EXCLUSIVE: "Mainstream, but Not as We Know It" - Pavel Kashuba, Coinspaid in 'The Paytech Magazine'

Big banks are getting serious about DLT and the tokenised assets it supports. So, what does that mean for merchants and consumers.

For the best part of a decade, the question hanging over crypto payments was whether digital tokens would become the currency of the high street – whether we’d be using them to pay for a flat white. It turns out that was the wrong question. The puzzle now facing tier-one banks, card networks, and central banks is not how blockchain can be leveraged at the point of sale. Rather, it is how blockchain rails can be wired into the plumbing that already moves the world’s money, ideally so well that everyday users never notice the role it plays.

“The conversation has moved from ‘Is crypto a legitimate payment method?’ to ‘Where does blockchain infrastructure deliver a measurable advantage?’” says Pavel Kashuba, Strategic Leader at Coinspaid Solutions, which provides the white-label infrastructure – wallets, custody, conversion and settlement technology, and compliance tooling – that banks, PSPs and platforms run under their own brand.

“A few years ago, discussions were dominated by volatility, speculation and basic education. Today, it’s about stablecoin settlement, tokenised deposits, programmable treasury and interoperability with existing rails,” he says.

In other words, crypto payments are increasingly being evaluated as financial infrastructure rather than as a separate industry, as the focus moves up the payments pipeline.

Making crypto invisible

Coinspaid’s picture of mainstream adoption is comparatively unglamorous. The most significant industry announcements, Kashuba predicts, ‘will not be about adding another token; they will be about making digital assets operationally invisible to the merchant’.

The spiky volatility and technical jargon that made most ordinary merchants suspicious of the crypto universe for years are being engineered out of sight. Stablecoins and automatic conversion deal with price risk, while APIs, hosted checkouts and managed wallets remove the need to run crypto infrastructure in-house.

Compliance screening, reconciliation and reporting are being folded into the same stack. Businesses can decide whether to hold a digital asset, convert it or settle in fiat, according to their own treasury needs.

“Merchants should not have to become crypto experts to accept a blockchain payment,” says Kashuba. “The customer may want to pay with a digital asset, but the merchant should be able to receive the currency and reporting format that make sense for their business. That is how crypto adoption becomes a commercial decision rather than a technical experiment.”

One of the most persistent myths of the crypto era is that a single chain will eventually win. Kashuba is unequivocal:

“There is no universally ‘best’ blockchain; the right network depends on the asset, corridor, transaction size and risk profile.” It is the same logic that already governs fiat. After all, nobody sends a multimillion-pound property completion and a 50p app purchase down the same rail. The choice between CHAPS, Faster

Payments and a card scheme depends on value, counterparties, geography and urgency. Kashuba sees Ethereum as the transaction ‘benchmark’ because of its ‘security, liquidity and mature ecosystem’; Layer 2 networks such as Base and Arbitrum as cheaper, faster options for higher volumes; Solana as ‘particularly compelling for high-throughput, low-value transactions’; and Tron as commercially relevant in ‘USDT-heavy international corridors, subject to enterprises satisfying themselves on governance and compliance’.

Atomic settlement is a defining feature of distributed ledgers, and you’d be forgiven for thinking the physics-based moniker implies blistering speed. In reality, atomic means all-or-nothing, where both legs of a transaction complete together or neither does, rather than being a measure of velocity. Time to completion still varies considerably from network to network, which is why Kashuba lists it alongside issuer support, liquidity, operational resilience and compliance tooling as factors that matter as much as raw throughput.

“In practice, the winning infrastructure will be multichain, with routing handled in the background,” he says.

If the technology question has become one of routing, the regulatory one has become one of design. The EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation has applied in full since the end of 2024, the US passed the GENIUS Act for payment stablecoins in July 2025, and Hong Kong’s stablecoin licensing regime came into force the following month.

Regulation is changing tokenisation from a largely experimental activity into an institutional one, says Kashuba. Banks and issuers can now build around identifiable licensing, reserve, redemption and governance requirements – but that also means ‘compliance is becoming part of the product architecture’. Providers must decide upfront where an asset can be offered, who may hold it and what happens when it crosses networks or borders. With global rules still fragmented, says Kashuba, ‘the next stage is therefore not only tokenisation, but compliant interoperability’.

Banks build the new rails

Nowhere has that proposition been tested more rigorously than in Project Agorá, the Bank for International Settlements’ experiment in tokenised correspondent banking. It brought together seven central banks – the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Korea, the Bank of Mexico, the Swiss National Bank and the Banque de France on behalf of the Eurosystem – with more than 40 private firms, including Citi, HSBC, J.P. Morgan, BNP Paribas, Santander, Swift and Mastercard. The prototype results, published in May, undercut two long-held objections.

The first was that central banks would have to cede control of their currencies to a shared platform. Agorá’s two-layer design keeps tokenised commercial bank deposits on a common ledger for coordination, while tokenised reserves stay on each central bank’s own ledger, under its own authority. The second was that compliance would be the bottleneck. 

But sanctions screening, anti-money laundering and fraud checks that typically run sequentially in correspondent banking ran in parallel, with transactions settling in seconds once liquidity was locked, around the clock.

The project now moves on to real-value transactions, with the Bank of Canada joining. Agorá’s significance lies less in the speed than in who signed up. This was central banks and commercial banks designing the rails together, rather than a crypto-native challenger trying to route around them. As a model of public-private collaboration on shared infrastructure, it is hard to beat.

But it’s far from being alone. In July, Swift declared its blockchain-based shared ledger ready for use, with 17 banks including UBS, BNY, Citi and Wells Fargo lined up to pioneer 24/7 tokenised deposit payments. And in September, the ECB switched on Pontes, which links DLT platforms to the Eurosystem’s TARGET services so that tokenised wholesale transactions can settle in central bank money. Today, companies across the crypto industry are expanding into one another’s areas of expertise. Custody providers are moving into payments, payments companies into custody, consumer exchanges are developing payment acceptance solutions for businesses.

“This is neither good nor bad; it is simply where the industry stands,” says Kashuba. “At the same time, I’d like to see more collaboration. For example, Coinspaid and Coinbase could launch a joint initiative offering cashback to customers who pay for purchases using blockchain technology. They could also create loyalty programmes for retailers that process their first 1,000 blockchain-based transactions.

“The entire industry would benefit. Coinspaid is open to partnerships of this kind. Strong initiatives that encourage adoption would also give traditional financial institutions more reason to use blockchain infrastructure across a wider range of payments.”

What is already happening is more targeted. For always-on, cross-border sectors such as digital entertainment, e-commerce and egaming, stablecoin rails are replacing parts of the correspondent chain inmerchant settlement, treasury transfers, supplier payments and payouts, where settling in minutes rather than waiting for banking windows frees up working capital.

“The likely future is coexistence,” says Kashuba. “Over time, merchants may not know which rail was used; they will simply receive the fastest compliant route.”

The same invisibility is emerging at the frontier. x402, now stewarded by the x402 Foundation under the Linux Foundation, revives the long-dormant HTTP 402 ‘Payment Required’ status code, letting a server quote a price and an AI agent pay it without a checkout page or account.

“The stablecoin is the money, the blockchain is the settlement rail, and x402 is the communication and authorisation layer,” says Kashuba, who sees paid APIs, data and compute as the obvious early markets. Further ahead lie tokenised accounts offered by banking proper. If tier-one banks offered native BTC- and ETH-denominated accounts, corporates could run fiat and digital assets from a single treasury – though Kashuba expects stablecoins and tokenised deposits to get there first, given unresolved questions over capital treatment and valuation. 

He is candid that this would reshape his own market. “Basic access to digital assets would become commoditised. The value would move toward orchestration,” he says.

Kashuba also expects a ‘true crypto bank’, combining regulated deposits, lending, custody, exchange and payments with blockchain settlement built into its core, to appear in selected areas before the end of the decade.

“The decisive factor will be regulatory integration, not technology,” he says.

When that happens, whether anyone buys their Starbucks with Bitcoin will be beside the point. The rail beneath the transaction may well be a blockchain. The measure of success will be that nobody notices.