As stablecoins move further from a crypto narrative into a mainstream payments discussion shaped by regulation and trust, Andrew Jones, Co-founder and Managing Director of ChilliMint (Europe) Limited, reflects on how governance and reliability are becoming central to their future role in the financial system.
The Bank of England’s announcement feels like another moment where stablecoins stop looking like a crypto story and start looking like a payments story.
A few years ago, most of the conversation was about the technology. Faster settlement. Programmability. Blockchain. New rails. But the further stablecoins move into the mainstream, the less people seem to care about the technology and the more they care about the questions payments people have been asking for decades.
A currency needs to be universally understood if it is to be fit for purpose. Most people don’t know where stablecoin reserves are held, who is responsible if something goes wrong, who do I call when there is a problem or how to use one in the first place.
That’s why the Bank’s framework is significant. It’s less about the technology and more about creating the conditions for trust. The reserve requirements, redemption protections and issuance guardrails are all designed to answer the same fundamental question: can people rely on this?
What is also becoming clear is that stablecoins aren’t heading towards one global model. The US has its approach. Europe has MiCA. The UK is building its own framework. Stablecoins were supposed to remove borders, but regulation is increasingly redrawing them.
For me, the most interesting part is that governance is starting to look harder than technology. Building a stablecoin is one challenge. Deciding who carries risk, who provides oversight and how trust is maintained at scale is a much bigger one.
The irony is that stablecoins were originally designed to sit outside traditional financial systems. Yet their long-term success increasingly depends on adopting many of the same principles that made traditional payments work in the first place.
Because in payments, people rarely remember what happens when everything goes right. They remember what happens when something goes wrong. And that’s where trust is built.
