Blockchain-based payments have reached an inflection point. Tokenization and stablecoins are no longer experiments—they’re actively shaping the future of payments. 

Yet beneath the optimism lies a stark reality. Despite their potential for speed, cost savings, and global reach, stablecoins make up just 0.03% of B2B payments. The gap is due to missing infrastructure, not lack of interest. Today’s blockchain rails don’t provide the basic elements businesses need: trust, context, and authorization.

The Hidden Barriers Slowing Stablecoin Adoption in B2B Payments

Despite their obvious advantages for speed, cost, and global reach, as of June 2025, stablecoins accounted for just 0.03% of B2B payments. While adoption is trending upward, this gap between potential and reality reveals a fundamental challenge: blockchain transactions, in their native form, lack three essential elements that businesses require.

1. Institutions demand counterparty trust
   When large established institutions transact, whether it be fiat or crypto, they demand a level of counterparty trust that has been missing from crypto-native payment flows. The crypto Travel Rule was introduced in 2019 in part to replicate the trust mechanisms that have been established in traditional finance for decades, and not being able to easily and confidently verify who is on the other side of a transaction is a deal-breaker for institutional players.
2. Blockchain transactions lack context
   What you see on a public ledger tells you nothing about the counterparty or what invoice a payment satisfies. For businesses that need to match payments to contractual obligations, this absence of information creates operational chaos.
3. Blockchain transactions lack authorization flows
   Traditional blockchain transactions are unilateral—whoever holds the private keys decides if settlement happens. As a receiver, you don't get a say in whether you want to accept those funds. This creates significant compliance and risk management challenges for regulated institutions.

Without these elements of trust, context and authorization, crypto rails are simply unable to power real-world business payments. The opportunity now is to add these missing layers without losing the efficiency of blockchain settlement.

The next era for payments: TradFi meets stablecoins

At the Federal Reserve’s first-ever Payments Innovation Conference last October, policymakers and market leaders sent a clear and unified signal that the convergence of traditional finance and decentralized systems is here. Federal Reserve Governor Chris Waller captured the shift succinctly when he urged conference attendees to “embrace the disruption.”

As Paxos CEO Charles Cascarilla noted in a panel on stablecoin use cases and business models, "We're in a bit of a strange interregnum, with stablecoins proliferating while regulatory frameworks like the GENIUS Act prepare to bring clarity and standardization to the market.”

Of course, since October this momentum has accelerated even more and the US market in particular seems to be closer than ever to the long-awaited crypto market structure bill aiming to remove any remaining regulatory uncertainty slowing efforts by traditional finance firms to fully embrace crypto and merge the worlds of TradFi and crypto.

This convergence creates tremendous opportunity, but also adds complexity. The question now isn't whether these worlds will merge, but how quickly and seamlessly that integration will happen and whether we can build the trust layer that enables blockchain payments to function like traditional business payments.

The Travel Rule as a catalyst

To understand how the industry can solve for this, we need to go back to the Travel Rule, introduced in June 2019 to require regulated VASPs (Virtual Asset Service Providers) to exchange originator and beneficiary information before or during value transfers. While initially seen by some crypto-native organizations as a regulatory burden, we recognized it as an opportunity. An opportunity to build the trust mechanisms, contextual messaging layer, and authorization flows that would truly enable crypto to become part of the everyday economy.

By mid-2025, 85% of jurisdictions with material crypto activity had implemented or were implementing Travel Rule requirements, according to the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). As compliance obligations expanded, so did the underlying authorization flows. In fact, the Notabene network alone has processed over $2 trillion in authorized transactions to-date.

But a critical problem remained: authorization wasn't enforceable. According to Notabene's 2025 State of Crypto Travel Rule Report, 61.6% of surveyed VASPs receive few or no incoming transactions with required Travel Rule data. Institutions could not block non-compliant transfers because traditional blockchain rails don’t allow receivers to control what hits their wallets.

Notabene Flow fundamentally changes this model with an innovation that is simple but transformative: no one receives a settlement address until authorization is complete.

Unlike with traditional crypto transactions, where anyone can send funds to your wallet address whether you want them or not, Notabene Flow only shares settlement addresses with counterparties after authorization.

This ensures that all due diligence, consent, and compliance checks complete before settlement, giving institutions control over their deposit flows while maintaining the efficiency benefits of blockchain settlement. This ability to ensure fully Travel Rule-compliant flows is critical for regulated entities to adopt stablecoins as an efficient and B2B payment method in regulated jurisdictions.

What makes Notabene different? It’s open network

Notabene Flow isn’t a point-to-point payments solution. It’s a network. In fact, it is the same powerful network that connects our more than 2,000 counterparties already transacting compliantly across the globe. We sidestep the cold start problem that new payment networks will encounter by leveraging the active open network that we’ve been building for the past 5 years. Any participant can transact with any other participant using shared standards, common authorization flows, and built-in compliance.

Notabene Flow is built on our open foundations:

• TAP (Transaction Authorization Protocol): An open-source messaging standard defining how institutions communicate about transactions
• Global Network: Regulated entities transacting digital assets across 100+ jurisdictions who have already processed over $2T in transaction volume
• Embedded compliance: Travel Rule requirements for 50+ jurisdictions built directly into the system

This approach is as practical as it is philosophical. We heard repeatedly throughout last fall’s Payments Innovation Conference, as well as every other event since, that this open-loop network design and protocol interoperability is crucial. The industry clearly doesn’t see a world with "one stablecoin to rule them all," but rather a variety of trusted assets and rails, all sharing clear standards for how they interact. Notabene Flow is designed for this multi-rail future.

Building the trust layer for stablecoin payments

As Tim Spence of Fifth Third Bank noted in October, innovation in payments comes down to "whether the incumbents get the innovation faster than the disruptors get distribution." Flow addresses both sides of this equation.

• For traditional institutions: A compliant gateway to blockchain-based payments without building infrastructure from scratch.
• For crypto-native companies: Enterprise-grade reliability and regulatory compliance that opens doors to institutional adoption.
• For businesses of all types: The ability to choose the best payment method for each transaction while maintaining necessary controls.

It's no longer a question of if traditional finance and blockchain will converge, but when and how.

The missing piece has always been trust. Stablecoins offer a fast, global settlement layer, but without counterparty confidence, businesses cannot fully leverage them.

Notabene Flow provides that missing trust layer by embedding authorization flows, delivering transaction context tied to real-world obligations, and ensuring compliance with Travel Rule requirements for virtually all payments on our open network with standardized protocols for seamless interoperability.

With three core payment types supporting the full range of business needs, Notabene Flow enables companies to embrace the efficiency of stablecoin payments today while maintaining the risk management and compliance frameworks they require. This is how we bridge the 0.03% gap to mainstream adoption—not by compromising on efficiency or control, but by building the infrastructure that provides both.

To learn more about Notabene Flow or explore partnership opportunities, visit notabene.id or contact our team.