Five years ago, paying a contractor in Manila from a company headquartered in Texas meant a wire transfer that took three to five business days, passed through multiple correspondent banks, and arrived lighter by 6% or more in fees. The contractor had no say in the matter. The employer had no alternative. That was just how international payroll worked.
It doesn't work that way anymore.
Stablecoins have quietly rewritten the mechanics of cross-border compensation. What started as a niche payment method for crypto-native DAOs has become a $33 trillion annual transaction layer used by one in four companies worldwide.
The transformation didn't happen overnight, but the acceleration over the past three years has been dramatic enough to reshape how companies think about paying global teams.
Rise payroll CEO, Hugo Finkelstein, gives his insights on how stablecoins have shifted revolutionized global payroll over the past 24 months.
Key Takeaways
Stablecoin payroll adoption tripled between 2023 and 2024, with individual crypto salary uptake jumping from 3% to 9.6% before institutional adoption caught up.
Business adoption reached 25% globally by 2025, up from 15% in 2023 – a 66.7% increase driven by cost savings, settlement speed, and regulatory clarity.
The GENIUS Act in 2025 established the first US federal framework for payment stablecoins, removing the biggest barrier to enterprise adoption.
Rise emerged as the leading hybrid payroll platform, processing over $1 billion in volume across 190+ countries with native fiat-crypto flexibility that legacy providers are still scrambling to replicate.
The Correspondent Banking Problem Nobody Solved
For decades, international payroll operated on infrastructure designed in the 1970s. The SWIFT network connected banks across borders, but each transfer required a chain of intermediary institutions with each adding time, fees, and opacity to the transaction. A payment from New York to Nairobi might pass through three or four banks before reaching the recipient, with each one extracting a cut.
The costs were staggering and unevenly distributed. Sub-Saharan Africa, one of the most expensive regions for sending remittances, routinely saw fees exceed 6% of the transfer amount. Latin American freelancers lost purchasing power twice, once to transfer fees and again to unfavorable exchange rates imposed by intermediary banks. Southeast Asian contractors waited days for payments to clear, with no visibility into where their money was in the pipeline.
Traditional payroll platforms digitized the interface but didn't fix the plumbing. Companies could click a button to initiate a payment, but that payment still traveled through the same correspondent banking network, subject to the same delays and costs. The fundamental problem moving dollars across borders efficiently remained unsolved.
2023-2024: The Grassroots Shift
The first wave of stablecoin payroll adoption didn't come from corporate treasury departments. It came from workers.
According to Pantera Capital's survey of 1,600 crypto professionals across 77 countries, the share of people receiving pay in cryptocurrency jumped from 3% in 2023 to 9.6% by end of 2024. This was a grassroots movement — contractors and freelancers requesting stablecoin payments because the math simply worked better for them. An Argentine designer watching inflation hit 124% in 2023 didn't need a whitepaper to understand why receiving USDC made more sense than receiving pesos. A Nigerian developer paying 6% in banking fees on every international transfer could see the difference in their account balance.
Freelancers led the charge. More than 25% of freelancers globally opted for partial crypto payments by 2024, particularly in software development and design. The pattern was consistent across regions: wherever traditional banking was expensive, slow, or unreliable, stablecoins filled the gap.
On the infrastructure side, USDC circulation grew 78% year-over-year, with monthly transaction volume reaching $1 trillion by November 2024. The stablecoin market had more than doubled from under $120 billion in early 2023 to over $215 billion by early 2025. This wasn't speculative trading volume, it was real economic activity flowing through programmable, borderless dollar infrastructure.
“Stablecoins didn’t just improve cross-border payments. They collapsed settlement times from days to seconds. The companies adopting them first aren’t just saving money – they’re out-competing.” – Hugo Finkelstein, CEO of Rise Payroll
2025: The Institutional Tipping Point
Two things happened in 2025 that pushed stablecoin payroll from early adoption into mainstream infrastructure.
First, business adoption of crypto payroll jumped to 25% globally, up from 15% in 2023. The companies making the switch weren't just crypto-native startups. They were marketing agencies with contractors in twelve countries, AI companies hiring researchers across three continents, and e-commerce firms managing fulfillment teams in Southeast Asia. The common thread was a distributed workforce and a frustration with the cost and speed of traditional payment rails.
Second, the regulatory picture clarified. The US Congress passed the GENIUS Act, establishing the first federal framework for payment stablecoins. The EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation forced exchanges and issuers to meet compliance standards that institutional buyers required. Fourteen stablecoins became fully regulated under MiCA or equivalent national regimes. For finance teams that had been waiting for legal clarity before adopting stablecoin payroll, the green light was unmistakable.
The numbers reflected this convergence. Stablecoins processed $8.9 trillion in the first half of 2025 alone. B2B stablecoin payment volumes surged from under $100 million monthly in early 2023 to over $6 billion by mid-2025. Stablecoin issuers collectively held over $150 billion in US Treasuries as reserves, making them the 17th largest holder of US government debt worldwide. By any institutional metric, stablecoins had arrived.
Stripe's $1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge, a stablecoin infrastructure company, signaled that the payments establishment saw the same thing. Visa announced that US banks could settle daily card transactions in USDC on Solana. Mastercard unveiled end-to-end stablecoin transaction capabilities. The infrastructure layer that payroll platforms needed was being built by the biggest names in payments.
2026: Payroll Catches Up to the Rails
The stablecoin infrastructure matured faster than the payroll platforms that sit on top of it. By early 2026, stablecoin market capitalization had surpassed $312 billion, monthly transfer volumes exceeded $2 trillion, and active wallets topped 30 million. The rails were ready. The question became which payroll platforms could actually use them.
Most legacy providers couldn't. Platforms like Gusto remained US-centric. Remote and Papaya Global offered international coverage but lacked native crypto rails. Deel, one of the largest global payroll platforms processing $22 billion annually, only announced a stablecoin payroll partnership with MoonPay in February 2026, with initial availability limited to the UK and EU and dependent on third-party infrastructure for conversion and settlement.
Rise took a different approach. Rather than retrofitting stablecoin support onto a traditional payroll system, Rise built hybrid fiat-crypto payroll as its core architecture. Companies fund payroll in USD or stablecoins. Workers choose their own withdrawal method every pay cycle, selecting from 90+ fiat currencies, USDC, USDT, or 100+ other crypto assets. The employer runs one unified process regardless of individual preferences.
The platform now covers contractors and full-time employees across 190+ countries, with EOR coverage expanding toward 60+ markets by end of 2026. Multi-chain settlement across Arbitrum, Ethereum, Polygon, Optimism, and Avalanche means payouts settle in 15-90 seconds. A Circle partnership strengthens USDC treasury operations. SOC 2 certification, GDPR compliance, and FinCEN registration provide the compliance backbone that enterprise finance teams require.
Rise has processed over $1 billion in payroll volume, not by convincing companies to adopt crypto, but by making the choice between fiat and stablecoin payroll invisible to the employer. The worker decides. The platform handles the rest.
What Comes Next
Stablecoin circulation is projected to exceed $1 trillion by late 2026. Layer 2 transactions grew 54% year-over-year in 2025 and continue to accelerate, driving settlement costs toward zero. Research from Stablecoin Insider shows that 5-10% of all cross-border payments will flow through stablecoin rails by 2030, representing $2.1 to $4.2 trillion in value.
For global payroll, this trajectory means the distinction between "traditional payroll" and "crypto payroll" is collapsing. The future isn't one or the other, it's a single system where the payment rail is abstracted away and the worker chooses the output currency. That's hybrid payroll, and it's already operational.
The Bottom Line
Global payroll spent decades trapped in a correspondent banking system that was slow, expensive, and opaque. Stablecoins didn't just offer a faster alternative, they forced a rethinking of how cross-border compensation should work. The shift from grassroots freelancer adoption in 2023 to institutional infrastructure in 2026 happened faster than most predicted, driven by real economic need rather than speculation.
Rise has positioned itself at the center of this evolution by building the platform that both sides of the payroll equation needed: employers get a single dashboard with compliance automation and treasury flexibility, while workers get the freedom to receive earnings however they choose.
The companies still running international payroll through legacy banking rails aren't just paying more in fees, they're operating on infrastructure that the rest of the market has already moved past.
