Meld CEO: Stablecoins won’t replace banks, but they will change cross-border payments

​Stablecoins are becoming an increasingly visible part of the payments industry, but their future may lie less in replacing the existing financial system than in improving how money moves within it. Their key advantage is the ability to transfer money quickly and cheaply across borders. In an interview with Traders Union, Meld co-founder and CEO Pankaj Bengani explains why banks will remain part of this system, how cross-border payments could change, and why stablecoins may ultimately become almost invisible infrastructure.

From payments to crypto

Before launching Meld, Pankaj Bengani worked in products and partnerships at Block, Yahoo, and his own payments startup, Coin, which was eventually acquired by Fitbit/Google. His experience in the industry exposed him to the costs and delays involved in moving money across borders.

According to Bengani, many of the problems in today’s payments system stem not from technological limitations but from infrastructure that has accumulated over time.

“If you spend enough time inside payments, you develop a very specific kind of frustration. You see exactly how much friction, cost and delay are baked into moving money across a border, and you see how arbitrary it is. Very little about payments is law like code or physics; it's just accumulated history.”

His encounter with Bitcoin in 2012 became a turning point, changing his understanding of how value could move.

How Block shaped his view of Bitcoin

Bengani spent roughly five years at Jack Dorsey’s Block. But the main lesson he took from that experience was not about betting on a particular digital asset. Instead, it was the potential of open money infrastructure to broaden access to financial services.

In his view, that potential matters most for people and small businesses underserved by the traditional financial system.

“I think the argument for an open, neutral, permissionless money protocol is correct. But if you want that idea to reach a small merchant or underbanked individual, you have to meet people in the unit of account they actually price their lives in. For most of the world right now, that's dollars or fiat. So I took the philosophy and applied it to a different layer of the stack.”

Bengani still sees Bitcoin as an important asset but draws a clear distinction between its role as an investment and its usefulness for payments.

“Bitcoin is a powerful and deeply transformational store of value and long-term investment in my opinion; but it’s not a unit of account yet.”

Why Meld bet on stablecoins

Bengani sees stablecoins as one of the most promising areas of the crypto market because their usefulness does not depend on people viewing crypto as an investment.

Unlike volatile digital assets, stablecoins can serve a straightforward purpose for ordinary users: moving money and making payments.

“Because stablecoins are the only part of crypto where the use case doesn't require you to have an opinion about crypto. Nobody wants to pay their counterparty in an asset that might move 15% in hours. Volatility is a feature for an investment and a bug for a payment — and payments are a vastly larger market than speculation.”

Bengani estimates that the stablecoin market is already worth around $313 billion, but their use in the real economy remains relatively limited. Much of the activity is still connected to trading and moving funds between exchanges and crypto wallets.

That is why he sees the biggest opportunity in expanding their use for payments.

Users should not have to choose a blockchain

Fragmentation presents another challenge. There are dozens of blockchains and stablecoins alongside hundreds of local payment methods used across different countries. Developers entering a new market often have to choose the networks, tokens, and liquidity providers themselves.

Bengani believes this complexity should eventually disappear from the user experience. He compares the model with card payments: a Visa user does not need to know which acquirer, payment network, or correspondent is behind a transaction.

“When you tap your card at a café, you don't know which acquirer processed it, which network routed it, what the interchange was, or which correspondent settled it. That opacity isn't a flaw — it's the product. The complexity got absorbed by infrastructure so the user didn't have to hold it.”

Bitcoin, gold, and the dollar serve different purposes

The rise of dollar-backed stablecoins may appear to conflict with the idea of Bitcoin as an alternative to the traditional monetary system. Bengani, however, does not see the two as mutually exclusive.

He separates the question of which asset is better at preserving value from the question of which infrastructure is more convenient for everyday payments.

“Bitcoin and gold are apex assets that are sovereign and not controlled by any nation state. That’s what value should be pegged to, and if you look at history, for the most part, hard money was defined as money backed by gold.”

At the same time, he believes the U.S. dollar remains more attractive than many national currencies that are depreciating more rapidly.

“The U.S. dollar is arguably better than many global currencies that are depreciating at a faster rate. The U.S. dollar is, in my opinion, not as robust in the long term as gold or Bitcoin. But that’s not the thesis we’re building Meld around. Meld is about increasing the avenues for access to money cheaper, faster, and better. The market will decide if “hard money” will be backed by gold, bitcoin, or some other asset.”

Stablecoins will not eliminate banks

Despite the growth of blockchain-based payments, Bengani does not expect banks to disappear from the system. Stablecoin reserves remain tied to bank deposits and government securities, while regulation is increasingly formalizing that relationship.

“Stablecoins will mostly be a layer on top — and I don't think that's a defeat. Reserves sit in Treasuries and bank deposits, and under the GENIUS Act framework that relationship is now written into law rather than worked around. Any founder who tells you stablecoins are disintermediating banks wholesale is selling something.”

Some parts of the banking infrastructure, however, could become significantly smaller. Bengani points to correspondent banking, still widely used for international payments, as one of the clearest examples.

“However, parts of the banking stack will be “replaced”: correspondent banking will become thinner. The chain of nostro and vostro accounts that a cross-border payment traverses today is slow, expensive, opaque about final cost, and shrinking. Stablecoins collapse that chain into a single settlement event.”

Bank-issued stablecoins could accelerate the market

Bengani sees the prospect of major banks issuing their own digital money as more of an opportunity for infrastructure platforms than a threat.

He draws a parallel with Visa, which became indispensable as more banks issued their own cards and needed common infrastructure to connect them.

“Look at the analogy properly. Visa didn't lose when every bank in the world started issuing its own cards. That's the moment Visa became indispensable, because a hundred issuers with a hundred card programs creates exactly one problem worth solving: interoperability.”

In Bengani’s view, greater stablecoin issuance by banks could similarly expand distribution across depositors and merchants, increasing the need for infrastructure that connects different issuers.

Stablecoins should become invisible

In the long term, Bengani does not expect most users to consciously choose a particular stablecoin every time they make a purchase or transfer money. As with today’s card payments, the underlying technology should fade into the background.

“The cheapest, fastest, most composable primitives will win. Those happen to be stablecoins for now.”

The ultimate goal, he says, is for users to stop thinking about the technology powering the payment altogether.

“The goal is: invisible. Payment infrastructure is only successful when nobody is talking about it.”