The Whitepaper I Shared With Smart People
Last week, BVNK released their Stablecoin Utility Report 2026, a YouGov survey of 4,658 stablecoin holders across 15 countries. The headline findings got a lot of attention: 39% of respondents receive income in stablecoins, 27% use them for everyday payments, and $307 billion in market cap is increasingly behaving like money rather than a speculative asset.
But one finding stood out to me personally. When asked about their biggest frustrations with stablecoin payments, users named irreversible transactions and the risk of losing funds as a top-three friction point. Right alongside “too many steps” and “confusing chain selection.”
This feels like a good time to share where Coinbax came from.
In early 2025, before we raised our seed round, I wrote a whitepaper. Not necessarily to publish, but to think. And to get smart people to tell me whether I was wrong or might be on to something.
The core argument was simple: stablecoins have a trust gap. Blockchain’s finality, the feature that makes it powerful, becomes a liability the moment you’re using stablecoins for real commercial transactions rather than speculation. Send $50,000 to the wrong address? Gone. Get hit with friendly fraud as a merchant? No recourse. Wire instructions compromised? Gone.
Traditional finance is slow and expensive, but it has a safety net. Stablecoins didn’t. That gap, I argued, was the thing holding back real commercial adoption.
I spent months sharing that thinking with people who knew payments far better than I did. People like Tom Brown, Wade Peery, Tony McLaughlin, and others who gave me the confidence that I was chasing down the right things. Their feedback sharpened the idea considerably. At the time, my thinking was anchored in e-commerce — online merchants dealing with chargebacks, platforms managing payouts to freelancers, marketplaces where buyer and seller don’t know each other. Those are all environments where irreversibility is a genuine problem, and where programmable escrow with structured dispute resolution could provide the trust layer that makes stablecoin payments viable.
What Evolved, What Didn’t
The thesis held up. What changed was where we focused it.
The deeper we got into conversations with banks and financial institutions, the clearer it became that the most urgent version of this problem wasn’t consumer e-commerce. It was B2B payments. Larger transactions, less established counterparty trust, higher stakes when something goes wrong, and institutions actively looking for ways to adopt stablecoin rails without abandoning the compliance and control frameworks their customers depend on.
Banks already understand escrow. They’ve been doing letters of credit and conditional payments for decades. What they needed wasn’t a new concept. It was programmable infrastructure that could bring those same protections to stablecoin payment flows. That’s what Coinbax is building: a trust layer for financial institutions moving onto stablecoin rails.
The e-commerce origin story matters because it’s where the problem was clearest. But B2B is where the stakes are highest and the infrastructure gap is most acute.
Why the BVNK Data Matters
The BVNK report validates something that was harder to quantify a year ago: real users, in real commercial contexts, are hitting the irreversibility problem and naming it as a barrier.
When 28% of respondents cite security as a top reason to use stablecoins and simultaneously name irreversible transactions as a top frustration, that’s not a contradiction. It’s a gap. People want the speed and efficiency of stablecoin payments AND the protection they’d expect from any other payment instrument. Right now, they can’t have both.
That gap is what we’re building Coinbax to close. Not by slowing down settlement, but by making the conditions of settlement programmable. Funds move when they should. Disputes have a resolution path. Fraud has a deterrent. The trust infrastructure that makes commercial payments viable, built natively on-chain.
The BVNK report also reinforces one other thing we’ve believed from the start: 77% of respondents said they would open a stablecoin wallet if their bank or fintech offered one. Consumers and businesses alike want this through institutions they already trust. That’s not a threat to banks. It’s an opportunity. The institutions that build the right infrastructure now will define how stablecoin payments work for their customers over the next decade.
Where We Are Now
We closed our seed round. We’re building. And we’re doing it alongside design partners who have been waiting for exactly this infrastructure.
The GENIUS Act passed. The regulatory framework is in place. The market validation is arriving. The infrastructure moment is here.
For more on the mechanics of reversibility and why it matters for banks specifically, I wrote about this in depth for Bankers on Chain — that piece is here.
Peter Glyman is Founder & CEO of Coinbax. Follow along at coinbax.com/signals or connect on LinkedIn.