The two ratios in the decrypt.co analysis do not describe the same market. Set $390 billion against $208 trillion of cross-border flow and you get 0.19% [1]; the same $390 billion is presented as 0.02% of payment volume once domestic flows are folded in [3], which only holds if the total denominator sits near $1.95 quadrillion [2]. The framings are about nine times apart [3]. Both are small, so the ranking of the constraint survives either way, and what moves is the size of the prize an operator can honestly quote to a board.
The wider gap is definitional. If headline stablecoin volume is $30 trillion or more while genuine payments are $390 billion, payments are about 1.3% of what gets counted and roughly 98.7% of the reported number is bots, exchange flows and automated trading [d4, c4]. Widen the numerator and a growth story arrives without a single new corridor being opened, which is the first way the bank-constraint thesis fails.
Brazil is the concrete version. Pix moved more than R$35 trillion in 2025, about $6.3 trillion, and the central bank's breakdown puts B2B at 47% of that value [c9, c10], so roughly $2.96 trillion of domestic business payments in one country runs about 7.6 times the entire world's genuine stablecoin payment rate [5]. Settling into that market at institutional size makes BRL settlement, local rail access and FX infrastructure mandatory [14]. The decrypt.co ladder makes the arithmetic of that plain: one banking relationship, one issuer and one compliance layer carry $50 million, and at $10 billion the binding question is how many corridors the banking, FX and licensing stack can hold [8], which is a 200x increase in volume [6] over a stack the analysis says takes years to assemble layer by layer [11].
The weak part of the argument as published is evidentiary. It asserts that most companies on stablecoin rails lean on one primary banking partner without giving a count, and it offers Silvergate, Signature and the FDIC pause letters as precedent without naming a payments company that stalled at mid-scale for that reason [c12, c13]. Precedent is standing in for data, and the piece does not address whether issuers or platforms getting direct access to local rails would shorten the fiat legs at all.
The view the numbers earn is narrow: bank access is the constraint, and it will be settled by arithmetic rather than argument. Genuine payments reaching 1% of cross-border flow means about $2.08 trillion, a 5.3x increase from here [8]; if that arrives while operators still run one primary bank per corridor, the dependency risk was overpriced, and if it arrives because the definition of a payment widened, no corridor was built. The underwriting question these figures support is banks per corridor, not transactions per second.
