Among the countless tokens circulating the crypto ecosystem, stablecoins have been gaining significant traction among everyday traders and organizations alike. Often backed by reserves of real-world currencies, stablecoins behave like true digital dollars, helping organizations process payments, bypass intermediaries, and get all the benefits of crypto rails without the volatility typically associated with digital assets.
But while stablecoins can be one of the simplest forms of cryptocurrency, the infrastructure surrounding them often is not. In this article, we'll discuss why facilitating stablecoin payments is trickier than expected and how you can overcome common roadblocks with secure wallet infrastructure.
Why stablecoin payments are deceptively difficult to implement
Stablecoin payments appear simple on the surface, but like many other elements of crypto, building the infrastructure to support them is no easy task. Even after investing in top technical talent and tools to bring this functionality to your users, there are still numerous hurdles to overcome, such as:
- User onboarding: If your users aren’t already crypto-native, asking them to download a wallet, manage a seed phrase, and figure out gas fees is a fast way to lose them! While some apps attempt to abstract this complexity by providing explicit guidance throughout the process, their users still face fragmented onboarding flows that deter new users rather than enticing them.
- Custodial tradeoffs: Companies or payment providers that hold funds on behalf of users are considered custodial and may be subject to potential regulatory obligations, such as obtaining Money Transmitter Licenses (MTLs) for US-based operations. In addition to increasing your compliance burden, offering custodial services can potentially limit your global reach and may create legal risks (both at the private and public levels) if you fail to properly identify users whose funds you control.
- Security and policy overhead: To ensure the safety of end users' funds, your team needs to control who can transfer funds, set transaction limits, and review or approve transfers before they go out. Plus, to ensure and prove compliance, each transaction needs a clear audit trail.
- Developer lift: Stablecoin payments go far beyond creating wallets and sending tokens. You’ll also need to build recovery options, support multichain routing, and manage authentication and authorization. Establishing this foundation takes time (which delays time-to-market), coordination, and significant in-house effort.
Put simply, while stablecoins themselves are now mature and battle-tested, building the infrastructure required to use them in a business context can be a daunting process.
What goes into a stablecoin payments stack?
When building stablecoin payment flows, your teams will need to navigate a mix of infrastructure decisions, vendor integrations, and UX tradeoffs. Whether you're building a new payroll platform, a rewards engine, or a global invoicing tool, assembling the right stack is crucial.
Here’s a breakdown of what that stack looks like:
1. Wallet infrastructure
At the heart of every stablecoin payment flow is wallet infrastructure. This infrastructure handles crucial elements such as key management and transaction signing while supporting non-custodial flows, user onboarding, and configurable transaction controls.
While some companies choose to build their infrastructure in-house, most outsource to proven Wallet-as-a-Service (WaaS) providers (like Turnkey) as the faster and more secure alternative. Because these providers have already established the infrastructure on your behalf, they're a great fit for teams looking to get their products to market fast without compromising on compliance.
2. Stablecoin and chain selection
Not all stablecoins or chains are created equal. Your teams must decide which stablecoins to support — such as USDC, USDT, or PYUSD — and which chain networks they’ll use to move those assets. If you’re unsure where to begin, we recommend starting with Ethereum, TRON, Polygon, Base, and Solana.
Factors to weigh here include transaction costs, network congestion, user familiarity, wallet compatibility, and regional access. Some solutions even route payments across multiple chains based on fees or liquidity.
3. On/off ramps
Since your users will need the ability to fund wallets and cash out, you’ll need to consider fiat on- and off-ramps. Some teams integrate them directly into their payment flows; others point users to trusted partners to facilitate this function.
Popular providers to consider include Stripe, Sardine, Coinbase Pay, Transak, and MoonPay. Your decision may depend on where your users are based, which payment methods you want to support, and how much control you want over your UX.
4. Compliance and monitoring
Stablecoin payments may feel decentralized, but they’re still subject to regulatory oversight — especially in markets like the U.S. or EU. If your business is sending large volumes or operating in a regulated vertical, you’ll likely need tools for sanctions screening, KYB/KYC (know your business/customer), transaction monitoring, and audit logging.
Vendors like Chainalysis, TRM Labs, and Notabene can help your teams stay compliant and catch suspicious activity before it becomes a problem.
5. Business logic and orchestration
Here's where you define how your stablecoin payment system actually works. Who gets paid? When? Based on what trigger? Often, this function is built in-house, but it can also be layered on top of tools like CRMs, spreadsheets, payout APIs, or no-code schedulers.
How Turnkey powers stablecoin payments
Turnkey provides the wallet infrastructure needed to build fast, secure, and scalable stablecoin payment flows. Let’s break down how the solution powers stablecoin payments for leading organizations:
Embedded wallets and seamless user onboarding
Turnkey makes it easy to provision non-custodial in-app wallets for your users via familiar authentication methods like email and social login or passkeys. There’s no seed phrases to manage, no browser extensions to install, and no prior crypto experience required to create a wallet and start sending payments. Everything happens behind the scenes — wallet creation, key management, and authentication — while users enjoy familiar onboarding and payment flows that rival web2 in accessibility.
Mural Pay is a perfect example of an organization simplifying stablecoin payments with Turnkey. Its goal was to help organizations send USDC payments to global contractors — many of whom had no experience with crypto and no existing wallet. With Turnkey, Mural Pay generates embedded, non-custodial wallets for its users at the time of signup based on email credentials, an experience that felt more like a modern fintech app than a crypto product.
The result was higher onboarding completion and reduced support burden, culminating in the launch of Mural Connections — a feature that enables users to send USDC directly to any email address without worrying about whether the recipient already has a wallet.
Policy engine for transaction control and compliance
Turnkey’s policy engine provides teams with fine-grained control over how transactions are handled, including limits on amounts, multi-user approval flows, role-based permissions, and session-based access logic. These policies are enforced directly at the signing layer, meaning they can’t be bypassed by frontend errors or rushed product workarounds.
For organizations managing stablecoin payments across teams, this built-in control is critical. It removes the need to reinvent the wheel with custom backend logic or rely on manual reviews to prevent mistakes. Instead, permissions and guardrails are embedded directly into the wallet infrastructure, making security and compliance part of the system’s foundation rather than an afterthought.
Spectral Labs put this policy engine to the test in a unique way. As a platform that offers AI agents to execute transactions on behalf of new entrants, Spectral Labs needed a way to ensure user intent was consistently aligned with the actions of its agents. Turnkey’s flexible policy engine provided fine-grained controls for how agents use private keys, including platform-wide limits for transaction amounts and signature patterns.
These policies were enforced at the infrastructure level, ensuring predictable, safe behavior without needing constant oversight. It was a clear demonstration that Turnkey’s policy controls could handle not only stablecoin payments, but also novel, programmable use cases operating at the edge of what’s possible.
Native multichain support
Turnkey operates at the cryptographic curve rather than being tied to any single chain or asset. That means it’s inherently asset-agnostic, offering native support for multiple chains out of the box.
For teams building stablecoin payment flows, this matters more than it might seem. The chain you choose to move stablecoins can impact everything from transaction fees and confirmation times to user accessibility and integration overhead. One week, it might make sense to settle on Polygon for cost efficiency; the next, you might prefer TRON or Arbitrum for ecosystem alignment or liquidity.
This flexibility is especially valuable for teams operating in multiple regions or iterating quickly on go-to-market strategies. Instead of getting locked into a single-chain implementation or juggling multiple vendor integrations, they can scale with one infrastructure layer that adapts as their needs evolve.
Low-latency transaction signing
Turnkey enables fast, secure transaction signing across chains, and it is designed to support high-throughput and real-time use cases. Unlike traditional MPC-based systems, which can introduce latency due to coordination between multiple parties, Turnkey delivers signing performance that’s up to 100x faster.
That kind of speed directly impacts the user experience in products where timing matters. Whether you're running an on-demand payout system, a trading app, or any workflow where delays create friction, signing speed becomes a core part of your product’s performance.
Moonshot proved the importance of low-latency transaction signing for mobile trading apps. As an app aimed at everyday users, it needed onchain transactions to feel just as responsive as actions in any mainstream fintech app. This meant abstracting crypto's commonly lengthy transaction processing times.
By using Turnkey to power embedded wallets and signing flows, Moonshot delivers near-instant execution with an interface that doesn’t feel like crypto at all. That low-latency infrastructure was key to creating a user-friendly UX, enabling users to trade and move funds from their phones without ever noticing the complexity behind the scenes.
Are you ready to build your stablecoin payment flows?
Stablecoins are quickly becoming a trusted way to move money around the world. Regulatory clarity is improving, adoption is rising, and more organizations are looking to use stablecoins for real use cases like payroll, invoicing, and global payouts.
Turnkey provides the crypto wallet infrastructure to power these stablecoin payments with speed, control, and security. If you're evaluating how to embed stablecoin payments into your product, Turnkey provides a proven foundation that teams are already using in production.
Chat with our team, or get started with Turnkey today.
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