According to PYMNTS.com, the push for enterprise stablecoin adoption is being tripped up by the sheer complexity of the underlying blockchain infrastructure. The core issue is that the crypto ecosystem has fragmented clearing functions across a wide array of actors like validators, sequencers, exchanges, and bridge protocols, rather than eliminating them. In response, companies like Unlimit have launched non-custodial stablecoin clearinghouses designed to simplify transactions for businesses. Industry leaders, such as Mesh CEO Bam Azizi, argue that the biggest barrier is user experience, stating the goal is to make payments so simple that “even a grandmother will use it.” The fundamental gap is that while stablecoin issuers know the reserves and validators know the ledger, no single entity has a complete view of exposure and solvency like a traditional clearinghouse does.
The irony is palpable
Here’s the thing: crypto was built on the promise of killing the intermediary. No more slow banks, no more opaque fees. Just peer-to-peer value transfer. But what’s happening with enterprise stablecoins? They’re accidentally building a whole new, even more complicated layer of intermediaries. We’ve traded a few big, slow, known banks for a dizzying mesh of validators, liquidity hubs, custodial platforms, and cross-chain bridges. Each piece adds its own rules and potential points of failure. So much for simplicity.
What businesses actually want
Enterprises don’t care about the tech. Seriously. They care about reducing friction, predicting cash flow, and managing risk. The current stablecoin landscape does the opposite for them. Imagine a CFO who has to worry about settlement latency on Polygon versus Solana, or bridge security on a cross-chain transfer. It’s a nightmare. They just want to pay a supplier and have it work. The push for rail-agnostic clearinghouses makes perfect sense from this view. It’s an admission that the underlying tech is too messy for prime time and needs to be abstracted away. Basically, businesses need a new middleman to hide all the other middlemen.
The real problem nobody talks about
There’s a massive, hidden fracture in the model. In traditional finance, a clearinghouse sits in the middle and sees everything: who owes what, who has collateral, who’s at risk. In the stablecoin world, that view is completely split. The issuer knows about the dollar reserves in a bank. The blockchain validators know about the token ledger. But no one entity is responsible for ensuring the whole system is solvent in real-time. The clearing function is just about ledger coherence, not systemic risk. That’s a huge, unaddressed gap. What happens when a rapid redemption event hits? The left hand might not know what the right hand is doing until it’s too late.
Clearing is eternal
So the big revelation here isn’t about blockchain at all. It’s that clearing—the reconciliation of obligations between parties—is a permanent, universal need in any financial system. You can’t design it away. You can only redesign how it’s done. Stablecoins are trying to bake it into code and market structure instead of a centralized rulebook. But let’s be skeptical: is distributing this critical function across a competitive, profit-driven ecosystem of protocols really more stable or safer? Or have we just made it more opaque and harder to regulate? The industry is scrambling to build the coordination layer it famously said it wouldn’t need. The old finance guys might be having a quiet chuckle.
