Digital assets and stablecoins are reshaping payments, making transactions faster, more accessible, and increasingly integrated into everyday global commerce.
The payments industry is undergoing a major transformation as digital assets become more integrated into everyday transactions. Carl Grimstad discusses the growing role of stablecoins, the limitations of traditional payment systems, and why seamless infrastructure will be essential in making digital payments more practical for businesses and consumers worldwide.
It’s lovely to have you with us today. To start, what changes in the payments space are you paying the closest attention to right now?
We’re at a point now where the infrastructure of the financial world is finally being upgraded for the demands of today’s digital world. Perhaps the greatest shift is from “holding” to “spending”. Until now the $4 trillion digital asset market has been separated from everyday commerce – with assets treated solely as stores of value rather than mediums of exchange and payment. Lydian is focused on finally closing that loop.
Beyond that, I’m watching a multi-ledger reality take shape, where bank tokenised deposits, public-chain assets, and merchants all need a universal translator to speak to one another. The institutions that build that translator earliest, and with the merchant in mind, will define the next era of commerce.
You’ve spent many years in payments. How has the role of money and transactions evolved compared to when you first started?
When I first started in this industry, the focus was purely on the digitisation of the traditional ledger – moving from paper to electronic batch processing like ACH.
What’s changed most fundamentally is the nature of money itself. It’s not a static deposit anymore but a fluid asset that needs to be as spendable in a corner shop in Istanbul as it is on a global e-commerce site.
The institutions that build that translator earliest, and with the merchant in mind, will define the next era of commerce.
Speed is now a mandate, not a nice-to-have. Legacy systems are tied to banking hours and manual clearing processes, meaning that transactions can be “pending” for days. If you’re paid on a Friday after 5:30pm, and your bank isn’t open on Saturday, and Monday happens to be a bank holiday, you may not see the funds until the following Tuesday. That’s an unacceptable reality today. It’s also the opportunity that drives everything we’re building at Lydian: a system that solves pain points.
As digital assets become more visible, what do you think is still misunderstood about how they can be used in everyday transactions?
The biggest misconception is that crypto payments are inherently too volatile or complicated for the merchant. People hear the word “crypto” and instantly associate it with fraud, or complexity. They assume that if you accept Bitcoin or a stablecoin,
you’re taking on massive risk or creating an accounting nightmare for the back office. That’s just not true anymore.
With the right infrastructure, the merchant never has to touch or even see the crypto. They receive their local fiat currency close to instantly. Their accounting teams receive a standard fiat deposit into their accounts, accompanied by a data feed that maps directly into existing ERP logic or other back-office workflows.
What we’re doing is abstracting all of that complexity, so that for the merchant, it feels exactly like a traditional transaction. Only faster. And meaningfully cheaper.
From your perspective, what needs to happen before digital payments using crypto or stablecoins feel truly mainstream?
It comes down to table stakes. For digital payments to be mainstream they must begin to be perceived as easy and familiar.
It comes down to invisibility.
Mainstream adoption will happen when “Pay with Crypto” is just another button at checkout, supported by the massive PSPs that already control the merchant relationship. At that point, you won’t think about which ledger your money is on; you’ll just think about the purchase.
This is exactly what we built Lydian to do – make spending digital assets feel as familiar as tapping a card at your favorite local shop.
Where do you think traditional payment systems are starting to fall short in today’s environment?
Traditional rails like Visa and Mastercard are amazing in that they work everywhere. But they are built on 50-year-old logic. They are expensive for the merchant, plagued by interchange fees and burdened by the threat of chargebacks, a multi-billion dollar problem that never really goes away.
Then there’s the access problem. 1.4 billion people remain unbanked or underbanked globally, and legacy infrastructure isn’t designed to serve them. It can’t provide the access that a worker in an emerging market needs to protect their purchasing power, let alone participate in the global digital economy.
By contrast, stablecoin rails deliver anytime settlement. Digital asset transactions are push-based, and this means that they settle with finality on a public ledger. The entire lifecycle of a transaction becomes trackable, and the origin of funds is verifiable with a level of certainty that traditional systems simply cannot match.
For businesses, what are the biggest concerns or barriers when it comes to accepting new forms of digital payment?
For most merchants, the biggest hurdle is compliance– or rather, the perception of it. There’s a misconception of a labyrinth of regulation and significant technical overhead involved in integrating new systems. CFOs worry that embracing digital assets means a rip-and-replace of their existing tech stack, potentially breaking workflows that have been running reliably for years. The reality is that modern crypto-fintech is additive, not disruptive.
Our job is to give CFOs peace of mind, eliminating chargeback liability and volatility risk. Sophisticated infrastructure layers like Lydian sit as parallel rails, integrating via API or SDK without altering existing checkout flows.
When merchants realise that they can lower costs and become accessible to more than 800 million crypto users without changing how they currently operate, the conversation changes pretty quickly.
What has been one of the more surprising lessons for you as this space continues to develop?
Honestly, the speed of the shift in awareness has surprised me the most.
Our team is constantly on the road, meeting merchants, institutions, and partners across markets, and the change in the room over the past twelve months has been remarkable. A year ago, I was still walking people through the basics of what a stablecoin actually is. That conversation has largely moved on. The interest in accepting digital assets is no longer something we have to manufacture… it’s coming to us.
The divide between traditional banking and the digital economy will close, not through disruption, but through integration.
But here’s the nuance: the engagement has improved dramatically, while institutional knowledge still has a long way to go. People are interested, even enthusiastic, but the depth of understanding inside most organizations remains thin. Decision-makers know enough to know they don’t want to be left behind, but they’re still early in genuinely understanding what integration looks like in practice.
That gap between willingness and readiness, is actually where Lydian does some of its most important work. Bridging it is as much about education as it is about technology.
How do you see everyday payments continuing to change as digital assets become more integrated into how people spend and transact?
I see a future where payments are invisible and the purchase is all that matters. Digital assets will unlock a truly globalised economy, one that enables instant payment for both banked and unbanked. Spending of any assets, from any wallet, at any merchant will be the global standard.
The divide between traditional banking and the digital economy will close, not through disruption, but through integration. Infrastructure platforms like Lydian will act as the universal translator, embedding seamlessly into existing financial ecosystems rather than replacing them. Ultimately, this is so much more than a technical upgrade: it’s a relief. One that gives business owners the certainty of instant liquidity and the peace of mind that comes with knowing their payments infrastructure is built for the world as it actually is, not as it was fifty years ago.
Executive Profile
Carl Grimstad is CEO and co-founder of digital assets infrastructure provider Lydian. He brings a specialised payments processing background to the digital asset space. His mission is embedding infrastructure into the foundations of modern finance, enabling the acceptance and settlement of digital assets from any wallet across any supported network. Under his leadership, Lydian has established itself as the independent infrastructure layer for major PSPs, enabling 300+ assets to confirm almost instantly at checkout for millions of merchants worldwide.
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