Stablecoin is being viewed as gamechanger for the travel industry for its ability to save costs, drive efficiency and help eliminate fraud.
During the Airline Distribution 2026 event in Barcelona last week, payment shared specific areas where carriers could use stablecoin, which are backed by fiat currencies.
Called on to describe stablecoin during the UATP-hosted event, Alex Taskey, founder and CEO of Frame, a stablecoin orchestration layer, said it was not bitcoin.
“It's a cryptographic transfer of money, and it's backed one-to-one with a fiat currency. So you have stability with a U.S. dollar, with a Euro, with a British pound, and then it's transacted in a very secure way. When you talk about a transaction, it's on-chain, so it's fully visible and trackable. You have your identity connected to the transaction,” he said.
Taskey added that areas such as cross-border transactions and corporate treasury—a company’s high-value cash movements—become “naturally efficient by using not a coin itself but a stablecoin orchestration platform.”
He mentioned other ways the mechanism could drive efficiency, such as processing refunds more quickly for consumers and eliminating processes such as trying to get the best foreign exchange rates.
“What I heard in the last couple of days was tight margins, low settlement times. We’re talking two days to four weeks to actually get the money. This is settled within seconds with super high efficiency,” he said.
Christopher Petersen, founder of Mica, described stablecoin as “providing a demonstrable solution to a problem.”
He added that we will be transacting with stablecoin in the future whether we know it or not.
“Because behind the scenes the settlement and the validation that it can provide is of real value to people. A consumer may not want to ingress into stablecoin but their financial institution might leverage something like Frame to enable that self-reconciliation between them and an airline.”
Petersen also spoke about a massive rethink needed in the broken payments ecosystem.
“It's broken from a technology perspective, it's broken from a process, procedural perspective. It's got a broken financial model. We're talking about how you stop fraud. Well, the fraud is just because of the design of the underlying system. If you really want to stop fraud and not worry about liability shift, but eliminate liability, you need a different design. You need to actually strip away the problems. Don’t get me wrong, these systems were amazing, they did amazing things for us, but they haven’t evolved. They haven't kept up with the needs of modern commerce both in this industry and others.”
He added that the industry needs to start thinking about the next layer of infrastructure and how it helps provide a seamless consumer experience
“Traditional card payment goes through 14 steps to be completed. That's a lot of points of failure. It's a lot of expense and much of it is unnecessary. I think that things now we're talking about with stablecoin, that is a value system that a new network should be able to support and that's the crux of it.”
While stablecoin was created more than 10 years ago, it is only beginning to gain traction in recent years. Travala, a crypto-focused online travel agency said last year that stablecoin payments account for more than half of its crypto bookings.
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in June last year that the company was still in "the study phase" with stablecoin but described it as "promising for global companies that are moving money around to create a mechanism to reduce costs."
Meanwhile, Trip.com announced late last year that it was testing stablecoin for prepaid hotel and flight bookings for some overseas users.
Other payment specialists have said recently that stablecoin could total a quarter of B2B transactions in a few years.
*Reporter's accommodation at the event was supported by UATP.