What Payments Companies Should Ask Their Stablecoin Vendors

There are hundreds of stablecoin companies, all with strengths and weaknesses. When payments companies assess stablecoin vendors, here are some of the key considerations.

We are at a watershed moment for stablecoin adoption in payments. Today, stablecoins are already being used by 13% of financial institutions and corporates globally, and 54% of non-users expect to begin using the technology within the next six to twelve months. With the tailwinds of growing adoption, and the need for stablecoin rails to support agentic commerce, the time to reassess your stablecoin strategy is now. But with hundreds of vendors bidding for your business, how do you separate the wheat from the chaff?

Unfortunately, the questions that matter most don’t usually come up in the sales process. The biggest threats to ramping a stablecoin offering tend to surface after the contract is already signed. Sometimes it’s when your team is mid-integration, or when your merchants are onboarding and the cost of switching is prohibitive. This, of course, is by design.

Every vendor pitch will appeal to one or more of the following value propositions: turnkey, flexible, agnostic, full-stack, built to scale. This guide walks through what those words actually mean in practice, and what's worth confirming before those assumptions get built into your roadmap.

What is a true “turnkey” stablecoin product?

Everyone is chasing turnkey solutions for complex problems. The incentive for most vendors is to convince payments companies that they have an incredibly simple solution for their problem(s). It’s very difficult to know when this is actually true. In our experience, the most important question to ask is, “Does this solution position us for what we want to do next?”

When tackling the first problem for the first merchant(s), payments companies often make the mistake of integrating a limited platform to satisfy the initial requirements, only to find themselves starting the process over with a new vendor when the next stablecoin opportunity arrives. At Cyclops, our goal is always to integrate a turnkey, single API solution for the first use case that enables you to move to your next use case without ever having to re-onboard or integrate a net new API.

What does “flexible” actually mean?

Vendor pitches lean heavily on words like flexible, modular and agnostic. In some cases, ‘flexibility’ means a platform supports multiple paths out of the box or the vendor handles it for you. In others, it can mean the work of filling a gap has been handed back to you.

Wallet architecture is a good example. Many vendors will tell you they support wallets. Fewer will tell you how those wallets connect to the rest of your infrastructure, or whether "agnostic" means genuinely flexible, or means the linking work and the reconciliation falls on your team instead of theirs. Sometimes agnostic means nothing is truly integrated, and you’re missing key capabilities. Other times it means everything is integrated from the jump, and you have the ability to navigate between alternatives seamlessly. The former can make the solution useless, and the latter can lead to achieving meaningful scale without stalling out or starting over.

The same pattern shows up elsewhere: "modular" compliance tooling that actually means you're assembling your own compliance stack. "Full-stack" offerings that turn out to be full-stack for one region and thin everywhere else.

Questions worth asking:

• When your vendor says "flexible" or "agnostic," what specifically does that mean they built, versus what does it mean you'll need to build/connect?
• If a merchant needs a capability your vendor doesn't natively support, what's the actual process, and who owns it?

Always start with your entire global ecosystem in mind.

There are platforms with wonderful solutions for some problems, and not others. Similarly, different solutions have the integrations and banking relationships to be effective in some regions, while being extremely limited in others.

Most stablecoin vendors built their infrastructure to support a specific corridor first, and expanded from there in a very limited way. The problem with this approach is that all of these platforms will claim “global coverage” that is largely non-existent.

This trap has stalled out, or killed, the stablecoin effort of many payments companies. While every other platform tries to catch up to and compete directly with the regional leaders, Cyclops takes a different approach. Cyclops integrates the strongest providers in every geographic region, rather than trying to build something better. It is impossibly time consuming and expensive to beat every industry-leading platform at their own game - so we partner with these leaders instead. As a result, Cyclops clients always get to use the best platforms in every geographic corridor, rather than suffering the weaknesses of a single provider.

Questions worth asking:

• Which regions does your vendor actually support in production today?
• What's the real timeline for a vendor to add a new region once a customer requests it?

Avoiding the contract traps.

Stablecoin contracts are often signed under duress. From time-sensitive merchant needs to arms races between competitors, the pressure often leads to less-than-ideal decision-making. The terms that seemed reasonable during the sales process aren’t always the ones that matter a year in, once your volume has grown, your regional priorities have changed or you’ve realized you need coverage the original vendor can’t provide.

This has been the biggest killer of stablecoin innovation in payments over the last few years. Starting over with new infrastructure vendors can easily cost up to a year of your time, require additional headcount and undo the progress from pilot initiatives as a result.

Adding multiple vendors alongside the first often means multiple integrations, multiple contracts and multiple initiatives to connect and orchestrate across the parts.

Cyclops has eliminated these problems with a single contract, onboarding process and API integration to connect payments companies with any stablecoin provider anywhere in the world. As your needs change, or the landscape shifts, Cyclops takes on the work of integrating new parts and ensuring they work seamlessly across your organization.

That’s the reason to ask the necessary questions now, and to look for a setup where expanding coverage doesn’t mean starting over.

Questions worth asking directly:

• If you need a provider or corridor this vendor doesn’t support today, can they bring it in for you, or does that become a separate integration on your side?
• Are there exclusivity clauses that would prevent you from working with other providers?
• What’s the actual off-boarding process if this partnership doesn’t scale the way you expect?

Why running more than one vendor is more common than you'd think.

Contracting, onboarding and integrating with more than one stablecoin vendor has been a killer for scaling beyond the first region or first use case. Since no single vendor tends to cover every region, or solve all the problems that payments companies must ultimately solve for, many companies fall into this trap.

Recent research on digital asset adoption found that payments executives are wary of the complexity that comes with managing multiple vendors across support areas at a time when governance standards are tightening. Starting with a vendor, like Cyclops, who sets your organization up for success moving forward is a critical step toward achieving scale.

The takeaway.

Vendor evaluation doesn’t really end at signing. What your business needs from a stablecoin partner one month in looks different from what it needs a year in, as merchant volume grows, new regions come into scope and workflows you didn’t anticipate at go-live start to matter. The questions above are worth asking again every few months, not just once before launch, and the right partner should be able to adapt as those answers change.

Fragmentation tends to be what costs the most once you’re a year in: a patchwork of vendors, workarounds and coordination overhead that grows with every new need. It’s also the specific problem Cyclops exists to solve. Cyclops gives payments companies a single API for all things stablecoins, and when your needs expand beyond what’s already covered, we onboard the additional partners or build the capabilities ourselves. The new coverage plugs into the integration you already have instead of becoming another one to manage.