Chainfeeds Summary:
Stablecoins are beginning to shed their single label as crypto assets and evolve into fundamental tools serving real-world business flows.
Article source:
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/dR2TL_yENS0wIP5kdQSfFQ
Article Author:
Cobo
Opinion:
Cobo: 2025 was a watershed year for stablecoin development. In that year, stablecoins completely shed their speculative, subsidiary role in the crypto market and transformed into the underlying clearing architecture of the global financial system. Supply-side momentum expanded at a non-linear pace: the global stablecoin market capitalization surpassed $300 billion for the first time, a net increase of nearly $100 billion from $205 billion at the beginning of the year. This growth rate not only exceeded that of 2024 but also reversed the downward trend of 2023. The time required to add $100 billion in supply was shortened from 82 months to just 6 months, resulting in a sharp increase in growth rate. Simultaneously, sovereign credit anchoring further solidified its ballast position: stablecoin issuers became among the top 20 holders of US Treasury bonds, with Tether (USDT) holding over $120 billion in US Treasury bonds, even surpassing sovereign nations like Germany. Changes in regulatory expectations are reshaping the market narrative. Substantial progress on legislation such as the GENIUS Act provides stronger certainty for the growth of stablecoins. Institutions like Citigroup, Standard Chartered, and JPMorgan Chase have begun to give long-term forecasts of a trillion-dollar market size: Citigroup has raised its baseline forecast for 2030 to $1.9 trillion, Standard Chartered expects it to reach $2 trillion by 2028, and JPMorgan Chase predicts a short-term increase to $500-750 billion. If the explosive growth in scale is the visible growth, then the key beneath the surface is the deconstruction of the real-world usage structure of stablecoins. Google Trends shows a continuous rise in search volume for "stablecoins," indicating that cognitive costs are decreasing and stablecoins are beginning to enter a more routine application query stage. A more robust metric comes from monthly active unique addresses (MAW): the number of monthly active stablecoin wallets has increased approximately 16 times over the past four years, rising to over 50 million, and has maintained an upward trend even during multiple market corrections. Artemis data indicates that this metric requires addresses to engage in genuine on-chain activity (transfers, interactions, or settlements), making it less susceptible to high-frequency trading or leveraged cycles. Therefore, it better reflects the expansion of genuine users compared to transaction volume. To further differentiate between network throughput and genuine adoption, a three-layer filtering model can be used to cleanse the approximately $4 trillion in monthly nominal transaction volume: the first layer, nominal transaction volume, cannot directly represent adoption; research shows that over 90% is not retail payments. The second layer, adjusted transaction volume, after removing exchange cycles, arbitrage/MEV, and contract-related transactions, mostly falls between $700 billion and $1.5 trillion per month, better reflecting the financialization characteristics of corporate treasuries, institutional settlements, and financial asset transfers. The third layer focuses on identifiable payments, including cross-border B2B, internal platform clearing, and crypto card spending, which is closest to the real economy. On the consumer side, retail payments are still in their early stages, but crypto cards (U cards) have become a key entry point for stablecoins into the real world. On-chain identifiable data shows that the transaction volume related to crypto cards grew from an average of approximately $100 million per month at the beginning of 2023 to over $1.5 billion per month at the end of 2025, representing a compound annual growth rate of approximately 106%, with an annualized scale exceeding $18 billion. This volume is approaching that of P2P stablecoin transfers during the same period (approximately $19 billion), although the latter's growth rate was only about 5%. This reveals a structural change: new demand is shifting from on-chain transfers to real-world consumption entry points. Meanwhile, there is a discrepancy between merchant feedback and on-chain data. A PayPal survey of 620 payment decision-makers showed that nearly 90% of merchants had received inquiries from customers about crypto payments, and approximately 40% already accepted cryptocurrency at checkout; among these early adopters, crypto payments accounted for more than a quarter of sales, and most merchants indicated that this share was still growing. This seamless experience of "encryption at the front end and fiat currency settlement through the card network at the back end" highlights the value of U Card as an invisible intermediary: a large amount of consumption is understood as stablecoin payment on the user side, but the settlement path can still be completed by embedding the Visa/Mastercard system, thus allowing stablecoin to begin to assume the function of real payment without changing the merchant network.
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