In this exclusive interview, Maksym Sakharov, Co-Founder and Group CEO of WeFi, discussed stablecoin adoption, payment innovation, regulatory challenges, and how crypto assets could reshape the future of finance. Sakharov sees stablecoins moving beyond crypto and becoming an important part of the global financial system.
Q1: Stablecoins have moved from primarily being a crypto trading tool to becoming a serious payments and financial infrastructure technology. Where do you see their most important real-world use cases emerging over the next few years?
Maksym Sakharov: The most important use cases will emerge first in business and platform flows, not necessarily at the consumer checkout. Stablecoins are most useful where payment delays, currency exposure, and fragmented rails create operating costs. That includes supplier payments, platform payouts, merchant settlement, and access to dollar-denominated value in markets where local rails are limited or expensive.
The next few years will be about turning stablecoins into a payment and settlement layer that businesses can use in their normal operations. The value has to arrive clearly, be usable by the recipient, and fit into accounting, compliance, and treasury workflows. If those conditions are in place, stablecoins move beyond crypto-market utility and start solving practical payment problems.
Q2: What are the biggest problems with today’s stablecoin ecosystem that still need to be solved before stablecoins can become a mainstream alternative to traditional payment rails?
Maksym Sakharov: A stablecoin can move quickly, but the payment still fails commercially if the recipient cannot use the value, the business cannot account for it, or the user has no reliable way back into local money. That is where much of the ecosystem still needs work. The issue is no longer only the token. It is the surrounding payment environment.
For broader adoption, stablecoins need to feel dependable in normal financial activity. A company should be able to receive value, reconcile it, convert it where needed, and resolve issues without managing a separate crypto process. Until that becomes possible, stablecoins will remain powerful rails that many businesses still find difficult to use at scale.
Q3: For consumers and businesses, the challenge may not be creating another stablecoin, but making stablecoins easy to use. What needs to change at the infrastructure and user experience levels for someone to use stablecoins without even thinking about the underlying blockchain?
Maksym Sakharov: The user should not be making chain decisions. They should be choosing an action: pay, receive, transfer, convert, or settle. The product should decide how value moves underneath. If the user has to understand which network to use, what route the liquidity takes, or how settlement works, the experience is still too technical for normal payment use.
At the infrastructure level, this requires products that connect stablecoins to familiar financial actions. The user should see one balance, payment instruction, or settlement outcome, while the system handles conversion, risk controls, and settlement logic underneath. The best stablecoin products will not make blockchain more visible. They will make digital value easier to use.
Q4: Do you expect the stablecoin market to consolidate around a handful of major global currencies and issuers, or will we see a much more fragmented market of regional and purpose-built stablecoins?
Maksym Sakharov: There will be consolidation and fragmentation at the same time. The largest global stablecoins will likely keep strong network effects because liquidity tends to concentrate around trusted issuers and widely used currencies, especially the U.S. dollar. That makes them hard to displace in global settlement and crypto-market liquidity.
Regional and purpose-built stablecoins can still grow where they solve a specific problem. A local-currency stablecoin may make sense for domestic settlement if users trust the currency, regulators support the structure, and payment products create real utility around it. The market will not be one universal stablecoin. It will be a layered market where global liquidity and local use cases develop in parallel.
Q5: The GENIUS Act has created a federal framework for U.S. payment stablecoins, with regulators now working on the rules that will put it into practice. What do you think the legislation gets right, and where could the regulatory framework still create challenges for innovation?
Maksym Sakharov: The GENIUS Act gets the core direction right by treating payment stablecoins as a serious financial instrument. Reserve discipline, redemption expectations, issuer accountability, and federal oversight are necessary if stablecoins are going to be used beyond crypto-native environments. The implementation work will decide how practical that framework becomes for the companies building real payment infrastructure.
The challenge is to make the framework robust without making it accessible only to the largest firms. If compliance costs, access to banking, and reporting obligations become too burdensome for responsible new entrants, the market may become safer but less competitive. The objective should be clear standards that protect users while still allowing serious infrastructure builders to enter the market.
Q6: The CLARITY Act is taking a broader approach to defining the regulatory framework for digital assets. How important is it for the U.S. to create a framework that works across the entire digital-asset ecosystem rather than regulating stablecoins in isolation?
Maksym Sakharov: It is very important because stablecoins do not operate in isolation. They are used through platforms, custodians, payment products, and onchain infrastructure. If regulation addresses the stablecoin itself but leaves the surrounding ecosystem unclear, companies still face uncertainty when building real payment or settlement products.
A broader digital-asset framework can help define responsibility across the market. Stablecoins need clear rules, but so do the products and services that make them usable. For stablecoins to become infrastructure, the U.S. needs clarity around both the asset and the systems that carry it into normal financial activity.
Q7: One of the biggest questions around stablecoins is whether regulation will ultimately make the market safer without making it too difficult for smaller companies and new entrants to compete. Where do you think regulators should draw that line?
Maksym Sakharov: Regulators should be strict where user trust is directly at risk. Reserve quality, redemption, custody, disclosures, and financial crime controls cannot be treated casually if stablecoins are going to support payments. Those standards are what make a payment stablecoin credible when users and institutions rely on it.
The line should be drawn so that risk is controlled, but product innovation is not limited to the largest issuers by default. Smaller companies should not get weaker rules, but they should have a path to operate responsibly if they can meet the same core protections. A safe market does not have to be a closed market.
Q8: As stablecoins become more integrated with banking, payments, and fintech, do you see them competing with traditional banks, becoming infrastructure that banks use, or ultimately creating a hybrid model between the two?
Maksym Sakharov: The likely outcome is a hybrid model, but not one where every existing player keeps the same position. Banks will remain involved where they provide useful functions around fiat access, public-sector digital money, and institutional relationships. But they will no longer define the entire payment stack by default.
Stablecoins will compete with parts of traditional banking where legacy rails create delay, cost, or limited access. At the same time, banks and fintechs may use stablecoin infrastructure, which improves settlement or digital value movement. From WeFi’s perspective, this is where Deobanking becomes relevant: modern financial infrastructure should make value movement more direct and usable, while still meeting the standards financial systems require.
Q9: Looking five years ahead, what do you think will be the biggest change stablecoins bring to the global financial system that people today are still underestimating?
Maksym Sakharov: The biggest change may be less visible than people expect. Stablecoins may not change the payment interface first. They may change the operating layer underneath it: how value settles, how quickly funds become usable, how businesses reconcile payments, and how financial products connect across markets.
People often look for a new consumer app as a sign of adoption. The more important signal will be when stablecoins become part of normal payment operations. A business receives funds, a platform pays users, or a merchant settles value, and the stablecoin rail supports the outcome without becoming the story. The moment stablecoins become mainstream will not look like a crypto moment. It will look like ordinary payments working better.
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