Crypto's Quiet Revolution: How Stablecoins Deliver Aid Where Banks Can't

Camila Russo talks to Mercina Tillemann (Circle) & Matthew Keller (Algorand Foundation) at Algorand's Humanitarian Payments Council about how stablecoins are being used to make aid payments faster, cheaper and traceable 👇

Circle, Algorand Execs Say Stablecoins Are Cutting Humanitarian Aid Costs by Over 40% in Some Corridors

Speaking with The Defiant at the Algorand Foundation's Humanitarian Payments Council, Circle's Mercina Tillemann Perez and Algorand's Matt Keller said blockchain rails are reducing settlement times from two weeks to under a day — and could restore donor confidence as global aid budgets shrink.

Stablecoin payments are delivering cost savings of more than 40% and cutting settlement times from two weeks to less than a day in some of the world's hardest-to-reach humanitarian corridors, according to Mercina Tillemann Perez, Vice President ofCircle Impact at Circle.

"We've seen a savings of more than 40% in certain corridors and settlement time being reduced from two weeks to less than a day for humanitarian flows in some of the hardest to reach corridors in the world," Tillemann Perez said in a conversation with The Defiant's Camila Russo at theHumanitarian Payments Council, convened by the Algorand Foundation in Washington, D.C. She was joined by Matt Keller, Head of Impact at theAlgorand Foundation and a former legal counsel at the United Nations World Food Programme.

The panel comes as humanitarian funding contracts sharply. More than 30% of global humanitarian funding disappeared between 2024 and 2025, driven largely by U.S. cuts that saw support fall from roughly $14 billion to $3.7 billion, according toRefugees International.

Programmable Aid

Beyond cost and speed, Tillemann Perez pointed to programmability as an underappreciated capability for public fund management, allowing donors to earmark funds for specific purposes.

"If you're sending resources, let's say to a very high-risk environment, you may want to earmark them as only being able to be used for food," she said.

Both speakers cautioned that outcomes depend on how flows are structured. "It's very geography specific, it's very contingent on the specific architecture of a flow of funds," Tillemann Perez said. "If you don't orchestrate things thoughtfully, you can end up spending much more if you're not careful."

An 'Afghan Stablecoin'

Keller pointed toHesabPay, a payments platform built on Algorand that the Foundation invested in, which lets users in Afghanistan pay electricity and phone bills and receive humanitarian assistance — what he described as "essentially" an Afghan stablecoin.

"This is an Afghan company innovating with Web3technology to deliver something of value from point A, which in the humanitarian aid case is a multilateral organization or an international NGO, to point B, which is the end user, which is the beneficiary," Keller said.

UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, has scaled its use of reloadable cards through HesabPay to support more than 625,000 refugee returnees and over 17,500 internally displaced people in Afghanistan, delivering more than $35 million in assistance,the Algorand Foundation said on July 15.

Keller also cited aLondon School of Economics study that delivered digital payments to some 2,400 Afghan women via HesabPay, saying that when women receive value directly in their wallets, "they spend it on things that benefit their family, so there's less hunger in the household."

USDC in Haiti

Tillemann Perez described a program byHope for Haiti, a nonprofit delivering monthly nutrition aid payments in USDC to mothers in Haiti, where recipients can spend the stablecoin directly with participating merchants without cashing out. USDC, issued by Circle, has a market capitalization of about $73.2 billion,per CoinGecko.

"They probably don't really care that it's using blockchain, but what they really care about is that it works," she said, adding that the NGO has found the model "injects a lot more dignity into the aid process" because recipients no longer queue for hours or carry physical cash.

Transparency as Budgets Shrink

Keller argued that onchain traceability directly answers the misappropriation concerns used to justify aid cuts, including the dismantling of USAID. The Algorand Foundation launched anAid Trust Portal last year to track and visualize aid payments onchain.

"Is there a technology that allows you to trace every single cent from point A to the end user's wallet?" he said. "The transparency element of the blockchain, the immutable nature of the data that goes on chain, and the traceability of that data, of those payments, is really important as we move forward because we're beginning to flip the script a little bit."

Both Keller and Tillemann Perez said that transparency could encourage donors to give more. "Can we make assistance more transparent and more accountable? And if we can answer those questions in the affirmative, then we have to do it," Keller said.

Regulation as an 'Unlock'

Tillemann Perez said theGENIUS Act, the U.S. stablecoin law signed in July 2025, has given hesitant institutions confidence to adopt the technology, and urged other jurisdictions to follow.

"The GENIUS Act in the United States was a massive unlock because it gives otherwise tentative organizations the confidence to move, because they know this innovation has meaningful consumer protections, that it has appropriate guardrails," she said.

Circle also backs builders in the sector through itsUnlocking Impact pitch competition, which awards up to 100,000 USDC to startups advancing UN Sustainable Development Goals. A recent winner, Cambodia-based ATEC Global, makes IoT-connected, pay-to-use induction cooktops for low-income communities and is on track to serve one million people by 2028, Tillemann Perez said.

Asked what success looks like in five years, she said: "I would love that the default for humanitarian payments is sending resources with USDC, that these are transparent flows, that you really can track them from donor to recipient."