Stablecoins at a Crossroads: A Decade In, Still Waiting for Adoption

This is the catch with stablecoin adoption. They are everywhere in crypto and almost nowhere in daily life. This is precisely the gap Stable was designed to close. The missing layer between stablecoin innovation and mainstream adoption isn’t another token or protocol; it’s a blockchain built specifically for stablecoins that makes digital dollars work like dollars.

While users can trade, hedge, and arbitrage with stablecoins, most still don’t use them to buy a coffee. This gap exists not due to lack of demand, but rather insufficient infrastructure to support mainstream use cases.

Despite crypto’s market cycles, stablecoin adoption continues to grow steadily, since early 2025, total market capitalization rose from $200 billion to over $240 billion — a signal of organic, non-speculative demand.

Stablecoins have scaled faster than the rails, platforms and user experience meant to carry them in everyday payments, savings and commerce.

The infrastructure gap is the last major hurdle as the demand for global, programmable dollars is clear but the rails, platforms, and user experience to support this at scale remain underdeveloped. This is where Stable comes in — offering a blockchain specifically designed to support stablecoins at scale and in daily life.

When Tether (USDT) launched in 2014, few predicted it would become the backbone of crypto liquidity. What began as a niche tool for traders, issuing a few million dollars’ worth of tokens ballooned into a $110 billion giant by 2025, handling over $80 billion in daily volume across exchanges and blockchains.

Tether’s rise wasn’t just about scale, it rewired how crypto markets functioned. By 2017, USDT was embedded into every major exchange. By 2020, it was the most traded digital asset in the world , outpacing even Bitcoin in daily turnover.

As the concept matured, innovation followed:

• Collateral-backed stablecoins like DAI introduced decentralized governance.

• Algorithmic stablecoins like UST attempted and famously failed to maintain pegs without backing.

• Yield-bearing stablecoins (e.g., USDY, sUSD) added passive income features.

• Omnichain assets like USDT0 solved cross-chain fragmentation.

• Now, programmable dollar bills like GENIUS are pushing the boundaries of on-chain dollar issuance.

Studying this evolution, a clear pattern emerges: each innovation addressed specific crypto-native challenges — trading efficiency, DeFi composability, cross-chain liquidity but the fundamental infrastructure for mainstream adoption remained largely untouched. Even the most advanced stablecoins still required users to understand gas mechanics, and navigate complex multi-step processes.

This gap became the foundation for our work at Stable. The question wasn’t whether to build another stablecoin variant, but whether the underlying infrastructure itself needed reimagining.
What would a blockchain look like if designed specifically for how stablecoins should function in everyday commerce? Where fees are predictable and denominated in dollars. Where user interfaces feel familiar rather than intimidating. Where businesses can integrate without requiring blockchain expertise. That’s what we built at Stable.

By the Defi Boom of 2020–21, stablecoins had become the lifeblood of DeFi, users used stables to earn interest in lending protocols, DEX and borrowed stablecoin against their crypto-assets. Total supply ballooned from $5 billion to $150 billion in under two years.

Most of the stablecoin are held by CEX which essentially paved the way for stablecoin infras to grow around exchanges, not end-users.

transaction volume. They’ve become one of the cheapest, fastest ways to move money globally — sending $200 from the U.S. to Colombia now costs less than $0.01.

Let’s see now where this supply is concentrated.

A recent study found that out of $27.6 trillion in stablecoin transfer volume, only 7–8% were organic payments; the rest 93% came from trading bots, arbitrage and exchange activity.

Visa’s breakdown of non-trading volumes shows stablecoins today are mostly used for:

• ~3% tokenized asset settlement

• ~5% actual payments (split between P2P remittances, business payments, and merchant transactions)

In short, over 90% of stablecoin activity remains concentrated in trading and speculation rather than real-world utility applications.

This shows how early we are in stablecoin adoption beyond crypto-native venues, now, let’s look a bit more into the these volume venues:

Today, over 90% of stablecoin activity is tied to trading either on centralized exchanges (CEXs) like Binance and OKX or decentralized platforms like Uniswap and Raydium.

DeFi’s share of stablecoin volume remains relatively small (~5–8%), but it powers critical financial primitives like lending, leveraged trading, and on-chain yield strategies, as decentralized platforms mature, their role will grow, but this transition remains slow with some outliers like Hyperliquid and Polymarket.

While stablecoin infrastructure has demonstrated the ability to support high-end trading systems, leveraging it for payment rails involves distinct integration challenges and operational requirements that are still being addressed.

In cross-border remittances and corporate payments, stablecoins are beginning to show real-world traction. Especially in emerging markets like Nigeria, where USD stablecoins now account for 43% of all recorded on-chain transactions, they’ve overtaken traditional remittance rails like Hawala.

Stablecoins cut remittance costs from up to 5% down to <0.01%, bypassing banks, brokers, and middlemen.

Yet, despite this success in specific corridors, cross-border stablecoin payments still account for a small share of overall volume, much of it is limited to high-value P2P transfers or business payments, not everyday remittances.

In countries plagued by inflation, capital controls, or economic instability, think Lebanon, Venezuela and Argentina — stablecoins have become an informal banking tool, locals there use USDT to protect savings from currency collapse, often holding them for weeks or months.

For many, stablecoins act as a dollar savings account in their pocket, with optional access to low-risk DeFi yields.

In this way, stablecoins such as USDT are helping in financial survival across the globe, while niche today, this market is critical for understanding stablecoins’ real-world utility beyond speculation.

Stablecoins sit at the edge of a $200 trillion+ global payments market and yet capture less than 0.5% of that flow today, they have barely penetrated everyday commerce, outside a handful of gaming sites, crypto-native services, and some online merchants, retail use remains negligible.

The reasons are obvious: clunky wallets, bad UX, unpredictable fees, very few integrations with traditional payment rails and a lack of merchant-ready infrastructure.

This is the glaring gap in stablecoin adoption and needs an infrastructure which can unlock this market for USDT. This can be done by integrating custom wallets, seamless on/off ramps, and stablecoin-backed debit/credit card rails, all of which are developed by Stable. We are building the infrastructure to bridge this gap, combining intuitive interfaces with direct traditional payment integration and instant settlement capabilities.

The top blockchain by stablecoin activity currently processes over 40% of global stablecoin transfer volume, a dominance driven largely by first-mover advantage, low fees, and strong retail adoption in emerging markets. This chain has become the default highway for stablecoin circulation, especially USDT, benefiting from powerful network effects.

Yet, despite its transactional dominance, the ecosystem has key limitations. It lacks mature DeFi infrastructure, developer mindshare, and institutional-grade tooling. Wallet UX remains clunky for average users, and integration with traditional financial rails is limited. These shortcomings make it difficult to onboard businesses, fintechs, and payment providers who demand transparency, compliance features, and robust APIs.

Moreover, while such chains capture high retail volumes, it struggles to support more complex financial operations — such as automated settlements, programmable payments, or multi-asset flows that institutions and platforms increasingly require. This technical ceiling slows USDT’s evolution from a crypto-native asset to a true global payments primitive.

To understand why USDT hasn’t yet become a frictionless digital dollar for the world, we need to explore the deeper bottlenecks. Not in demand, but in infrastructure.

1. UX hurdles — Stablecoins promise seamless global payments, but for most users, the experience feels anything but seamless. Setting up wallets, safeguarding seed phrases, handling gas fees isn’t how global money moves.

Sending stablecoins should feel as familiar as texting on whatsapp or sending a photo on snapchat but instead, it feels like operating a command-line tool. Telegram’s wallet app is the project to look out for which made sending payments through chats super easy and intuitive.

Most stablecoin platforms were architected around blockchain primitives rather than payment primitives. Users shouldn’t need to understand the difference between L1 and L2, or why their transaction failed, Stable is the one doing this.

Until wallets onboard users with phone or email, abstract away keys, and enable direct name-to-name transfers such as Stable Names, stablecoins will remain the domain of crypto-natives.

2. Transaction Fee Complexity — Stablecoins are often pitched as “low-fee” and in raw numbers, that’s true, but users often face unpredictable, volatile transaction fees. Ethereum’s gas costs fluctuate wildly; even low-cost chains still require holding volatile native tokens just to pay for transactions.

For institutions, the problem doubles: holding volatile native tokens for gas complicates both treasury management and accounting, turning simple transactions into hedgeable risk positions.

Stable addresses this by using USDT as the native gas token, creating predictable, dollar-denominated fees. Users can pay transaction costs directly from their stablecoin balances without needing to acquire and manage separate volatile tokens. This approach simplifies treasury management for businesses and eliminates the complexity of hedging gas token price risk.

3. Integration Gaps — There are minimal integrations for stablecoin beyond trading and defi platforms, converting between fiat and stablecoins still often requires crypto exchanges or specialized on/off ramps, merchants lack infrastructure to accept crypto.

Businesses face difficulties integrating blockchain technology with existing systems, and lack of privacy solutions needed to comply with regulations.

Stable’s Native Wallet integrates directly with traditional payment rails, allowing users to spend stablecoins via cards or fiat gateways without intermediaries. On the merchant side, this wallet enables direct USDT acceptance with built-in settlement tools, no middlemen, no hidden fees.

More such integration infrastructure is needed.

4. Institutional Usage — Global institutions don’t move billions on public blockchains and it’s not because they aren’t interested, it’s because blockchains lack predictable transaction priority, offer no private settlement layers, and provide zero native compliance tools.

Institutions need guaranteed execution, regulatory clarity, and security, none of which come standard with existing stablecoin platforms.

Stable offers dedicated institutional blockspace, confidential settlement layers, and compliance modules (KYC/AML) inbuilt natively in the chain. Whether batching thousands of micro-transactions or settling $10M block trades, gives institutions the reliability and compliance hooks they need — without cobbled-together solutions.

5. MEV & Fragmentation Risks — A Hidden Tax on Stablecoin Usage — Even on decentralized exchanges (DEXs), stable swaps, which now account for 31.5% of all DEX volume, are far from efficient, they suffer from over $8.1 billion in hidden slippage (>0.1%) and make up 54% of sandwiched trades, acting as an invisible fee on users.

Add liquidity fragmentation across dozens of chains, and users face inefficient swaps, risky bridges, and unpredictable outcomes. By using USDT as the native token and incorporating LayerZero-based USDT0 for cross-chain compatibility, Stable seeks to minimize the complex bridging operations that often create MEV opportunities and user risk.

Stable is building the rails that make stablecoins practical for everyday use. This evolution moves stablecoins from niche adoption to real-world payments and enterprise use — a step toward unlocking their full potential in the global economy.

The last five years of stablecoins belonged to traders, arbitrageurs, and DeFi power users. They turned stablecoins into the backbone of crypto liquidity, but the next five won’t be about speculation; they’ll be about integration into global commerce.

The real opportunity now lies with builders who can weave stablecoins into everyday payments, with institutions ready to bring them into regulated finance, and with platforms solving for scale, compliance, and seamless user experience. Stable is already building towards this transformation.

The world’s biggest payment networks, fintech giants, banks, and even governments have seen the numbers and are moving fast, the stablecoin era isn’t some future event — it’s already here.

Happy global payment rails to each and every one of you readers, in advance.

Website: https://stable.xyz

X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/stable

Discord: https://discord.gg/stablexyz

Telegram: https://t.me/stableannouncements

Partnership Form: https://forms.gle/LLPfKJbRiuqc7zeE8

This is the catch with stablecoin adoption. They are everywhere in crypto and almost nowhere in daily life. This is precisely the gap Stable was designed to close. The missing layer between stablecoin innovation and mainstream adoption isn’t another token or protocol; it’s a blockchain built specifically for stablecoins that makes digital dollars work like dollars.

While users can trade, hedge, and arbitrage with stablecoins, most still don’t use them to buy a coffee. This gap exists not due to lack of demand, but rather insufficient infrastructure to support mainstream use cases.

Despite crypto’s market cycles, stablecoin adoption continues to grow steadily, since early 2025, total market capitalization rose from $200 billion to over $240 billion — a signal of organic, non-speculative demand.

Stablecoins have scaled faster than the rails, platforms and user experience meant to carry them in everyday payments, savings and commerce.

The infrastructure gap is the last major hurdle as the demand for global, programmable dollars is clear but the rails, platforms, and user experience to support this at scale remain underdeveloped. This is where Stable comes in — offering a blockchain specifically designed to support stablecoins at scale and in daily life.

When Tether (USDT) launched in 2014, few predicted it would become the backbone of crypto liquidity. What began as a niche tool for traders, issuing a few million dollars’ worth of tokens ballooned into a $110 billion giant by 2025, handling over $80 billion in daily volume across exchanges and blockchains.

Tether’s rise wasn’t just about scale, it rewired how crypto markets functioned. By 2017, USDT was embedded into every major exchange. By 2020, it was the most traded digital asset in the world , outpacing even Bitcoin in daily turnover.

As the concept matured, innovation followed:

• Collateral-backed stablecoins like DAI introduced decentralized governance.

• Algorithmic stablecoins like UST attempted and famously failed to maintain pegs without backing.

• Yield-bearing stablecoins (e.g., USDY, sUSD) added passive income features.

• Omnichain assets like USDT0 solved cross-chain fragmentation.

• Now, programmable dollar bills like GENIUS are pushing the boundaries of on-chain dollar issuance.

Studying this evolution, a clear pattern emerges: each innovation addressed specific crypto-native challenges — trading efficiency, DeFi composability, cross-chain liquidity but the fundamental infrastructure for mainstream adoption remained largely untouched. Even the most advanced stablecoins still required users to understand gas mechanics, and navigate complex multi-step processes.

This gap became the foundation for our work at Stable. The question wasn’t whether to build another stablecoin variant, but whether the underlying infrastructure itself needed reimagining.
What would a blockchain look like if designed specifically for how stablecoins should function in everyday commerce? Where fees are predictable and denominated in dollars. Where user interfaces feel familiar rather than intimidating. Where businesses can integrate without requiring blockchain expertise. That’s what we built at Stable.

By the Defi Boom of 2020–21, stablecoins had become the lifeblood of DeFi, users used stables to earn interest in lending protocols, DEX and borrowed stablecoin against their crypto-assets. Total supply ballooned from $5 billion to $150 billion in under two years.

Most of the stablecoin are held by CEX which essentially paved the way for stablecoin infras to grow around exchanges, not end-users.

transaction volume. They’ve become one of the cheapest, fastest ways to move money globally — sending $200 from the U.S. to Colombia now costs less than $0.01.

Let’s see now where this supply is concentrated.

A recent study found that out of $27.6 trillion in stablecoin transfer volume, only 7–8% were organic payments; the rest 93% came from trading bots, arbitrage and exchange activity.

Visa’s breakdown of non-trading volumes shows stablecoins today are mostly used for:

• ~3% tokenized asset settlement

• ~5% actual payments (split between P2P remittances, business payments, and merchant transactions)

In short, over 90% of stablecoin activity remains concentrated in trading and speculation rather than real-world utility applications.

This shows how early we are in stablecoin adoption beyond crypto-native venues, now, let’s look a bit more into the these volume venues:

Today, over 90% of stablecoin activity is tied to trading either on centralized exchanges (CEXs) like Binance and OKX or decentralized platforms like Uniswap and Raydium.

DeFi’s share of stablecoin volume remains relatively small (~5–8%), but it powers critical financial primitives like lending, leveraged trading, and on-chain yield strategies, as decentralized platforms mature, their role will grow, but this transition remains slow with some outliers like Hyperliquid and Polymarket.

While stablecoin infrastructure has demonstrated the ability to support high-end trading systems, leveraging it for payment rails involves distinct integration challenges and operational requirements that are still being addressed.

In cross-border remittances and corporate payments, stablecoins are beginning to show real-world traction. Especially in emerging markets like Nigeria, where USD stablecoins now account for 43% of all recorded on-chain transactions, they’ve overtaken traditional remittance rails like Hawala.

Stablecoins cut remittance costs from up to 5% down to <0.01%, bypassing banks, brokers, and middlemen.

Yet, despite this success in specific corridors, cross-border stablecoin payments still account for a small share of overall volume, much of it is limited to high-value P2P transfers or business payments, not everyday remittances.

In countries plagued by inflation, capital controls, or economic instability, think Lebanon, Venezuela and Argentina — stablecoins have become an informal banking tool, locals there use USDT to protect savings from currency collapse, often holding them for weeks or months.

For many, stablecoins act as a dollar savings account in their pocket, with optional access to low-risk DeFi yields.

In this way, stablecoins such as USDT are helping in financial survival across the globe, while niche today, this market is critical for understanding stablecoins’ real-world utility beyond speculation.

Stablecoins sit at the edge of a $200 trillion+ global payments market and yet capture less than 0.5% of that flow today, they have barely penetrated everyday commerce, outside a handful of gaming sites, crypto-native services, and some online merchants, retail use remains negligible.

The reasons are obvious: clunky wallets, bad UX, unpredictable fees, very few integrations with traditional payment rails and a lack of merchant-ready infrastructure.

This is the glaring gap in stablecoin adoption and needs an infrastructure which can unlock this market for USDT. This can be done by integrating custom wallets, seamless on/off ramps, and stablecoin-backed debit/credit card rails, all of which are developed by Stable. We are building the infrastructure to bridge this gap, combining intuitive interfaces with direct traditional payment integration and instant settlement capabilities.

The top blockchain by stablecoin activity currently processes over 40% of global stablecoin transfer volume, a dominance driven largely by first-mover advantage, low fees, and strong retail adoption in emerging markets. This chain has become the default highway for stablecoin circulation, especially USDT, benefiting from powerful network effects.

Yet, despite its transactional dominance, the ecosystem has key limitations. It lacks mature DeFi infrastructure, developer mindshare, and institutional-grade tooling. Wallet UX remains clunky for average users, and integration with traditional financial rails is limited. These shortcomings make it difficult to onboard businesses, fintechs, and payment providers who demand transparency, compliance features, and robust APIs.

Moreover, while such chains capture high retail volumes, it struggles to support more complex financial operations — such as automated settlements, programmable payments, or multi-asset flows that institutions and platforms increasingly require. This technical ceiling slows USDT’s evolution from a crypto-native asset to a true global payments primitive.

To understand why USDT hasn’t yet become a frictionless digital dollar for the world, we need to explore the deeper bottlenecks. Not in demand, but in infrastructure.

1. UX hurdles — Stablecoins promise seamless global payments, but for most users, the experience feels anything but seamless. Setting up wallets, safeguarding seed phrases, handling gas fees isn’t how global money moves.

Sending stablecoins should feel as familiar as texting on whatsapp or sending a photo on snapchat but instead, it feels like operating a command-line tool. Telegram’s wallet app is the project to look out for which made sending payments through chats super easy and intuitive.

Most stablecoin platforms were architected around blockchain primitives rather than payment primitives. Users shouldn’t need to understand the difference between L1 and L2, or why their transaction failed, Stable is the one doing this.

Until wallets onboard users with phone or email, abstract away keys, and enable direct name-to-name transfers such as Stable Names, stablecoins will remain the domain of crypto-natives.

2. Transaction Fee Complexity — Stablecoins are often pitched as “low-fee” and in raw numbers, that’s true, but users often face unpredictable, volatile transaction fees. Ethereum’s gas costs fluctuate wildly; even low-cost chains still require holding volatile native tokens just to pay for transactions.

For institutions, the problem doubles: holding volatile native tokens for gas complicates both treasury management and accounting, turning simple transactions into hedgeable risk positions.

Stable addresses this by using USDT as the native gas token, creating predictable, dollar-denominated fees. Users can pay transaction costs directly from their stablecoin balances without needing to acquire and manage separate volatile tokens. This approach simplifies treasury management for businesses and eliminates the complexity of hedging gas token price risk.

3. Integration Gaps — There are minimal integrations for stablecoin beyond trading and defi platforms, converting between fiat and stablecoins still often requires crypto exchanges or specialized on/off ramps, merchants lack infrastructure to accept crypto.

Businesses face difficulties integrating blockchain technology with existing systems, and lack of privacy solutions needed to comply with regulations.

Stable’s Native Wallet integrates directly with traditional payment rails, allowing users to spend stablecoins via cards or fiat gateways without intermediaries. On the merchant side, this wallet enables direct USDT acceptance with built-in settlement tools, no middlemen, no hidden fees.

More such integration infrastructure is needed.

4. Institutional Usage — Global institutions don’t move billions on public blockchains and it’s not because they aren’t interested, it’s because blockchains lack predictable transaction priority, offer no private settlement layers, and provide zero native compliance tools.

Institutions need guaranteed execution, regulatory clarity, and security, none of which come standard with existing stablecoin platforms.

Stable offers dedicated institutional blockspace, confidential settlement layers, and compliance modules (KYC/AML) inbuilt natively in the chain. Whether batching thousands of micro-transactions or settling $10M block trades, gives institutions the reliability and compliance hooks they need — without cobbled-together solutions.

5. MEV & Fragmentation Risks — A Hidden Tax on Stablecoin Usage — Even on decentralized exchanges (DEXs), stable swaps, which now account for 31.5% of all DEX volume, are far from efficient, they suffer from over $8.1 billion in hidden slippage (>0.1%) and make up 54% of sandwiched trades, acting as an invisible fee on users.

Add liquidity fragmentation across dozens of chains, and users face inefficient swaps, risky bridges, and unpredictable outcomes. By using USDT as the native token and incorporating LayerZero-based USDT0 for cross-chain compatibility, Stable seeks to minimize the complex bridging operations that often create MEV opportunities and user risk.

Stable is building the rails that make stablecoins practical for everyday use. This evolution moves stablecoins from niche adoption to real-world payments and enterprise use — a step toward unlocking their full potential in the global economy.

The last five years of stablecoins belonged to traders, arbitrageurs, and DeFi power users. They turned stablecoins into the backbone of crypto liquidity, but the next five won’t be about speculation; they’ll be about integration into global commerce.

The real opportunity now lies with builders who can weave stablecoins into everyday payments, with institutions ready to bring them into regulated finance, and with platforms solving for scale, compliance, and seamless user experience. Stable is already building towards this transformation.

The world’s biggest payment networks, fintech giants, banks, and even governments have seen the numbers and are moving fast, the stablecoin era isn’t some future event — it’s already here.

Happy global payment rails to each and every one of you readers, in advance.

Website: https://stable.xyz

X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/stable

Discord: https://discord.gg/stablexyz

Telegram: https://t.me/stableannouncements

Partnership Form: https://forms.gle/LLPfKJbRiuqc7zeE8