Paybis: Twelve Years Old and Catching Its Stride

An interview by Sean Murphy with Jegors Zubarevs, Director of Partnerships at Paybis

Paybis turned twelve years old on the first of April. It’s no longer a start-up; it is a 200-person infrastructure business building the crypto plumbing that banks, payment institutions and enterprise clients increasingly need, and the work of the last half-decade has been about making it boring enough to be trustworthy.

MiCA is the reason the next two months matter. The regulation's transitional period for crypto-asset service providers ends on a timeline that, for most firms, is already uncomfortably short. On 12 May, Latvijas Banka issued SIA Paybis Europe a licence for the provision of crypto-asset services and, in the same decision, a licence to operate as a payment institution. It is the first crypto-asset firm in Latvia to receive both authorisations simultaneously, and only the third in the country to clear the MiCA process. There is an awareness, common to most firms going through the process right now, that the firms that do not receive authorisation will either exit the European market or quietly sell themselves to companies that can achieve authorisations.

Zubarevs's own arc inside the crypto industry reflects the shift the sector is trying to navigate. He joined Paybis from a background in payments, and what he describes finding is a company that has been moving for a decade in a direction the rest of the industry is only now forced to take seriously. Their client base, which leans institutional, rewards firms that can demonstrate documentation, auditability and settlement history. Banks and payment institutions, when they come shopping for a crypto infrastructure partner, are not looking for the cheapest integration; they are looking for the one that will not generate a regulatory headache.

The cultural transition is the one Zubarevs keeps returning to. A few years ago, he notes, crypto was a space where the absence of rules was often sold as a feature. That version of the industry has effectively ended. Regulation is arriving in every market that matters, from the United States with the GENIUS Act to the EU with MiCA to Hong Kong and Singapore with their own frameworks. The firms that complained hardest about the tightening are, in many cases, the ones that have since disappeared. The ones that are growing, he argues, are the ones that treated compliance as a product and not a tax.

Stablecoins are where that shift is most visible. Adoption, from Zubarevs's vantage, is no longer a theoretical question. Chainalysis tracked $28 trillion in real-economy stablecoin volume in 2025, with business-to-business payments now accounting for around 60% of it, and monthly B2B flows up from under $100 million in early 2023 to more than $6 billion by mid-2025. Enterprise treasuries have started using stablecoin rails to move money across jurisdictions outside banking hours, and the freedom to settle from New York to Sydney on a Saturday night is, he says, the single most underappreciated commercial feature of the asset class.

What is striking about the institutional adoption curve is how quickly it has gone from pilot to policy. Treasury teams that were running cautious tests a year ago are now writing stablecoin rails into their cash management playbooks. The conversations Zubarevs has with payment institutions and banks have shifted accordingly. 

Two years ago the question was whether stablecoins were a regulatory risk worth touching at all. Now the question is which provider can plug them into existing reconciliation and reporting workflows without forcing the treasury team to learn a new vocabulary. The infrastructure conversation has moved from defensive to operational, and the firms that built for that earlier have a head start.

Off-ramping still remains the major constraint. For all the progress on issuance, custody and transfer, the hardest part of stablecoin infrastructure is the last mile back into fiat. Paybis positions itself here, with the regulatory documentation to explain where funds came from and the rails to convert them without friction. Zubarevs is careful on this point: the value is not just speed but auditability. A treasurer moving seven figures out of a stablecoin position on a Sunday night does not want a partner who can do it quickly but cannot produce a clean audit trail on Monday morning. The combination, he argues, is what most of the market still lacks, and what twelve years of compliance investment is actually for.

What he wants, in the end, is for his mother to use stablecoins without knowing she is using them. That image, of the technology disappearing into everyday life, is the one most infrastructure providers quietly share. Paybis has spent twelve years working towards a market that is only now arriving.