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The stablecoin industry has spent possibly too much time trying to reinvent checkout.

Consumers already have a nearly universal interface for turning balances into purchases. Their cards. Merchants already accept them, networks already route them, all while banks and processors already know how to handle fraud, disputes and chargebacks around them.

That puts cards at the center of the stablecoin opportunity in consumer payments.

“If you look at stablecoins without cards, it’s very hard to spend them,” Paymentology Chief Technology Officer Tim Joslyn told PYMNTS. “Cards solve the acceptance problem.”

“I don’t think of them as separate things; one is an enabler of another,” Joslyn added, noting that “demand isn’t the problem. It’s the plumbing.”

He pointed to research showing that 42% of stablecoin holders want to use them for major purchases, compared with 28% who actually do.

Closing that gap may not require convincing millions more consumers to consciously “pay with stablecoins,” Joslyn said.

It might just require making stablecoins practically invisible, where instead of replacing card networks at checkout, stablecoins use them as the last mile and serve as the infrastructure moving money behind the card.

Cryptocurrency payments have frequently been treated as an acceptance problem. Persuade enough consumers to pay with digital assets, persuade enough merchants to accept them, and eventually create a viable network.

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