How Does Stablecoin Pre-Funding Work for Cross-Border Payments?

How Thunes Uses Stablecoins to Pre-Fund Cross-Border Payouts

Thunes, a cross-border payments network spanning 140 countries, lets customers pre-fund transactions in USDC and EuroC and receive payouts in USDC or USDT. Stablecoins reduce the currency Thunes must lock up ahead of volatile weekends, giving customers faster access to 220 payment methods and more than 1,500 Swift-connected banks.

“our customers now can pre-fund us in stablecoins, so USDC and EuroC to start with. That's freeing up some of their liquidity challenges they have”

— Pritpal Shokar, Head of Product, Digital Assets at Thunes

Thunes built that network over roughly a decade, connecting 140 countries, 90 currencies and 220 payment methods behind a single API. Stablecoins started as an internal experiment for treasury movements before becoming a customer-facing option, layered in alongside the bank accounts, mobile wallets and cards Thunes already supported.

Why Correspondent Banking Doesn't Move Value in Real Time

Thunes' Pritpal Shokar started his career updating a bank ledger by hand when the branch's systems went down — a reminder that traditional finance often just updates records rather than moving value. That gap between messaging and settlement is what stablecoins close.

“I think what cryptos got right from day one is the concept of settlement, real-time settlement. And what I mean by that is, in the tradfi space, we still see as more of a messaging infrastructure layer. So messages move, but the value doesn't actually move”

— Pritpal Shokar, Head of Product, Digital Assets at Thunes

That real-time settlement is also why Thunes has to hold buffer liquidity across 90 currencies today. Locking up cash over a volatile weekend or an extra-long public holiday carries real risk, and stablecoins narrow the time a corridor has to sit unfunded.

The Real Value Is Speed, Not Cost

The industry's default sales pitch for stablecoins is better, faster, cheaper. Shokar pushes back on the cheaper part: once a thin corridor's FX spread and off-ramp costs are priced in, a stablecoin payment can end up costing more than the traditional rail it replaced.

“stablecoins are not cheaper; they're faster. And if you can capture value from speed, for example, we had in one of our episodes, we were talking with Citi about you know trade finance and commodities and how you can actually gain value from paying your exporters faster and whatnot”

— Ran Goldi, SVP Payments and Network at Fireblocks

Fireblocks' Ran Goldi draws the same conclusion from the infrastructure side. Speed is where the value actually shows up — reaching an exporter or a network partner hours or days faster changes the economics of a trade, even when the price on the transfer itself looks similar.

Who's Actually Subsidizing Cheap Stablecoin Rails

Where stablecoin payments do look cheap today, that's not always the underlying cost structure — it's often venture capital. New chains and stablecoin issuers have spent heavily to buy adoption, and that subsidy shows up as low fees for early customers.

“stablecoins feel cheaper because they're subsidized by VCs. And basically, you have like tons of these VCs putting money into chains, putting money into companies, putting money the chains themselves, the blockchains, obviously giving subsidies of sorts because they want to encourage utility”

— Ran Goldi, SVP Payments and Network at Fireblocks

That matters for anyone modeling costs a few years out: fees on a current corridor may be temporarily discounted while a chain or issuer builds market share, not permanently set that low.

Navigating a Multi-Stablecoin World

Payment providers can no longer assume a single dollar stablecoin. USDC tends to dominate onshore in the US, while USDT is still the default across much of the rest of the world, and new issuers keep entering.

“there's several flavors of U.S. dollar. You know, least USDC, USDT, new consortia popping up. How do you think about supporting this multi-stable coin world, where you know, sort of onshore in the US, maybe USDC is more popular, but offshore it's all USDT”

— Simon Taylor, Head of Market Development at Tempo

Thunes' answer is to stay currency-agnostic the way it already is with fiat: evaluate each new stablecoin on market demand, tokenomics and how quickly Thunes can get in and out of a position, rather than picking a single winner.

Compliance Is the Hard Part of Blending TradFi and Crypto

Building a stablecoin rail inside a regulated payments company is not primarily a technology problem. Thunes operates under licenses across multiple jurisdictions, and each one brings its own rules for how crypto assets can move.

“compliance has been quite a challenge in this space, and although the fundamental principles are the same around KYC, you think about how the two different worlds operate and these concepts of travel, self-custodial wallets, custodial wallets”

— Pritpal Shokar, Head of Product, Digital Assets at Thunes

Shokar frames Thunes' role as an intermediary, not a replacement for one: the goal was never to remove middlemen from cross-border payments, but to make Thunes' existing global coverage easier for customers to reach.

What's Next: Onchain FX and the Agentic Economy

Shokar's near-term focus is onchain FX and liquidity management across all 220 of Thunes' network partners — funding every corridor with a stablecoin option is still a small percentage of total volume today.

“They will become a fact, in my opinion. I think it'll be part of a bigger picture, though. So I think it won't be the only form of tokenized money. So we know we've seen tokenized deposits. We know CBDCs may launch soon”

— Pritpal Shokar, Head of Product, Digital Assets at Thunes

He also expects AI agents to eventually hold stablecoin wallets and transact onchain directly. But even in that world, Shokar expects agents will still need to convert back to fiat for obligations like taxes and rent, which is why he sees continued demand for the fiat off-ramp Thunes provides.

• 140 countries, 90 currencies, 220 payment methods. Thunes built its cross-border network over roughly a decade before adding stablecoins as a funding and payout rail, per Pritpal Shokar on Stablecoin Stories Ep. 10.
• USDC and EuroC for pre-funding, USDC and USDT for payouts. Customers can now fund transactions in stablecoins instead of locking up currency ahead of volatile weekends and long holidays.
• 1,500+ banks already connected via Swift. Customers can receive stablecoin-funded payouts through Thunes' API or their existing Swift membership, with no new rail to onboard.
• Only 1-2% of stablecoin volume is real-world usage today. Most stablecoin volume is still trading, but treasury management, payroll and remittances are the fastest-growing real-world use cases, Shokar said.
• 65% of Fireblocks' stablecoin volume, up from 8% four years ago. Fireblocks SVP Ran Goldi cited roughly $4 trillion of current stablecoin flow on the platform as evidence utility has overtaken speculation.