The Invisible Plumbing of Stablecoins: Where Gaps Still Matter

Stablecoins are no longer just a crypto experiment. With the Genius Act now requiring that reserves be held in cash and Treasuries at regulated banks, they are moving into the core of the financial system and drawing serious attention from both banks and regulators. As the Associated Press reported, the law is a major step for an industry that has been trying to establish its credibility.

When people talk about stablecoins, they usually focus on the tokens themselves like USDC, Tether, or tokenized deposits. Coins get the attention but what founders should focus on is the invisible plumbing of stablecoin; the infrastructure that makes stablecoins safe, compliant, and usable inside banks.

In our FinTech Industry Council, bank leaders made it clear: customers don’t care whether they’re using ACH, RTP, FedNow, or USDC. What they want is for payments to be instant and trustworthy. 

As one council member put it: “The tech works. The real hurdle is trust with compliance, audit, and regulators.” 

The biggest challenges lie in the unseen systems of compliance, reporting, and core integration. And while many parts of the market are crowded with large players, there are still gaps where new solutions could make a real difference.

Compliance Across Rails

Blockchain monitoring is well covered by firms like Chainalysis and TRM Labs. These companies track suspicious flows and help banks manage crypto-specific risk. What is still missing is a single compliance layer that spans every payment rail. Banks today run separate systems for stablecoins, ACH, cards, and faster payment networks. This duplication increases cost and makes oversight harder.

A stronger play is a compliance layer that spans every rail. One system applying the same checks everywhere, producing a single audit trail regulators can trust. Banks consistently point to this as a missing piece.

Programmable Payments

Stablecoins can do more than move money quickly. They can be programmed to release funds automatically when conditions are met. Circle and Tassat have begun to explore this, but most solutions still require custom development and heavy legal review.

What’s still lacking are ready-to-use templates that reduce legal and IT friction. Standardized escrow, milestone payouts, or supply-chain contracts that are safe to deploy and easy to connect to existing systems would lower friction and speed up adoption.

Treasury and Reserve Management

Custodians like BlackRock and BNY Mellon already hold reserves for stablecoin issuers, and firms like Ondo are tokenizing Treasuries. The assets themselves are managed. What is still missing is a way for issuers, custodians, and banks to coordinate around those reserves.

Right now, each party manages its own piece in a silo. Liquidity planning, yield management, and disclosures are handled separately, which makes reporting clunky and slows decision-making. A realistic solution is not one single platform for everyone, but rather a coordination layer that pulls data from each stakeholder’s existing systems, normalizes it, and provides shared dashboards and standardized reports. That kind of interoperability would make reserve management more transparent and efficient without forcing any one group to change how it operates.

Legacy Banking Systems

Large payment providers like Stripe, Modern Treasury, and Fireblocks already help enterprises move money across rails. But many smaller and mid-sized banks are still running on legacy systems that were not designed for 24/7 payments. For them, plugging into stablecoin networks is difficult and expensive.

As one council participant put it: “We’d like to experiment with stablecoin settlement, but our core wasn’t designed for 24/7. We’d have to re-architect too much just to run a pilot.”

Middleware that bridges older banking cores with new stablecoin rails could open the door for these institutions. Lightweight connectors that handle reconciliation, reporting, and ledger updates would allow them to participate without ripping out their core systems.

Transparency and Audit

Blockchain explorers and analytics platforms exist, but they are built for specialists. Regulators and bank boards are asking for something different: clear proof of reserves, plain-language dashboards, and stress tests that show what would happen if there were a surge in redemptions.

Audit-first infrastructure that is designed with regulators and risk officers in mind, rather than engineers, would help reduce hesitation and accelerate adoption.

The Bottom Line

The visible parts of the stablecoin market such as issuers, custody, wallets, and blockchain monitoring already appear to be well served. The less visible plumbing is where adoption often stalls, and where important gaps remain. These back-end systems may not grab headlines, but they determine whether banks can safely integrate stablecoins into day-to-day operations. Founders who focus on solving these quieter, infrastructure-heavy problems will be addressing the pain points that financial leaders return to again and again. In the long run, it is this invisible work that will decide whether stablecoins become a niche tool or a core part of the financial system.

About Forum Ventures’ Industry Councils

Forum Ventures’ Fintech Industry Council brings together senior executives from across banks, payments and embedded finance companies, data and infrastructure leaders, and corporate venture to share perspectives, compare strategies, and engage with startup solutions that address their most pressing needs. These insights were drawn from discovery calls with founding members as well as the Council’s first quarterly meeting.

Learn more about all of our industry councils here: https://www.forumvc.com/forum-industry-council

A Call for Founders!

We believe the opportunities surfaced through our Industry Councils are some of the most urgent and exciting in the market. That’s why we’re actively investing in the companies building solutions to these challenges.

If you’re already building a startup that aligns with the themes our Fintech Council is exploring, pitch our accelerator here.

If you’re earlier on the journey, Forum’s AI Venture Studio backs ideas before a company even exists. We partner with industry veterans who’ve lived these problems firsthand and are ready to build transformative solutions. If that’s you, reach out to Ksenia@forumvc.com.