Stablecoins as a Core Layer of Financial Infrastructure

Stablecoins have, in our view, become the most established and economically relevant application in digital assets. Their primary function is payments: efficient, borderless, and low-cost value transfer. By operating outside correspondent banking networks, stablecoins materially reduce settlement times to seconds and transaction costs to cents, enabling near real time business to business, peer to peer, and cross border payments.

Regulatory Framework Reshapes the Market

Regulation is now structurally reshaping the stablecoin market. In the U.S., the GENIUS Act provides a clear path for institutional adoption by defining payment stablecoins as fully reserved transactional instruments, backed one for one by cash and short dated U.S. Treasuries. This framework embeds stablecoins within regulated payment and treasury systems, while prohibiting issuers from distributing underlying reserve yield (3% from money-markets) directly to end users.

As a result, yield ceases to be a source of differentiation at the payment layer, and competition shifts away from balance sheet economics toward structure and distribution. We expect market share to migrate towards issuers that can pair compliant stablecoins with adjacent financial services, such as cash-management wrappers, integrated treasury dashboards, and credit solutions without breaching reserve and disclosure rules.

Transaction Volume Scale

Stablecoin transaction volumes have scaled rapidly and now operate at multi-trillion-dollar annualized levels. On a relative basis, they are comparable in magnitude to large global payment networks and exceed traditional remittance and digital payment rails. This comparison uses annualized transaction value to illustrate settlement scale and does not represent a direct comparison with consumer-facing payment volumes.

The trajectory reflects a rising baseline with intermittent spikes, consistent with a settlement network that is expanding in both scale and frequency of use. Taken together, this supports the view that stablecoins are no longer a niche crypto instrument, but a meaningful settlement mechanism within global payments activity.

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The performance and value of any financial product may fluctuate and may be subject to sudden and large movements that could result in a loss equal to or in excess of the amount invested. Past performance is not a guide to future performance, future returns are not guaranteed, and a loss of original capital may occur. The presented figures is based on estimates, assumptions, models and third-party data, any or all of which may prove to be inaccurate.