Author: Nianqing, ChainCatcher

The recent popularity of CZ and BNB Chain may have caused everyone to overlook a major event, namely the significant progress of the United States’ first stablecoin bill.

On March 13, local time, the U.S. Senate Banking Committee did pass the "Guidance and Establishment of a United States Stablecoin National Innovation Act" (hereinafter referred to as the "GENIUS Act") with a vote of 18:6. The bill needs to obtain at least 60 votes in the Senate, then enter the House of Representatives for deliberation, and finally be signed by President Trump. It was previously reported that the Trump administration set August as the deadline for passing the stablecoin bill.

While the crypto market is in another downturn, the total market value of stablecoins continues to rise. According to DefiLlama data, in the past 7 days, the market value of stablecoins has increased by another $1.91 billion, exceeding $229 billion for the first time. In addition, the revenue of stablecoin issuers in the past 30 days accounted for more than 70% of the total revenue of on-chain protocols.

The implementation of GENIUS and other US stablecoin bills will have a huge impact on the current stablecoin landscape. This article will start from the perspective of stablecoin regulation implementation, sort out the major stablecoins issued in the United States, and the core projects of the stablecoin infrastructure track that are potentially beneficial.

Impact of the bill on the stablecoin landscape: Circle launches a counterattack against Tether

The primary impact of the GENIUS Act is the increase in compliance costs, and compliant issuers and traditional giants will have more advantages. Currently, Tether, the largest stablecoin issuer, has a market share of over 60% of USDT, which is absolutely dominant, but it still has a long way to go in terms of compliance.

Tether is not a U.S. project, and its place of registration, legal entity, and core operations are all overseas. Earlier this year, after obtaining the El Salvador Digital Asset Service Provider (DASP) license, Tether announced that Tether and its subsidiaries will soon complete all procedures for moving to El Salvador and establish their headquarters in El Salvador.

At the same time, the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation came into full effect on December 30, 2024. Tether was not approved to withdraw from the European market, while 10 institutions including Circle, Crypto.com, and Societe Generale were approved to issue euro and dollar stablecoins.

Tether is about to face regulatory pressure from the US GENIUS Act. Circle co-founder Jeremy Allaire advocates that all issuers of dollar-based stablecoins should be registered in the United States on the grounds of protecting consumers and ensuring fair competition in the cryptocurrency market. He said: "Whether you are an offshore company or headquartered in Hong Kong, if you want to offer your dollar stablecoin in the United States, you should register in the United States as we have to do elsewhere."

This comment was directed at Tether. Although Circle is far smaller than Tether in scale, it has firmly chosen the same compliance path as Coinbase from the beginning. The US dollar stablecoin (USDC) issued by Circle is issued and regulated in the United States, and was officially approved in 2024 as the first stablecoin to comply with MiCA regulations.

While the competitor’s business model should be to build better products and larger distribution networks, their real intention is to “eliminate Tether” and every business or political meeting they hold is aimed at achieving this intention as the ultimate goal. Although this may seem a bit exaggerated, it is true.

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino responded that competitors are trying to "eliminate Tether" through legal and political meetings, and Tether will not sit idly by.

The interests of the Tether empire are still entangled in the United States. In addition to Paolo Ardoino's self-proclaimed "USDT is the most successful tool for dollar hegemony and emerging market allocation" (huge U.S. Treasury bond positions), Tether's fund custody and banking services are partially dependent on U.S. institutions. For example, its main partner Cantor Fitzgerald is responsible for managing some assets. And Cantor Fitzgerald's chairman and CEO Howard Lutnick is the newly appointed Secretary of Commerce of the Trump administration (he has now resigned from the relevant position). In addition, Tether has invested heavily (US$775 million) in Rumble, a video sharing platform that has close ties with Trump.

However, once the legislation related to stablecoins is completed, in order to comply with the proposed stablecoin regulations in the United States, Tether may need to sell some non-compliant assets, including Bitcoin, precious metals, corporate notes and secured loans. Will Tether choose to embrace US compliance or maintain its existing strategy? After all, this "offshore dollar stablecoin" positioning is also a huge advantage under the current weak regulation of cryptocurrencies .

Existing centralized stablecoins in the United States

As early as the end of 2024, based on the friendly attitude of the new US government and Trump towards cryptocurrencies and the expectations of stablecoin reserves and supervision, major institutions predicted that the stablecoin track will usher in a larger-scale outbreak and growth opportunities. In addition, Tether won a high profit of US$13 billion in 2024, and more and more companies began to rush into the market in order to deploy stablecoin business as soon as possible and seize market share. For example:

• Paypal has already launched its own stablecoin PYUSD in cooperation with Paxos, and plans to expand its promotion this year;
• BlackRock launched the tokenized fund BUIDL as early as last year. Currently, Ethena's stablecoin USDtb and Frax's frxUSD both invest in BUIDL as reserve funds;
• Stripe acquires stablecoin infrastructure platform Bridge for $1.1 billion;
• Ripple's stablecoin RLUSD will be launched before 2025;
• Visa launched a tokenized asset platform that allows banks to issue stablecoins;
• Robinhood is working with Paxos to create an open network for stablecoins;
• Bank of America plans to launch its own stablecoin after regulatory clarification;

The current legislative direction is more favorable to the issuers of stablecoins in the United States. Let’s first take a look at the existing major stablecoins in the United States (the screening criteria are that the issuer is registered in the United States).

Data sources: DefiLlama , CoinmarketCap

It is worth mentioning that DefiLlama also classifies BlackRock's USD BUIDL as a stablecoin. BUIDL is not a centralized stablecoin in the traditional sense, but a tokenized investment fund that invests 100% in cash, U.S. Treasury bonds and repurchase agreements. It maintains a stable value of $1 per token. It is mainly aimed at institutions. The most essential difference between tokenized assets and stablecoins is that they only have investment value but do not have payment functions. Franklin also issued a fund similar to BUIDL, BENJI.

For comparison, we can take a look at the overall USD stablecoin market. Currently, the stablecoins in circulation can be roughly divided into centralized stablecoins (USDT, USDC), decentralized stablecoins (Ethena USDe, DAI, USDD), RWA stablecoins (Ondo's USDY, Usual USD, Ethena's USDtb), etc. The following figure shows the top 15 stablecoins ranked by market value on CoinmarketCap .

Comparison of the average supply of major stablecoins in circulation, source : Visa Onchain Analytics Dashboard

In addition to USDT and these stablecoins registered and issued in the United States, there are two other important participants in the centralized stablecoin track, namely First Digital (FUSD) and TrueUSD (TUSD).

First Digital USD (FDUSD)

• Market value: $2 billion
• Issuer: FD121 Limited, a subsidiary of First Digital Limited, headquartered in Hong Kong.
• Release date: June 2023.
• Asset Backing: FDUSD is a stablecoin pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar, backed by cash and cash equivalents (such as short-term U.S. Treasury bills), with reserves held in custody by First Digital Trust Limited.
• Issuing networks: Ethereum, Sui, Solana, BSC

FDUSD is regulated in Asia. In 2023, due to regulatory pressure from the SEC, Paxos chose to terminate its partnership with Binance on BUSD, and Binance also announced the delisting of BUSD. Subsequently, FDUSD became one of the main stablecoins on Binance.

TruUSD (TUSD)

• Market value: $9.5 billion
• Issuer: Techteryx (formerly TrustToken), a company with Asian background.
• Release time: April 2018
• Asset backing: TUSD is pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar and backed by U.S. dollar deposits. Reserves are held in escrow accounts at multiple trust companies and are subject to real-time on-chain verification.
• Issuing networks: Ethereum, TRON, Avalanche, BNB Chain, Fantom, Polygon, etc.

TUSD is one of the earliest stablecoins on the market, even earlier than USDC and USDP. At the end of 2020, Techteryx Ltd., an investment company registered in the British Virgin Islands (BVI), led the acquisition of TUSD. Last September, the SEC filed charges against TrueCoin LLC and TrustToken Inc. for suspected fraudulent and unregistered sales of investment contracts for TrueUSD (TUSD). It was later revealed that more than 99% of the assets were reserved in First Digital, and Justin Sun team held more than 80% of the positions.

Who are the players in the stablecoin infrastructure?

Stripe's huge acquisition of Bridge, a stablecoin infrastructure company, has attracted investors' attention to stablecoin infrastructure. The reason why Stripe spent $1.1 billion to acquire Bridge was because of its stablecoin orchestration and issuance API, which allows any company or team to provide digital dollar-based services to its end consumers or businesses. Its customers include the US government, Coinbase, and SpaceX.

In March, crypto payment giant MoonPay stepped up its efforts by acquiring Iron, an API-first stablecoin infrastructure startup. Founded in 2023 and headquartered in Germany, Iron's core product is a stablecoin payment API that allows companies to embed stablecoins into payment and operating systems, provide virtual account functions, and support instant, low-cost cross-border transactions. It is conceivable that once the US stablecoin legislation is implemented, more participants with capital strength will urgently need projects that can directly provide technical solutions.

Stablecoin infrastructure generally refers to entities that provide underlying technology, services or platforms for the issuance, management, trading, payment or compliance of stablecoins. Further subdividing stablecoin infrastructure, we can roughly divide it into the following categories:

• Stablecoin as a Service : infrastructure that provides APIs for rapid issuance of stablecoins;
• Stablecoin payment service : Provide stablecoin payment services to banks, traditional payment companies and other entities;
• Others, such as a stablecoin liquidity management platform to solve the problem of stablecoin ecosystem fragmentation.

(Because potential acquisitions and mergers are not so geographically specific, when screening stablecoin infrastructure, there is no strict restriction on the location of the project, but the scale and influence of the project are mainly considered.)

1. Stablecoin as a Service

Paxos

Founded in 2012, Paxos provides “stablecoin as a service” through white-label services, customizing and issuing stablecoins for other companies (such as PayPal and Binance). This service includes token design, reserve management, compliance support, and technical integration.

Paxos has currently issued a variety of stablecoins, including Pax Dollar (USDP) (2018), Binance USD (BUSD) (cooperated with Binance, has stopped issuing), PayPal USD (PYUSD) (issued by PayPal), and Global Dollar (USDG) (registered and issued in Singapore). Among them, BUSD has been the third largest stablecoin after USDT and USDC for a long time.

Paxos provides blockchain settlement services for securities and asset transactions, supports stablecoin payments, provides enterprises with APIs for minting, redemption, and management, and supports multi-chain deployment. In addition, Paxos provides reserve custody and transparency reports (verified by independent auditing agencies) to provide stablecoin compliance assurance.

Recently, Paxos has also teamed up with Robinhood to develop the Global Dollar Network, a stablecoin network that aims to accelerate the use of global stablecoins by sharing the proceeds of reserve assets with participants, thereby incentivizing them to promote and distribute USDG.

Stably

Stably is an asset tokenization infrastructure provider based in the United States. Stably works with regulated financial institutions to launch white-label stablecoins or tokenized assets in a compliant manner. Stably allows organizations to issue stablecoins or native stablecoins for their communities or brands. It is worth mentioning that Stably not only serves banks and institutions in issuing compliant stablecoins, but also serves emerging blockchains (i.e. issuing decentralized stablecoins).

In 2023, Stably launched the US dollar stablecoin Stably USD on the Bitcoin network, with the symbol #USD. This is a BRC20 standard stablecoin created based on the Bitcoin Ordinals protocol. Each #USD is backed by US dollars at a 1:1 ratio in a collateral account managed by a US-regulated custodian to meet the interests of KYC/AML-verified token holders.

Quantoz Payments

Quantoz Payments is a payment technology company based in the Netherlands. Founded in 2022, it focuses on issuing and managing regulated electronic money tokens (EMTs) through blockchain technology. Quantoz Payments issues stablecoins (E-Money Tokens) pegged to fiat currencies and provides related payment and fund management services. Quantoz Payments holds an Electronic Money Institution (EMI) license issued by the Dutch Central Bank and is strictly regulated.

Quantoz Payments has issued two Euro stablecoins, EURD and EURQ, and one US dollar stablecoin, USDQ. It has cooperated with Bitfinex, Kraken, Tether, NPEX, Dusk, Fabric Ventures, Deloitte and other companies, involving stablecoin listing, investment support and technology integration, especially in the promotion of the European market.

Last November, Tether announced an investment in Quantoz Payments to launch a MiCAR-compliant stablecoin.

Stablecoin payment service

Stablecoin payment services are actually an important branch of the crypto payment business. Here we only organize some projects that focus on stablecoins and serve centralized entities.

Zero Hash

Zero Hash is a US company founded in 2017 and a B2B2C cryptocurrency and stablecoin infrastructure provider. Its core business is to provide enterprises with seamless solutions for connecting fiat currencies, cryptocurrencies and stablecoins through APIs and embedded technologies, including cross-border payments, commercial transactions, trading platforms, remittances, tokenization, wallets and on/off-ramps. It supports multiple stablecoins and multiple blockchains.

For example, Zero Hash provides payment rail support for Franklin Templeton's tokenized fund BENJI, helping it to achieve stablecoin settlement, and for WhatsApp's cross-border payment startup Felix's stablecoin international remittance process. In addition, Zero Hash also cooperates with payment companies such as MoonPay and Shift4.

In terms of financing, Zero Hash has received support from well-known investment institutions such as Point72 Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures and NYCA, with a total financing amount of over US$167 million.

BV

BVNK is a UK-based fintech company that provides enterprise-grade stablecoin payment infrastructure, helping businesses send and receive stablecoin payments, convert currencies and add crypto payments to the checkout process. It integrates payment, conversion and hosting functions through a single API, which is easy to embed into existing enterprise systems.

In 2024, BVNK launched its self-custodial infrastructure Layer1 for stablecoin payments. Both BVNK and Zero Hash offer API-driven stablecoin payments, but BVNK places more emphasis on global bank integration and self-custody, while Zero Hash focuses on the U.S. market and transaction support.

Last December, BVNK received $50 million in an all-equity Series B funding round led by Haun Ventures, with participation from Coinbase Ventures and existing investor Tiger Global.

Coinflow

Coinflow Labs is a US company focused on Web3 payment infrastructure. It provides instant settlement payment solutions for enterprises through its technology platform, especially in the field of stablecoin payments. Coinflow uses stablecoins as a settlement medium and provides instant fund payment products, allowing enterprises to use real-time payment channels (such as Visa Direct, RTP through clearing houses, and instant SEPA) to pay stablecoin funds to users' bank accounts instantly.

For example, Coinflow provides payment solutions for businesses in the Solana ecosystem, supporting users to purchase NFTs or tokens on the Solana chain using credit cards and instantly convert funds into USDC to pay merchants.

Coinflow has completed US$3.7 million in financing, with investors including Jump Crypto, Reciprocal Ventures, CMT Digital, etc.

Sphere

Sphere is a US-based crypto payment company founded in 2022. It calls itself "The Operating System for Stablecoins" and supports businesses to accept stablecoin payments and achieve seamless conversion between fiat currencies and stablecoins through APIs, no-code tools, and embedded widgets. Sphere focuses on underserved emerging markets (such as Latin America and Oceania).

Sphere has provided stablecoin payment support for projects such as Helium and Latitude.sh. In addition, Sphere has cooperated with non-crypto native merchants in countries such as Mexico, Chile and Brazil to solve the problem of high cross-border payment fees.

Last December, Sphere completed a $5 million financing round led by Coinbase Ventures and Kraken Ventures, bringing the total financing amount to $7.8 million.

3. Stablecoin liquidity management platform

As more and more institutions issue different types of stablecoins, stablecoins have serious problems such as liquidity fragmentation, fragmentation, and user experience. Therefore, stablecoin liquidity management will also become an important demand.

Perena 

Perena is a company focused on stablecoin infrastructure, committed to solving the problems of dispersed liquidity and inefficient capital in the stablecoin market through blockchain technology. Founder Anna Yuan was previously in charge of the stablecoin business at the Solana Foundation.

Perena has launched a multi-asset stablecoin swap protocol, Numéraire. Its core function is a multi-stablecoin liquidity pool, which further improves the capital efficiency and liquidity of the stablecoin market by integrating multiple stablecoins into an interchangeable and liquid token (such as USD*). USD* is essentially an LP token of a stablecoin pool (which can also be used as a stablecoin itself). The stablecoin pool consists of a basket of stablecoins, and the AMM pool contains stablecoins such as Tether, Circle and PayPal USD. This attempts to solve the problem of fragmentation of the stablecoin ecosystem and reduce the capital requirements for the issuance of new stablecoins.

Last November, Perena completed a Pre-Seed round of financing of approximately US$3 million. This round of financing was led by Borderless Capital, with participation from Binance Labs, MitonC Fund, Maelstrom Fund, Breed VC, ABCDE Labs and others.

Stablecoin issuance network

The issuance network of stablecoins can also be regarded as the infrastructure of stablecoins in a broad sense, but stablecoins usually choose to expand to multiple networks to accelerate adoption. From the perspective of the circulating market value of stablecoins, Ethereum and Tron are the main public chains for the issuance of stablecoins, followed by BSC, Solana, Arbitrum, Avalanche and Polygon.

Comparison of supply of mainstream stablecoins on various public chains, source: Visa Onchain Analytics Dashboard

Although Ethereum has a leading advantage in the TVL of stablecoins, it is not friendly to the issuance and trading of most stablecoins due to high transaction costs, and Ethereum's stablecoins are mostly used for DeFi interactions or income acquisition. If we look at it from the perspective of stablecoin value transfer (transfer), Tron, BNB Chain, Solana, and Polygon are used more. For example, about 96% of the transaction volume on the Tron network is related to stablecoins. In addition, by region, in addition to Ethereum, Avalanche and Stellar are more accepted in the United States and South America, and these two are also American concept projects.

In addition to these mainstream public networks, many networks focusing on stablecoin payments have also been born. Compared with ordinary public chains, these networks are not well-known and are more like the existence of underlying facilities, just like Ripple's global payment network RippleNet, which can connect banks, payment providers, digital asset exchanges and enterprises.

In 2023, Latin American cryptocurrency service provider Ripio launched a Layer 1 blockchain focused on Latin American payments in cooperation with SenseiNode, Num Finance, Cedalio and Buenbit. Ripio is an important crypto payment participant in Latin America, providing cryptocurrency transactions, digital wallets, payment solutions, stablecoin services and enterprise-level blockchain products. As of 2024, it has more than 10 million users in 8 countries including Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay, Colombia, Chile, the United States and Spain. The monthly transaction volume exceeds US$200 million.

In November 2024, Galaxy Digital, Paxos and other 7 project parties jointly launched the stablecoin network Global Dollar Network. Its goal is to promote the widespread use of stablecoins in global payments, transactions and financial services through collaboration and innovation, and break the inefficiency and high cost barriers of traditional finance. The core asset USDG is a regulated stablecoin issued by Paxos in Singapore.

In February 2025, Ondo Finance, a tokenized RWA asset platform, announced the launch of a new public chain, Ondo Chain, and obtained the participation of Franklin Templeton, Wellington Management, and WisdomTree in the ecosystem construction. The core goal is to accelerate the tokenization of real-world assets (RWA, such as US Treasury bonds, stocks, bonds, ETFs, etc.) through blockchain technology. Stablecoin payment is also one of its important use cases.

Keeta Network, a public payment chain that has just conducted TGE on the Base network, has also attracted the attention of many KOLs and communities because of the "value discovery" of its token price. Keeta Network calls itself "the best blockchain for hosting compliant stablecoins" and its goal is to bridge traditional finance (TradFi) and decentralized finance (DeFi), especially serving financial institutions. Keeta provides a built-in digital identity authentication mechanism and issues secure digital certificates through trusted KYC providers. These certificates can instantly verify user identities in the network while protecting privacy and meeting global financial regulatory requirements. It is expected to be launched on the test network at the end of March.

(The projects mentioned in this article are not intended as investment advice. Welcome to communicate with the author @jiayifan510)