The question that bothers me isn’t “can institutions use stablecoins?”
It’s simpler.
What happens when a compliance officer realizes that using a public blockchain means publishing their entire transaction history to competitors, analysts, and bad actors — forever?
Regulated finance isn’t allergic to transparency. It’s built on it. But transparency in finance is structured. Auditors see certain data. Regulators see more. The public sees disclosures on a schedule. Information moves in layers.
Public blockchains collapse those layers.
In theory, that’s elegant. In practice, it creates strange incentives. Treasury teams hesitate to move size because flows can be tracked. Payment processors worry about counterparties being mapped. Market makers guard addresses like trade secrets. Everyone builds internal tooling just to avoid being exposed by default.
So privacy becomes reactive. New wallet structures. Off-chain agreements. Complex compliance wrappers around something that was supposed to simplify settlement.
That friction matters. Especially if stablecoins are going to be used for payroll, remittances, cross-border trade, real retail volume — not just trading.
If privacy isn’t designed into the base system, institutions will recreate it elsewhere. And that usually means fragmentation: permissioned chains, private rails, or hybrid systems that quietly abandon the public layer when stakes get high.
Infrastructure like @Plasma only becomes meaningful if it treats privacy as a structural requirement for regulated use — not as a feature toggle. Fast finality and EVM compatibility are useful, but they don’t solve institutional hesitation on their own.
Who uses this? Probably operators who already move stablecoin volume and are tired of duct-taping compliance onto public rails.
