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Stablecoins are becoming one of the fastest-growing payment rails for global businesses, offering faster settlement, lower costs, and around-the-clock availability. Yet despite the technology's promise, many enterprises still hesitate to adopt blockchain payments. Managing multiple wallets, bridging assets across blockchains, handling gas fees, and meeting evolving compliance requirements can introduce operational complexity that finance teams simply don't expect from modern payment infrastructure.
Request Network is working to change that. By abstracting away blockchain complexity through one-click cross-chain mass payouts while integrating compliance capabilities such as wallet screening, the protocol aims to deliver the simplicity, security, and reliability enterprises expect from traditional payment systems without sacrificing the benefits of decentralized finance.
To discuss the future of enterprise stablecoin adoption, the importance of hiding blockchain complexity, the growing role of compliance, and what it will take for digital asset payments to become as intuitive as traditional payment methods, we spoke with Tristan Wallaert, CEO of Request Network.
Stablecoins have dramatically improved the speed and cost of moving money globally, yet many businesses still find blockchain payments operationally complex. What do you think has been the biggest barrier to enterprise adoption, and how is Request Network working to solve it?
Tristan Wallaert: Interestingly, even though the overall stablecoin supply has increased, actual retail usage has declined around 10% year over year.
Enterprises have very different requirements from early crypto adopters. Early adopters have often been willing to accept higher levels of risk in exchange for novelty, freedom, or access to new technology. Enterprises simply do not operate that way. There are fundamental requirements that must be met before they can adopt a new payment infrastructure.
In Web2, companies have traditionally delegated much of the complexity to payment service providers. Until recently, there was no equivalent alternative in the blockchain space. If we want enterprises to start using blockchain payments, we need to ensure that their business needs and expected outcomes are met. We should not expect them to deal with complexity or compromise on security.
That’s why we’ve invested first heavily in protecting the payer, as the payer was still exposed to risks such as sending funds to the wrong address or interacting with the wrong smart contract. Request Network is now the safest way to transact in crypto.
In a second time, as we were seeing more and more high-risk wallets circulating in the ecosystem, we invested in protecting the recipients as well to make sure they did not interact with high risk wallets. The un-managed risk of frozen asset is not acceptable for enterprise users.
Finally between those two sides, there is still a significant amount of complexity around gas, bridging, and swapping. This may be acceptable for crypto power users, but it is not acceptable for an enterprise. That’s why we focused on providing businesses a simple and reliable way to move funds across the ecosystem.
Our mission as a protocol is to ensure that decentralized blockchain payments deliver the same outcomes, the same functionalities, the same usability, and the same level of security that enterprises expect from a centralized payment service provider.
In crypto, losing a few dollars because of a wallet mistake, a bridge, or a swap is often seen as part of the experience. For an enterprise, that is simply not acceptable. We believe that this is one of the key gaps in the market, and it’s the problem we’re solving.
Request Network recently introduced one-click cross-chain mass payouts across EVM chains and Tron. Why is abstracting away bridges, swaps, and multiple wallets such a significant step toward making blockchain payments practical for businesses?
TW: A useful parallel is the banking industry 20 years ago, before clearinghouses became standard. At the time, banks were not connected. Paying someone at another bank was often cumbersome, sometimes requiring cashier’s checks or other manual processes because the infrastructure simply wasn’t interoperable.
Crypto has, in many ways, recreated that same fragmentation. Assets exist across different blockchains, different tokens on ERC20 smart contracts that cannot natively communicate with one another. That fragmentation is fundamentally a technology problem, and users should not be expected to solve it.
Today, if you want to pay someone in crypto, you’re often expected to know which blockchain they use and bridge or swap assets before making the payment. That shifts the complexity from the infrastructure onto the user.
We believe this is one of the reasons blockchain adoption has remained limited. The industry has largely been built by highly technical people who understandably optimized for technological innovation, but sometimes lost sight of what is required for mass adoption. End users and businesses should not have to understand the underlying infrastructure in order to send or receive money.
That is why we invested heavily in abstracting away bridging and swapping. These technologies are solutions to blockchain fragmentation, but they should operate behind the scenes rather than becoming part of the user experience.
If I want to pay an employee, I should just be able to pay using the asset I hold and trust, while they receive the asset they want to receive. Neither party should have to change their operational processes because of differences between networks.
By making that possible, we believe we have effectively built the equivalent of a decentralized clearinghouse for digital assets. In our view, removing blockchain fragmentation in this way is one of the most important breakthroughs required to make crypto usable at enterprise scale.
As stablecoin payment volumes continue to grow, how do you see compliance evolving alongside usability? Why was it important for Request Network to integrate Merkle Science as an additional wallet screening provider?
TW: At its core, this comes back to the psychology of money. A currency only has value if people trust that they can exchange it later for goods, services, or another currency. Throughout history, money evolved because people needed a reliable way to store the value of their work and redeem it at a later date. That fundamental principle hasn’t changed.
The same applies to crypto. Holding a digital asset is only useful if you can confidently redeem it, whether that’s for fiat, another cryptocurrency, or a product or service. The challenge is that, over the years, part of the crypto ecosystem has been used by illicit actors. As a result, whenever crypto is converted through licensed financial institutions, it is typically subject to compliance and transaction screening. If the funds are considered high risk, there is a real possibility they cannot be redeemed or may face restrictions.
This trend is only becoming stronger. We’re seeing new regulatory approaches that introduce compliance requirements not only at the point of conversion to fiat, but also at token transfers at ERC-20 level as well. As these frameworks mature, compliance checks will become an even more essential part of how digital assets move through the financial system.
That’s why we don’t see transaction screening as a nice-to-have feature. We see it as a fundamental requirement for mass adoption. If people are going to trust crypto as money, they need confidence that the assets they receive can be used and redeemed when they need them.
It’s also why we believe relying on a single screening provider isn’t sufficient. The objective is to maximize confidence and resilience. Different providers have different datasets, detection models, and areas of expertise. By supporting multiple providers, we improve both coverage and redundancy, ensuring that the ability to transact and redeem assets doesn’t depend on a single company’s infrastructure.
We chose to work with Merkle Science because of its expertise in blockchain intelligence and, in particular, its ability to follow fund flows across multiple chains. Since our infrastructure bridges and swaps assets across different blockchain networks, it’s essential that compliance screening follows those cross-chain movements as well. Our goal is simple: make crypto safer to use, easier to trust, and ultimately more redeemable as a global form of money.
For finance teams evaluating stablecoin payments today, what separates an enterprise-ready payment platform from one that simply supports blockchain transactions?
TW: Unfortunately, there isn’t an all-in-one platform for enterprise crypto payments today. Most providers solve only one part of the problem, whether that’s wallets, custody, liquidity, bridging, or payment orchestration, leaving finance teams to integrate and manage the rest themselves.
That’s why we took a different approach with Request Network. Instead of building another platform, we built a protocol. We believe moving crypto should be as simple, secure, and compliant as moving fiat, without requiring a complex infrastructure. Our goal was to redesign how crypto payments work from the ground up, so enterprises can move stablecoins with the security, compliance, and usability they expect, while avoiding the fragmentation or the need of infrastructure that exists today.
Looking ahead, where do you think the biggest opportunities lie in making blockchain payments as intuitive and user-friendly as traditional payment systems?
TW: The biggest opportunity I believe starts with mobile-native wallet signatures.
Today, crypto works very well on desktop, where browser wallet extensions provide a relatively smooth experience. On mobile, however, the payment flow is still more fragmented than users expect. Consumers have become accustomed to the simplicity of Apple Pay and Google Pay: tap, authenticate with Face ID or biometrics, and the payment is complete. Blockchain transactions should feel just as seamless.
The technology is already there. What we need is a native experience where signing a blockchain transaction is as effortless as authorizing an Apple Pay payment with a biometric confirmation. Once that happens, blockchain payments can become a natural choice for everyday use.
I believe this is especially important for in-person payments. Blockchain is uniquely suited for borderless commerce. A traveler should be able to walk into a local market anywhere in the world, scan a QR code or tap their phone, authenticate with Face ID, and pay instantly using the assets they already hold, exactly how we removed the need for a physical card in our pocket.
