Galaxy predicts stablecoins will overtake ACH transaction volume in 2026

cointelegraphPublished on 2025-12-19Last updated on 2025-12-19

Abstract

Galaxy Research forecasts that stablecoins will surpass the U.S. Automated Clearing House (ACH) system in transaction volume by 2026, driven by regulatory clarity and increasing adoption. Stablecoins already exceed major credit card networks like Visa and currently process about half of ACH volumes. The stablecoin market, valued at around $309 billion, is dominated by USDT and USDC, but new entrants like Western Union, Sony Bank, and SoFi are launching their own dollar-pegged stablecoins. Galaxy also predicts Bitcoin could reach $250,000 by late 2027, with potential new all-time highs in 2026. The report highlights the GENIUS Act’s expected implementation in early 2026 as a key growth catalyst.

Stablecoins could process more transaction volume than the US Automated Clearing House system in 2026, as regulatory clarity and rising adoption expand their usage, according to a new forecast.

Galaxy Research, the research arm of digital asset company Galaxy Digital, pointed to existing transaction data and regulatory developments to support its prediction, noting that “stablecoin transactions already eclipse major credit card networks such as Visa and now process roughly half the transaction volume of the automated clearing house (ACH) system.”

Thad Pinakiewicz, vice president of research, said stablecoin supply has continued to grow at a 30%–40% compound annual growth rate, with transaction volumes rising alongside issuance. Galaxy also cited the expected implementation of definitions under the GENIUS Act in early 2026 as a factor supporting further growth in stablecoin usage.

*Stablecoin volume vs. other financial systems. Source:* *Galaxy Digital*

The paper also brings predictions for the price of Bitcoin (BTC), writing that it could reach $250,000 by the end of 2027. According to Galaxy Research head of firmwide research Alex Thorn, 2026 is “too chaotic to predict, though Bitcoin making new all-time highs in 2026 is still possible.”

Related: Coinbase ‘cautiously optimistic’ on 2026 as crypto nears institutional inflection point

Dollar-pegged stablecoin market expands

According to data from DefiLlama, the stablecoin market cap currently stands at about $309 billion. While Tether’s USDt (USDT) and Circle’s USDC (USDC) continue to dominate, a growing number of financial institutions and payments companies have entered the stablecoins race in recent months.

*Stablecoin market cap. Source:* *DefiLlama*

In October, Western Union announced plans to launch its own US dollar-pegged stablecoin, the US Dollar Payment Token, which will be built on the Solana blockchain and issued by Anchorage Digital Bank as part of a broader digital asset settlement network.

Sony Bank was reported to be preparing a US dollar-pegged stablecoin for use across Sony’s US ecosystem, including PlayStation games, subscriptions and anime content. The stablecoin is expected to launch in 2026.

On Thursday, SoFi Technologies launched SoFiUSD, a fully reserved US dollar stablecoin issued by its banking subsidiary, SoFi Bank. The company said the token will debut on Ethereum and is designed to support low-cost settlement for banks, fintechs and enterprise platforms.

Galaxy Research associate Jianing Wu said she expects TradFi-partnered stablecoins will consolidate in 2026, as users and merchants are unlikely to adopt a long list of digital dollars and will instead favor one or two with the “broadest acceptance.”

Magazine: Quantum attacking Bitcoin would be a waste of time: Kevin O’Leary

Trending Cryptos

CitreaCTR

wrapped stUSDTWSTUSDT

Velodrome FinanceVELODROME

Former CFTC Chairman, Circle President Tarbert: Preaching Long-Termism While Cashing Out $30 Million Himself

Former CFTC Chairman and Circle President Heath Tarbert has consistently advocated for a long-term vision in public, urging patience from investors as Circle’s stock price has fallen significantly from its peak. However, it has been revealed that since Circle’s IPO, Tarbert has continuously sold his CRCL shares through pre-arranged trading plans, cashing out approximately $30 million, without making any public market purchases. This contrast between his public messaging and personal actions has drawn criticism. Tarbert joined Circle in July 2023 as Chief Legal Officer, leveraging his regulatory experience to help guide the company through its IPO and expansion. Despite promoting stablecoins as long-term infrastructure, he established a 10b5-1 trading plan just before Circle went public, leading to substantial stock sales over the following year. In March 2026, he initiated another plan to sell more shares. His career trajectory highlights a pattern of moving between high-level regulatory roles and influential positions in the financial sector. After resigning as CFTC Chairman in early 2021, he joined Citadel Securities as Chief Legal Officer just 27 days later, during a period of intense regulatory scrutiny for the firm. He later joined Circle, aiding its efforts to navigate regulatory challenges for its public listing. While Tarbert's expertise in policy and compliance is valuable to companies like Circle, his actions—advocating long-term confidence while personally divesting—raise questions about the alignment between his public statements and his private financial decisions, leaving investors who followed his advice to bear the market risks.

marsbit17m ago

Former CFTC Chairman, Circle President Tarbert: Preaching Long-Termism While Cashing Out $30 Million Himself

marsbit17m ago

Gate Research Institute: The 'Wall Street-ization' Wave of Crypto Financial Products – Competition or Integration?

The article titled "Gate Research Institute: Are Crypto Financial Products Sparking a 'Wall Street' Wave—Competition or Convergence?" explores the evolving relationship between the crypto ecosystem and traditional finance (TradFi). The piece begins by reflecting on Bitcoin's original 2009 vision of decentralization, disintermediation, and moving away from banks. It then contrasts this with the 2024 landscape, where key crypto assets like Bitcoin are increasingly held through Wall Street products like ETFs issued by giants like BlackRock. The article questions whether this signifies that TradFi is systematically taking over the rights to issue, price, custody, and distribute crypto financial assets. The core argument is that this is not a zero-sum takeover but rather a bidirectional convergence where each side addresses the other's weaknesses. Crypto offers 24/7 global markets, programmable settlement, and open access but lacks compliant channels, institutional-grade custody, deep fiat liquidity, and mainstream distribution. TradFi possesses these but is constrained by legacy systems, limited operating hours, and slow settlement. Two primary convergence paths are highlighted: * **Path A (CEX to TradFi):** Exemplified by Gate, which has progressed from offering tokenized stocks and CFDs to providing direct, real stock trading (US, Hong Kong, South Korea) within its platform, using USDT. * **Path B (TradFi to Crypto):** Exemplified by Robinhood, which has integrated crypto trading, acquired exchanges like Bitstamp, and is moving traditional assets like stocks onto the blockchain via tokenization and its own Layer 2. Both paths are ultimately competing to become the next-generation, unified financial account—a "super account" where users can seamlessly trade cryptocurrencies, stocks, ETFs, RWA (Real World Assets), and tokenized treasury products in one interface. The growth of RWA and tokenized treasuries (e.g., BlackRock's BUIDL) is presented as the asset-layer fusion, providing stable, yield-bearing assets on-chain and acting as a bridge between the two worlds. In conclusion, the "Wall Street-ization" of crypto is framed as a mutual transformation. Decentralized ideals persist in the protocol layer, while at the application layer, a more efficient, global, and accessible unified capital market is emerging from this convergence. The future competition lies not between crypto exchanges and stockbrokers, but between platforms vying to offer the most comprehensive asset coverage, liquidity, and user experience within a single account.

marsbit21m ago

Gate Research Institute: The 'Wall Street-ization' Wave of Crypto Financial Products – Competition or Integration?

marsbit21m ago

S&P Dow Jones and Pantera Launch Crypto Index, Excluding Bitcoin for "Not Making Money"

S&P Dow Jones Indices and Pantera Capital have launched the S&P Pantera Digital Asset Index, a benchmark that excludes Bitcoin and meme coins like XRP. The index adopts a fundamental screening framework inspired by the S&P 500, requiring constituent tokens to demonstrate positive protocol revenue over multiple quarters, verified by on-chain data, and a clear mechanism for distributing value to token holders. This "financial viability" test is cited as the reason for Bitcoin's exclusion, as it does not generate protocol revenue. The index currently includes 18 assets, with Ethereum (ETH), BNB, Solana (SOL), Tron (TRX), and Hyperliquid (HYPE) as its top five holdings. While initially serving as a benchmark, discussions are underway with asset managers to develop associated ETFs and investment products. Pantera argues the index addresses an institutional product gap, offering a way to evaluate crypto assets based on utility and earnings rather than just market capitalization.

marsbit22m ago

S&P Dow Jones and Pantera Launch Crypto Index, Excluding Bitcoin for "Not Making Money"

marsbit22m ago

Claude's Major New Feature: Screen Recording + Voice, Distilling Your Skills into AI Tasks in One Click

Claude has introduced a major new feature called "Record a Skill," available for Pro, Max, and Team users. This function, found in the Claude desktop app's CoWork menu, allows users to create reusable AI skills simply by recording their screen and providing voice narration while performing a task. Claude then automatically analyzes the recording and generates a functional Skill. A hands-on test confirmed the feature works seamlessly. Users start recording via the Skills manager, perform their workflow while verbally explaining the steps and logic, and avoid including sensitive information. After recording, Claude processes the content and creates the Skill, which can be saved and later invoked with a slash command (/). This eliminates the need for manual adjustments or writing complex instruction files. The innovation goes beyond mere efficiency. Previously, creating a Skill required writing a detailed SKILL.md file in Markdown—a significant barrier for non-technical users. "Record a Skill" bypasses this by directly capturing both actions and the implicit reasoning shared in the narration. This lowers the barrier to knowledge transfer and automation, addressing a core challenge in corporate knowledge management: the difficulty of getting experts to write and maintain documentation. However, the feature also highlights a shift in the nature of work. A case study from March 2026 showed a freelancer whose five-year client relationship was effectively replaced by a hand-coded Claude Skill automating their content workflow. With the even lower barrier of screen recording, the ability to distill personal expertise into automatable skills accelerates this trend. The "moat" for work is moving from simply knowing how to do a task to mastering tasks that are difficult or impossible to automate.

marsbit25m ago

Claude's Major New Feature: Screen Recording + Voice, Distilling Your Skills into AI Tasks in One Click

marsbit25m ago

Feeding AI "Noise" Can Also Boost Scores, This Work Enables Positive Transfer with Noise

Feeding "Noise" to AI Can Improve Performance: A Method Enables Positive Transfer from Noise This work, Semi-Supervised Noise Adaptation (SSNA), introduces a Noise Adaptation Framework (NAF) that challenges traditional transfer learning. Instead of requiring a labeled source domain of real data (e.g., images, text), NAF uses randomly generated Gaussian noise as the source. For a target task with C classes, it constructs C noise clusters by sampling from Gaussian distributions. Although this synthetic noise contains no semantic meaning, NAF trains it to form a discriminative class structure in a shared representation space—clustering same-class noise and separating different classes. The key is aligning this learned structure from the noise domain to the real, sparsely labeled target domain. A small number of target labels are still essential to establish the correspondence between noise clusters and actual classes. The training objective combines: 1) supervised loss on the few labeled target samples, 2) classification loss for the noise to build its structure, and 3) a distribution alignment loss (using Negative Domain Similarity) to minimize the gap between the noise and target domains in the shared space. Experiments show significant gains in few-label settings. With just 4 labels per class, NAF with a ResNet-18 backbone improves accuracy over a standard supervised baseline (ERM) by +12.35% on CIFAR-10, +7.61% on CIFAR-100, +4.38% on DTD-47, and +2.74% on Caltech-101. It also benefits fine-grained datasets and scales to ImageNet-1K (with 100 labels/class) and text classification (AG News). NAF can be integrated into existing semi-supervised methods like FixMatch for further gains. Ablation studies confirm the transferred benefit comes from the discriminative structure of the noise, not randomness itself. Collapsing all noise into a single point causes negative transfer, while increasing separation between noise cluster centers improves performance. The amount of noise per class is less critical once a basic structure forms. In conclusion, this work demonstrates that for positive transfer, the semantic content of source data may not be necessary. What can be effectively transferred is the *organizational structure* of categories within a representation space. This offers a promising alternative for scenarios where real source data is unavailable due to privacy, copyright, or procurement constraints.

marsbit27m ago

Feeding AI "Noise" Can Also Boost Scores, This Work Enables Positive Transfer with Noise

marsbit27m ago

Trading

Spot

Hot Articles

How to Buy ACH

Welcome to HTX.com! We've made purchasing Alchemy Pay (ACH) simple and convenient. Follow our step-by-step guide to embark on your crypto journey.Step 1: Create Your HTX AccountUse your email or phone number to sign up for a free account on HTX. Experience a hassle-free registration journey and unlock all features.Get My AccountStep 2: Go to Buy Crypto and Choose Your Payment MethodCredit/Debit Card: Use your Visa or Mastercard to buy Alchemy Pay (ACH) instantly.Balance: Use funds from your HTX account balance to trade seamlessly.Third Parties: We've added popular payment methods such as Google Pay and Apple Pay to enhance convenience.P2P: Trade directly with other users on HTX.Over-the-Counter (OTC): We offer tailor-made services and competitive exchange rates for traders.Step 3: Store Your Alchemy Pay (ACH)After purchasing your Alchemy Pay (ACH), store it in your HTX account. Alternatively, you can send it elsewhere via blockchain transfer or use it to trade other cryptocurrencies.Step 4: Trade Alchemy Pay (ACH)Easily trade Alchemy Pay (ACH) on HTX's spot market. Simply access your account, select your trading pair, execute your trades, and monitor in real-time. We offer a user-friendly experience for both beginners and seasoned traders.

3.9k Total ViewsPublished 2024.03.29Updated 2026.06.02

Discussions

Welcome to the HTX Community. Here, you can stay informed about the latest platform developments and gain access to professional market insights. Users' opinions on the price of ACH (ACH) are presented below.