There’s a storm brewing in stablecoin payments… and no one wants to talk about it.
Every day, we watch promising founders and fast-scaling teams sleepwalk into security decisions that would make a bank compliance officer faint. Wallets cobbled together from unmaintained smart contracts. Funds left sitting on exchanges as if FTX never happened. “Custody” outsourced to a multisig with EOA signers and no audit trail. And worst of all: the normalization of shortcuts.
We get it. You’re moving fast. You want to ship. But ask yourself: are you building a financial service or setting a time bomb?
The stablecoin payments ecosystem today is not a clean, linear flow of transactions. It’s a tangled web of PSPs, liquidity providers, OTC desks, aggregators, smart contracts, and centralized rails, all daisy-chained and often indistinguishable from each other. Everyone plugs into everyone. Everyone borrows each other's infrastructure. Everyone is exposed to each other's risks. One major failure could trigger cascading effects that take the whole ecosystem down with it.
We’re scared. Not because we don’t believe in the future of stablecoins, but because we do. We’ve spent years building the infrastructure to support this future. But what we see around us right now is reckless.
Too many founders treat stablecoin payments like a demo app instead of a regulated, high-stakes financial system. Security is an afterthought. Risk assessments are superficial. Operational maturity is replaced by three-month ISO checklists gamified through tools like Drata and Vanta. People are still using Safe contracts for treasury workflows—two months after Safe and ByBit got hacked. WTF.
The truth is this: stablecoin payments need to be secured like banking infrastructure. Anything less is delusional. Just because you're not regulated (yet) doesn’t mean the risks aren’t real. Counterparty risk, compromised keys, unauditable flows: they’re all ticking quietly in the background.
Security is not a feature. It’s the foundation. Without it, you’re not building finance. You’re making kindling.
We’ve worked with the most mature PSPs and fintechs in the space. The ones who’ve seen how fast things break. The ones who know that “non-custodial” doesn’t mean “safe” and that fast growth means nothing if your ops can't survive a scare.
If you're building with stablecoins, we’re begging you: think harder about the security infrastructure you’re standing on. Ask dumb questions. Challenge assumptions. Meet with experts. Revisit your wallet stack, your key management, your recovery process, your governance flows, your transaction lifecycles, your smart contract audits, your open-source dependencies. Don’t wait for the next hack to realize you were exposed.
The stablecoin ecosystem is one of the most promising advances in financial history. But it will only fulfill that promise if the people building it take security seriously. Otherwise, it’s not a question of if it blows up. It’s just when and how many it will take down with it.
Don’t be the founder who learns this the hard way.
All opinions expressed by the writers are solely their current opinions and do not reflect the views of FinancialColumnist.com, TET Events.
