The Plumbing Nobody Sees
Last year, stablecoins processed more transaction volume than many national payment systems. The numbers are almost absurdly large. Trillions of dollars flowing through smart contracts, settling in seconds instead of days, crossing borders without correspondent banking fees.
Most people use stablecoins without thinking about the infrastructure underneath. Send USDC, receive USDC. Simple. But building systems that can handle this kind of volume, reliably and compliantly, is anything but simple.
We've spent years working on this plumbing. What follows are some observations from that experience.
"Everyone wants to build the app on top. Very few people want to build the infrastructure underneath. That's where the real value accrues."
What We Learned the Hard Way
Some lessons only come from operating systems at scale under real conditions.
Redundancy isn't a nice-to-have. Every piece of the stack needs a fallback, and the fallbacks need fallbacks. We learned this after a cloud provider incident took down what we thought was a resilient architecture. Now we assume every component will fail and design accordingly.
You can't optimize what you can't see. Before scaling anything, we instrument everything. Latency percentiles, error rates, queue depths, mempool conditions. The monitoring infrastructure often takes longer to build than the feature it's monitoring. It's worth it every time.
Compliance bolted on after the fact is a nightmare. The systems we've seen struggle most are the ones that tried to add KYC, sanctions screening, and transaction monitoring to existing architectures. The ones that designed for compliance from the start have much cleaner codebases and fewer late-night incidents.
How Production Systems Actually Work
The architecture of high-volume stablecoin infrastructure involves tradeoffs that aren't obvious from the outside.
Multi-chain deployment sounds straightforward until you're managing liquidity, monitoring transactions, and maintaining security across a dozen networks with different consensus mechanisms and finality guarantees. Each chain has its quirks. Optimizing for one often creates problems on another.
Real-time settlement requires smart contracts that don't just work correctly but work efficiently. Gas optimization becomes critical when you're processing thousands of transactions per hour. We've seen poorly optimized contracts cost clients millions in unnecessary fees over time.
Fiat integration is where blockchain meets traditional banking, and traditional banking moves slowly. Getting bank partnerships in place, building compliant on-ramps and off-ramps, maintaining those relationships through regulatory changes. This is often the bottleneck for stablecoin projects, not the blockchain engineering.
The Technical Realities
Transaction throughput on most chains is limited in ways that matter at scale. You're competing for block space with everyone else, and during congestion events, your critical transactions need to still go through. We've built systems with dynamic fee estimation, transaction bundling, and fallback RPC endpoints that activate automatically when primary providers lag.
Finality is trickier than it sounds. A transaction appearing in a block isn't the same as a transaction being irreversibly confirmed. Different chains have different finality models, and for high-value transfers, you need to wait for appropriate confirmation depths. Getting this wrong means accepting transactions that later get reorganized out of existence.
Cross-chain messaging is the weak point of multi-chain stablecoin systems. Bridges have been the source of some of the largest hacks in crypto history. We've moved toward designs that minimize bridge exposure and use multiple verification mechanisms for cross-chain transfers.
Key management at scale is its own specialty. HSMs, multi-sig schemes, operational security procedures. The larger the value secured, the more sophisticated the attacks become. We've seen nation-state-level attempts at social engineering against hot wallet signers.
The Regulatory Reality
Stablecoins sit at the intersection of banking, securities, and payments regulation, often in multiple jurisdictions simultaneously.
AML and KYC requirements vary by jurisdiction but are non-negotiable everywhere that matters. The challenge is implementing verification at scale without creating so much friction that users go elsewhere. We've found that tiered verification with increasing limits strikes a reasonable balance.
Reserve transparency has become expected. On-chain proof of reserves, third-party attestations, regular audits. The stablecoins that have maintained trust through market stress are the ones that over-communicate on backing.
Cross-border compliance is a constant puzzle. What's permitted in Singapore differs from what's permitted in the EU, which differs from what's permitted in the US. Many stablecoin operators maintain separate entities and systems for different jurisdictions.
What Actually Gets Built
The infrastructure we've helped create powers some useful things.
Cross-border payments that settle in minutes instead of days, at costs that are a fraction of wire transfers. Small businesses using stablecoin rails for supplier payments. Remittance flows that don't lose 8% to intermediaries.
Programmable treasury management, where business logic executes automatically on payment conditions. Escrow that releases on verifiable conditions. Payroll that streams by the second rather than arriving in monthly lumps.
Settlement that doesn't stop for weekends or holidays. Commerce that can close deals on Sunday night because the payment infrastructure actually works on Sunday night.
What Comes Next
Privacy-preserving stablecoin payments are closer than most people realize. Zero-knowledge proofs enable transactions that are private to observers but auditable to regulators. This resolves what seemed like an impossible tension.
Yield on stablecoin holdings is becoming standard. If reserves are backing the tokens, those reserves can be invested in low-risk instruments. The economics of stablecoin issuance are shifting as a result.
Governance questions are emerging. Who controls the issuer? How are decisions made about blacklisting addresses or freezing funds? Decentralization in stablecoin governance is harder than in most DeFi protocols because of the real-world assets and regulatory relationships involved.
Building Here
Stablecoin infrastructure is foundational. It's not glamorous work, but it's work that matters.
If you're building in this space, we've probably encountered whatever problem you're facing. Happy to share what we've learned.