Stablecoins should be priced like ACH, not RTP
- The RTP trap
- What enterprise actually wants
- The reversibility feature
- "You have to do the CH"
- Fixed-fee pricing
- The path forward
Stablecoins are being positioned as instant, expensive settlement. Like RTP — real-time payments. Fast, final, irreversible. And that sounds great in a pitch deck.
But 70% of ACH volume could trivially move to RTP today. And it doesn't. Because speed isn't worth the cost for most payments.
The RTP trap
Here's the thing about instant settlement: most people don't need it. Krish from Ramp — one of the largest enterprise spend management platforms in the US — put it bluntly: "The bill pay user does not care if their vendor got the money right away."
Ramp could move 70% of their ACH volume to RTP with minimal effort. It's an attractive idea — everyone would love Ramp if they did it. But they would just be lighting money on fire for things that people don't care about. RTP costs more per transaction than ACH. And for the vast majority of enterprise payments — vendor invoices, payroll, bill pay — the speed premium isn't worth it.
If you look at the stablecoin product through Ramp's lens, it looks like a treasury product where all money in and out is RTP and it costs as much as RTP. They wouldn't want that.
What enterprise actually wants
Enterprise wants three things from a payment rail: cheap, reversible, and predictable.
Cheap means ACH-range pricing — pennies per transaction, not percentage-based fees. Fintechs want deterministic costs they can model, not variable slippage that changes with pool depth and market conditions.
Reversible means a settlement window that allows chargebacks, fraud detection, and error correction. In the fiat banking world, if money shows up incorrectly, you can reverse it within a window. Instant, final settlement destroys this capability.
Predictable means knowing exactly what the fee will be before you press the button. A fintech partner wants to offer a "move money" button with a dollar sign — not "USD XYZ 1112" — and know the pricing before the button is pressed. Slippage-based pricing is the opposite of predictable.
The reversibility feature
This is the point that gets lost in the "instant settlement" narrative: a settlement window isn't a bug. It's a feature.
A clearinghouse batches and nets transactions over a window — maybe minutes, maybe hours. During that window, transactions can be reversed if fraud is detected, errors can be corrected, and compliance checks can complete. This is exactly what enterprise compliance teams need.
Instant, irreversible settlement sounds like a feature until you realize it means every error, every fraudulent transaction, every compliance failure is permanent. For a company processing millions of transactions, that's not a feature — it's a liability.
The reversibility window is how you justify the clearinghouse model to enterprise customers. As Krish put it: "The way in which you justify the longer window with us would almost exclusively be the reversibility, fraud protection, et cetera. You could sort of launder it — and then it'll be like, 'oh, and you save cost.'"
"You have to do the CH"
Here's the pun that became a thesis: to get ACH benefits, you have to do the CH. The clearinghouse.
ACH works because it batches, nets, and settles through a centralized clearing mechanism. Stablecoins can do the same thing — batch payment orders, net them against each other, settle the minimal fiat movement required — and deliver ACH-quality pricing with blockchain settlement.
The clearinghouse isn't competing with ACH. It's rebuilding ACH on better infrastructure. Same economic model — cheap, reversible, batch-settled — but with the speed, programmability, and global reach of blockchains.
Fixed-fee pricing
The pricing model matters as much as the infrastructure. Fintechs don't want to explain slippage to their customers. They want a fixed fee per transaction — a number they can put in a contract, model in a spreadsheet, and pass through to their users.
If stablecoins can offer fixed fees in the ACH range — pennies per transaction, regardless of amount — adoption becomes obvious. You're not asking enterprises to pay more for a new technology. You're offering the same price for a better product.
Variable slippage is the pricing model of a market. Fixed fees are the pricing model of a utility. Stablecoins need to be priced like a utility, not a market.
The path forward
Position stablecoins as ACH replacement first: high volume, low margin, cheap, reversible, batch-settled. This is where the volume lives. This is what enterprise actually wants. This is the product that 70% of payment volume is already using — and would switch from, if the alternative offered the same economics on better infrastructure.
Then add RTP-like instant settlement as a premium tier. For the transactions that actually need speed — time-sensitive settlements, margin calls, urgent payroll — offer instant, final settlement at a higher price. Just like the existing payment landscape: ACH for most things, RTP when you need it.
The stablecoin ecosystem has been trying to sell everyone RTP when most of the market wants ACH. The clearinghouse makes the ACH model possible. And in the end, it's ACH — not RTP — that moves most of the money.
Quotes
70% of ACH could move to RTP — and doesn't
Source: Better Money / Ramp — Jan 16, 2026
Ramp (Krish): 70% of the ACH volume today we do could be moved to RTP trivially. And it's sort of an attractive idea — oh, everyone would love Ramp if we did this. But we would just be lighting money on fire for things that people don't care about. The bill pay user does not care if their vendor got the money right away.
The reversibility justification
Source: Better Money / Ramp — Jan 16, 2026
Ramp (Krish): The way in which you justify the longer window with us would almost exclusively be the reversibility, fraud protection, et cetera. You could sort of launder it — and then it'll be like, "oh, and you save cost."
"You have to do the CH"
Source: Better Money / Ramp — Jan 16, 2026
Ramp (Krish): Selling it as all the benefits of ACH. And then, by the way, in order to do ACH, you have to do the CH.
Sam: You have to do the CH. That's hilarious.
Stablecoins should be priced like ACH, not RTP
Source: Better Money / Ramp — Jan 16, 2026
Ramp (Krish): I almost think you have to sell ACH back to people. Like, if you could sell — quite literally — if you could just convince us that all the things we'd be losing in moving ACH volume to stablecoins, theoretically, would be regained... the reversibility and the windows. And it's also the cost — ACH transactions are dramatically cheaper than RTPs. One way I look at the stablecoin product, if we extrapolate it to be consensus, is it's like a Ramp treasury product, except all money in and out is RTP and it costs as much as RTP. We wouldn't want to do that.
Sam: So if you could get fixed-fee pricing in that range and reversibility, then that's actually an excellent outcome for you.
Ramp (Krish): Yeah, exactly.
Bridge costs and operational pain
Source: Better Money / Ramp — Jan 16, 2026
Ramp (Krish): Bridge is really expensive. Like, borderline — I remember in the early days, people just being like, we have to really be confident this is really worth paying this much for. And because it's crypto, ideally without ripping everything out and building something from scratch — we can just start to overlay just bare metal, which is like the clearinghouse in the long term.
Fintechs want a dollar sign, not USDXYZ
Source: Better Money / Modern Treasury — Jan 9, 2026
Sam: A typical fintech partner of ours is saying something like, we want to offer stablecoins, but we want it to have a dollar sign and not like USD XYZ 1112. That's just crazy. They want to be able to offer a button that says "move money" and then know what the pricing is going to be before the button is pressed.