chain, settlement is near-instant, and total costs are knowable upfront. As FinTech Weekly put it in its 2026 stablecoin analysis, these assets “don’t just benefit from the comparison with legacy rails—they expose the inefficiencies and intensify pressure for reform.”
Dixon’s broader vision: Open highways, not railroads
Dixon’s post about G20 targets is part of a broader thesis she has been building throughout 2025 and 2026. In an essay titled “Let’s Build Open Highways, Not Railroads,” she warned that the blockchain industry risks repeating the monopolistic patterns of the 1880s railroad era if major corporations continue building closed, vertically integrated networks.
After returning from Davos 2026, Dixon noted that digital assets were not a side conversation at the event—they were the conversation. She flagged privacy as the next critical frontier for institutional adoption, a point she expanded on in a March 2026 blog post where she argued that blockchain transparency was designed to deter bad actors, not to let one bank spy on another’s operations.
The Stellar Development Foundation has been acting on that vision. The network’s X-Ray protocol upgrade (Protocol 25), which went live in January 2026, introduced native support for zero-knowledge primitives like BN254 and Poseidon, laying the foundation for configurable, compliance-forward privacy applications. The subsequent launch of Stellar Private Payments enables confidential transfers using zero-knowledge proofs while maintaining regulatory compliance.
Institutional validation accelerates
The institutional signals around Stellar have been piling up fast. A DTCC patent identifies XLM as a designated “Digital Liquidity Token” for cross-ledger settlement within the Depository Trust Company’s planned tokenization service, expected to launch in the second half of 2026. Franklin Templeton continues to operate a tokenized money market fund on the network, and according to rwa.xyz data, Stellar now holds over $1.4 billion in distributed real-world asset value.
Just this week, XLM was classified as a commodity alongside Bitcoin, XRP, Cardano, and Solana under a new U.S. digital asset framework. Dixon reacted positively to the development, which removes a significant regulatory overhang for institutional deployment on Stellar.
Stellar is also a founding member of the Blockchain Payments Consortium, alongside Fireblocks, Polygon Labs, Solana Foundation, TON Foundation, and others. The consortium aims to build common frameworks for blockchain payments that work across networks and borders—essentially an industry-level push toward the kind of interoperability the G20 envisioned but legacy systems have failed to deliver.
The bigger picture: Stablecoins as the new settlement layer
The numbers tell a compelling story. Stablecoins processed roughly $33 trillion in transaction volume in 2025, more than double Visa’s $15 trillion over the same period. Global stablecoin supply has crossed $300 billion. The GENIUS Act, signed into law in July 2025, set strict rules for U.S.-issued payment stablecoins, including 1:1 asset backing, monthly audits, and real-time redemption rights—giving institutional players the regulatory clarity they needed to participate.
In countries with unstable economies, from Venezuela to Egypt to Argentina, stablecoins have become practical tools for preserving purchasing power and accessing global financial services. The Marshall Islands even completed the world’s first on-chain disbursement of universal basic income using a digitally native sovereign bond on Stellar in December 2025.
Dixon’s argument, ultimately, is that the infrastructure for faster, cheaper, and more transparent cross-border payments does not need to be built from scratch by multilateral working groups over the next decade. It already exists. It runs on open, public blockchain networks. And it is being used today by millions of people and some of the largest financial institutions in the world.
The G20 set the targets. Stablecoins on Stellar beat them.
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