The stablecoin market is moving $1 billion per day through institutional channels, but the real story isn't about which issuer wins; it's about the infrastructure that connects them. Cactus Raazi, CEO Americas at B2C2, one of the largest institutional market makers in digital assets serving roughly 1,500 institutions across more than 40 exchanges globally, explained that the conventional Circle-versus-Tether framing has become obsolete. Instead, the next frontier is interoperability, programmability, and the unsexy but critical work of market making that most crypto participants never see.

What Does an Institutional Stablecoin Market Maker Actually Do?

Market makers occupy a spectrum of strategies, and where they sit on that spectrum fundamentally shapes the execution quality their clients receive. At one extreme, a market maker functions as a riskless aggregator, pulling prices from 40 or more exchanges and quoting on top with minimal directional view. At the other extreme, a market maker operates as a proprietary quantitative trading shop, running algorithmic signals across timeframes from seconds to days, and the price a client receives is heavily conditioned by where those signals predict the asset is heading.

B2C2 positions itself in the middle of this spectrum, partly because its parent company, SBI Group, constrains risk appetite. This structural positioning has a direct implication for institutional buyers: the market maker you choose determines execution quality, not just the spread you pay. The difference between riskless aggregation and proprietary alpha can mean thousands of dollars on large institutional trades.

Why the Multi-Issuer Bet Changes Everything?

Eighteen months ago, B2C2 made a contrarian bet that the duopoly narrative was wrong. The firm predicted that Stripe (via its Bridge product), Western Union, Revolut, and many other consumer and platform companies would issue their own stablecoins, fragmenting the market away from USDC and USDT dominance. That prediction is now materializing, and it has forced a rethinking of stablecoin infrastructure.

The product expression of this view is PENNY, B2C2's offering for instant, zero-cost, zero-counterparty-risk stablecoin-to-stablecoin swaps. The deeper claim underlying PENNY is that stablecoins are software, not just transfer-of-value tools. The real analogy is SaaS: a base layer plus an app store of programmable financial logic. That programmability is what will accelerate institutional adoption from here, according to Raazi's analysis.

"The Circle-vs-Tether framing is already obsolete; the next product wedge is interoperability," stated Cactus Raazi, CEO Americas at B2C2.

Cactus Raazi, CEO Americas at B2C2

How to Understand the Hidden Layers of Stablecoin Infrastructure

• Market Maker Strategy: Institutional stablecoin execution depends on whether your market maker is a riskless price aggregator or a proprietary trading shop with directional views; this structural choice determines the quality of pricing you receive.
• Balance Sheet Constraints: Market makers require "risk equity," capital comfortable with daily losses, but US capital markets are structured to fund venture, growth equity, and private equity, not the balance-sheet-heavy business of market making.
• Multi-Issuer Interoperability: The future of stablecoins is not a winner-take-all battle between USDC and USDT, but rather a fragmented ecosystem where Stripe, Western Union, Revolut, and other platforms issue their own stablecoins, requiring seamless cross-stablecoin swaps.

Why US Capital Markets Struggle to Fund Market-Making Businesses

Raazi's career spans nearly three decades on Wall Street, including 13 years at Goldman Sachs, where he held the record for the firm's highest annual credit sales production. He later co-founded Elefant, an algorithmic market-making platform for corporate bonds, in 2015. That experience revealed a structural problem in how the US capital base funds financial infrastructure.

Algorithmic fixed-income market making didn't fail because of technology; it failed because of capital structure. Market makers need balance sheets comfortable with the possibility that their models lose money on a given day. The US capital markets excel at funding venture, growth equity, private equity, and leveraged buyouts, but there is almost no domestic pool of "risk equity" designed for businesses that require daily mark-to-market volatility. This structural mismatch between what market-making businesses require and what the US capital base offers is a fundamental reason firms like Elefant struggled, regardless of execution quality.

What Institutional Treasurers Actually Want From Stablecoins?

The practical benefit of stablecoins for institutional users is 24/7 money movement. Unlike traditional banking infrastructure, which operates on business hours and settlement cycles, stablecoins enable treasurers to move value across time zones and institutions without waiting for the next business day. This capability has become a core part of the treasurer wish list, and it's driving adoption independent of the broader crypto market narrative.

The scale of this infrastructure is substantial. B2C2 alone handles roughly $1 billion per day in stablecoin flow, pricing across more than 40 exchanges globally and serving approximately 1,500 institutions. This volume is not speculative trading; it's institutional plumbing, the unglamorous but essential infrastructure that moves value in the digital asset ecosystem.

The stablecoin market has matured beyond the point where a single issuer can dominate through brand or first-mover advantage. Instead, the winners will be the platforms and market makers that solve the interoperability problem, enabling seamless movement between USDC, USDT, and the next generation of platform-issued stablecoins. For institutional participants, that means the future of stablecoins is not about picking a winner, but about building infrastructure that works across all of them.