About Sophia
Sophia Shluger has 20 years of experience building and scaling institutional businesses, driving revenue growth, structuring complex financial products and advising institutions at the intersection of capital markets and digital asset infrastructure. She has held leadership roles in digital assets across market making (Amber Group), tokenization (PV01) and most recently, stablecoin issuance and payments (Circle), following her early career in traditional finance at Goldman Sachs and Santander. Sophia holds an MBA from IESE Business School and a BA in Economics from Wellesley College and is a regular speaker and thought leader at industry events, including Paris Blockchain Week, European Blockchain Convention and the Digital Assets Summit, among others.
We sat down with her to get her perspectives on growth opportunities in the digital asset market across stablecoins and payments, collateral mobility, tokenisation and agentic money.
These views are her own and not representative of any company.
1. Stablecoins processed up to $35T in transactions in 2025, but McKinsey and Artemis estimate only about $390B of that was actually real-world payments. How do you reconcile the headline numbers with actual payments adoption?
Most stablecoin volume is, and has historically been, trading and settlement between crypto-native exchanges, so the headline clearly overstates the figures. But the payments slice is real and growing fast with B2B payments representing about $226B (or roughly 58% of the real world segment). While total addressable market in payments is massive (in the trillions), I would focus on the B2B figure as its being driven by addressing pain points in treasury management, merchant settlement and cross-border payments.
2. Some argue that stablecoins don't just improve the payment stack, they collapse it, and that the 2010s fintech playbook of plugging into legacy bank rails is being inverted. Where does value accrue when that stack collapses?
I look at this through three economic lenses specifically, what gets commoditised, where bargaining power shifts, and which capabilities remain scarce.
Stablecoins can compress the cost of moving and settling money by reducing dependence on multiple intermediaries. When the underlying payment rail becomes cheaper and more accessible, the infrastructure itself captures less of the economic rent. Value migrates towards the capabilities that remain scarce: customer distribution, merchant acceptance, regulatory permissions, compliance, liquidity and the management of financial risk.
There is an important distinction between creating value and capturing it. Stablecoins can make payments materially cheaper, but that doesn't mean every provider benefits economically. The real question is who retains the savings as competition drives prices down. Businesses that combine lower operating costs with differentiated distribution, strong customer relationships and defensible margins will be best positioned to capture the value, rather than simply pass it through to customers.
That doesn't mean every intermediary disappears. It means their ability to charge a premium depends increasingly on the value they add, rather than their position in a legacy payment chain. Issuance can be an attractive business, particularly where scale and distribution create advantages, but competition can put pressure on reserve economics and drive customers to demand a greater share of the benefits.
My thesis is that the strongest businesses will combine distribution with control of a critical part of the value chain. The opportunity is not simply to build a cheaper payment rail but to own the customer relationship and orchestrate money movement across rails, currencies and providers.
3. As stablecoin infrastructure becomes more widely available, what will separate the fintech winners from the businesses that get squeezed out?
I would look at three factors specifically, pricing power, customer acquisition economics and defensibility.
First, businesses selling largely commoditised connectivity face margin compression as infrastructure improves and competitors offer similar functionality. If your product is primarily an API wrapper around third-party services, you need a compelling source of differentiation to sustain pricing power.
Second, customer acquisition is expensive, and lower barriers to entry do not necessarily translate into attractive unit economics. Stablecoins make it easier to launch financial products, but they don't automatically solve customer acquisition, retention, trust or distribution. Incumbents can bring new capabilities to established customer bases, often at a lower incremental cost than a new entrant can acquire users from scratch.
Third, the most durable businesses tend to control scarce assets or capabilities such as distribution, proprietary workflows, regulatory permissions, balance-sheet capacity, liquidity or the ability to manage operational and compliance risk. These create barriers to entry and can support stronger margins over time.
The critical distinction is between businesses that create economic value and those that can capture it. A fintech might make payments cheaper and more efficient but still struggle to generate attractive returns if competition forces it to pass all those savings to customers. Sustainable businesses need both a genuine cost or service advantage and a defensible way to monetise it.
In my experience, I would distinguish between businesses that merely remove friction and those that take ownership of a critical problem. The former risk being competed away as infrastructure improves. The latter can build durable businesses because customers are paying not just for connectivity, but for trust, accountability and outcomes.
4. Stablecoin supply has passed $300B, with the top two issuers holding over 80% between them. At the same time, there has been a proliferation of stablecoin issuers. How do you make sense of the market and where it is going?
For institutional adoption to scale, regulation is key, and we have seen that with the passing of the GENIUS Act. In the same way the dollar dominates FX, today's concentration reflects network effects and liquidity. But new entrants, from bank consortia to stablecoin issuance networks, will compete on distribution and regulatory standing, not just technology. In my view, for institutions, the deciding factors will be reserve transparency, licensing and yield.
5. Where do stablecoins deliver the clearest advantage for an enterprise?
Stablecoins have great product-market fit in cross-border B2B payments, in corridors where correspondent banking is slow or expensive. In EY-Parthenon's 2025 survey, 77% of corporates cited paying overseas suppliers as a key use case. Correspondent banking typically takes several business days and can cost several percent all-in once FX markups are included, while stablecoins settle in minutes, often for under pennies on the dollar. At enterprise scale, even modest savings in FX spreads, transaction fees and working capital can translate into millions in annual cost savings and improved treasury efficiency.
6. Three forms of digital money now compete for institutional use: stablecoins, bank deposit tokens such as Citi Token Services or JPM Coin, and tokenised money market funds. How would you explain the difference to a board?
The way I think about it, is that each has a different job. Stablecoins are portable digital cash from a regulated issuer and generally pay little to no yield, so they're best for money movement. Deposit tokens are a bank's own deposits on-chain, best for institutional cash within that bank's network. Tokenised MMFs are fund shares backed by T-bills, typically yielding around 3.5% with very low risk, so they're best for holding money and posting as collateral.
7. On tokenisation, why is collateral mobility emerging as the “killer application”?
Because the economics are tangible, measurable and recurring. Financial markets still operate around settlement windows, but risk runs 24/7. Firms compensate by holding excess collateral and pre-funding margin calls, tying up capital that could otherwise earn a return.
Tokenisation can make eligible assets, particularly tokenised money market funds, more mobile. Rather than redeeming a fund to access cash, firms can potentially transfer or pledge the tokenised fund units directly, subject to collateral eligibility and the relevant legal and operational arrangements. The assets can continue earning yield while being used as collateral, with the potential to move across markets and time zones in minutes rather than hours or days. I know first hand about the challenges and opportunities in bringing a tokenized asset to market when I worked as Chief Commercial Officer at PV01.
Ultinately the business case is therefore about capital efficiency, not just technology. In a recent report by Citigroup, 25% of collateral holdings were estimated to earn little or no return. For an average tier-1 firm, that's roughly $15B of idle assets (or approximately $346M a year in lost income). The report also finds firms post 6–7% more collateral than they need and pre-fund up to 63% of margin overnight, which is significant. It's no wonder up to 77% expect to use tokenised collateral in 2026.
The remaining challenge is execution, namely integrating tokenised assets into legacy collateral systems, custody arrangements, transfer-agent processes, risk frameworks and counterparty approval workflows. The technology is advancing, but adoption depends on making tokenised collateral legally recognised, operationally interoperable and acceptable across the market.
8. Are traditional banks embracing stablecoins as a new growth opportunity, or positioning themselves to protect their role in the future of payments?
Protecting their position is a major driver. Qivalis and Open USD are two good examples. The former is a euro stablecoin initiative, backed by 37 European banks including BNP Paribas, ING, UniCredit and BBVA, received Dutch central bank authorisation as an electronic money institution in October 2026. Open USD has attracted more than 140 companies, including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and BlackRock. The strategic logic is clear. As payments move on-chain, banks risk losing deposits, FX margins and transaction fees to new infrastructure providers. Issuing or distributing stablecoins allows them to defend existing customer relationships while participating in the economics of a new payment ecosystem. Europe also has a strategic interest in ensuring that digital money is not overwhelmingly dollar-denominated.
Ultimately, I believe distribution will be a decisive advantage. Banks, payment networks and PSPs already have established customer relationships, regulatory access and payment infrastructure. The winners will be those that combine these advantages with the technology and interoperability to make stablecoin payments seamless for businesses and consumers.
9. In April 2026, Google, Visa, Mastercard and other major industry players backed the Linux Foundation’s x402 initiative, following Coinbase’s contribution of the protocol. Designed to enable AI agents to pay programmatically for APIs, data and digital services, x402 is helping establish a new payment layer for machine-to-machine commerce. Why does agentic commerce need a different approach to payments, and what still needs to be solved before it can scale?
Traditional payment infrastructure was built primarily for human customers, not software agents making thousands of small, automated transactions. Stablecoins offer programmable, 24/7 settlement and the potential for low-cost micropayments, while protocols such as x402 allow payments to be embedded directly into internet interactions. But enabling an agent to pay is only one part of the equation. We still need robust agent identity, verifiable spending mandates, granular controls, fraud prevention and clear liability when an agent makes a mistake. The payment protocols are developing quickly, however, the wider trust, governance and interoperability frameworks are still evolving.
My bet is on neutral middleware infrastructure that can orchestrate multiple payment methods, rails and protocols, giving businesses flexibility as the agentic commerce ecosystem develops rather than locking them into a single standard now.