In 2024, the total on-chain transfer volume of stablecoins reached $27.6 trillion, surpassing the combined total of Visa and Mastercard for the first time.
This figure was $300 billion five years ago and close to zero a decade ago.
On December 18, a project named United Stables launched a new stablecoin, $U, in Dubai. Its reserves are not U.S. dollar cash or treasury bonds but a combination of three stablecoins: USDC, USDT, and USD1. Using stablecoins to collateralize stablecoins is known in the industry as "nesting."
Binance Wallet integrated immediately, with official endorsement from BNB Chain, and full support from PancakeSwap and Four.Meme.
This configuration sends a clear message in the crypto circle: Binance is personally entering the fray.
$U itself may be insignificant. But the trend it represents is clear: stablecoins are moving from wild growth to a state of rival regimes, and a new battle is beginning.
Stablecoin 1.0 Era: The Monopoly of First Movers
The essence of stablecoins is "on-chain dollars." Users deposit $1 with the issuer and receive 1 token, which can circulate on any blockchain globally, 24/7, with second-level settlement and fees of just a few cents.
Compared to Alipay or bank transfers, the core advantage of stablecoins is that they require no real-name verification, no bank account, and no regulatory approval. A wallet address is the only barrier to entry.
When Tether issued USDT in 2014, the entire crypto market's capitalization was less than $50 billion. So Tether seized the opportunity window: traditional banks generally refused to provide services to cryptocurrency companies. The only way to cash out profits after trading cryptocurrencies was to exchange crypto assets for USDT, locking in dollar-denominated gains.
USDT's rise was not just due to a superior product but also because users had no other choice. This "passive monopoly" has continued to this day. As of December 2025, USDT's market capitalization is approximately $199 billion, accounting for 60% of the stablecoin market.
In 2018, Circle, in partnership with Coinbase, launched USDC, emphasizing compliance: monthly reserve audit reports, funds custodied with regulated financial institutions, and adherence to the U.S. securities regulatory framework. The subtext was that Tether's black-box model would eventually cause problems.
By 2022, USDC's market cap once approached 70% of USDT's. Wall Street bet that the compliant faction would ultimately prevail.
In March 2023, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed. Circle had $3.3 billion in reserves deposited there. USDC briefly depegged to $0.87—an asset promised to always equal $1 had lost 13% of its value.
The lesson the market drew was: compliance is a plus, but not a moat. Banks can fail, regulators can change course; the real barrier is network effects—when your user base and liquidity are large enough, you become the de facto standard.
The survival rule of the Stablecoin 1.0 era was simple: first-mover advantage trumps everything.
Binance's Three Pivots
Exchanges are the traffic hubs of the crypto world, and stablecoins are the unit of account for trading. Whoever controls the mainstream stablecoin holds pricing power. Binance cannot afford to give up this position.
In 2019, Binance partnered with Paxos, a New York-licensed trust company, to issue BUSD. This was a compliant stablecoin regulated by the New York Department of Financial Services, with a peak market cap of $16 billion, second only to USDT and USDC.
BUSD once accounted for 40% of Binance's trading volume. It was a core tool for Binance to establish its autonomous "monetary sovereignty."
In February 2023, the SEC issued a Wells Notice to Paxos, alleging that BUSD was an unregistered security. On the same day, the New York Department of Financial Services ordered Paxos to stop minting new BUSD. Nine months later, Binance founder CZ pleaded guilty in the U.S., and Binance paid a $4.3 billion fine.
$16 billion in stablecoin assets was reduced to zero under regulatory pressure.
Binance reacted quickly. Shortly after BUSD was halted, the Hong Kong company First Digital launched FDUSD,恰好 coinciding with the launch window of Hong Kong's virtual asset licensing system. FDUSD quickly became one of the main stablecoins on the Binance platform, although the two parties never publicly confirmed a partnership.
The move from BUSD to FDUSD was passive survival; the move from FDUSD to $U is active positioning.
The design logic of $U is fundamentally different from the previous two: it does not directly compete with USDT, USDC, or USD1 but incorporates them all into its reserve pool. In a sense, $U is a "stablecoin of stablecoins" or a "stablecoin ETF."
Binance's lesson is: stablecoins reliant on a single regulatory framework always have their lifelines held by others.
The Presidential Family Enters the Fray
The most noteworthy component in $U's reserves is USD1.
In March 2025, the Trump family issued the USD1 stablecoin through World Liberty Financial. According to public disclosures, Trump family-related entities hold 60% of the parent company's equity and receive 75% of the net income share. Trump himself serves as the "Chief Cryptocurrency Advocate," while his sons Eric and Donald Jr. serve as "Web3 Ambassadors."
By December 2025, the Trump family had already profited over $1 billion from the project.
Two months after its issuance, USD1 received its first major order: the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund MGX invested $2 billion in Binance, using USD1 as the payment tool.
This was the largest cryptocurrency payment in history, instantly providing the nascent stablecoin with $2 billion in "practical endorsement."
As of December, USD1's market cap is approximately $2.7 billion, ranking seventh among stablecoins and becoming one of the fastest-growing.
Now, USD1 has been included in $U's reserves. This implies a hidden chain of interests: part of Binance's ecosystem trading volume is converted into usage scenarios for USD1; part of USD1's usage scenarios is converted into income for the Trump family.
The deeper game lies in the monetization of political capital. After Trump returned to the White House, the SEC suspended investigations into several crypto projects, including cases involving Sun Yuchen, a major investor in World Liberty Financial. Treasury Secretary Besant stated clearly at the White House Crypto Summit: "We will use stablecoins to maintain the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency."
Stablecoins are no longer just financial tools; they are becoming carriers of political resources.
The Logic of Nesting
Using stablecoins to collateralize stablecoins might seem redundant. But this design is based on three considerations.
Risk Diversification. USDT's hidden danger lies in its opaque reserves; USDC's隐患在于 its over-reliance on the U.S. banking system, as the Silicon Valley Bank incident warned; USD1's隐患在于 its deep binding with Trump's political fate. Holding any one alone means bearing its specific risk. Combining the three theoretically allows for risk hedging.
Liquidity Aggregation. The pain point of the stablecoin market is fragmented liquidity. USDT has its liquidity pools, USDC has its own, and funds are scattered across dozens of public chains and hundreds of DeFi protocols. $U attempts to connect these isolated pools, providing users with a unified liquidity entry point.
Narrative Upgrade. The competitive dimension of Stablecoin 1.0 was "who is more transparent" and "who is more compliant"—a rhetoric repeated for a decade. $U attempts to provide a new narrative framework: "settlement currency designed for the AI era," "supporting gasless signature transfers."
Of course, gasless transfers are part of the EIP-3009 standard, which existed in 2020, and USDC already supports it. So "AI-native" is more of a universal label; any on-chain stablecoin can be called by smart contracts and enable automatic machine-to-machine payments. $U's real differentiation lies not in technology but in its ecosystem and aggregated architecture.
Naturally, the nested structure also implies risk transmission: if one layer has a problem, the effects ripple through.
If USDT were to collapse one day, $U would not go to zero completely but would certainly承受 the impact: reserves shrinking, redemption pressure surging, depegging risk rising.
所谓 "Risk diversification" is more accurately "diversifying the intensity of impact from a single point of failure," ensuring that holders don't lose everything if any underlying asset fails. It's a bottom-protection mindset, not a risk-free design.
From Gray Zone to Great Power Game
2025 is the first year of stablecoin regulation.
In June, Circle listed on the NYSE, with an IPO price of $31, closing at $69 on the first day, its market cap approaching $20 billion, becoming the "first stablecoin stock." In the same month, the U.S. Senate passed the GENIUS Act with 68 votes in favor, establishing a federal regulatory framework for stablecoins for the first time. The EU's MiCA regulations came into full effect, and Hong Kong, Japan, and Singapore相继 introduced licensing systems.
Over the past decade, stablecoins existed in a gray area, with regulators lacking grounds for intervention. Now, with an annual transfer volume exceeding the world's largest payment network, no government can continue to pretend not to see it.
Data shows: 34% of adults in Turkey hold USDT to hedge against the lira's depreciation; nearly 30% of remittances in Nigeria are completed via stablecoins; tech workers in Argentina普遍 use USDC to receive salaries, bypassing local currency inflation. In these countries, stablecoins are already the de facto "shadow dollar."
The foundation of dollar hegemony is not the Fed's money-printing ability but the inertia of global trade being denominated and settled in dollars. If stablecoins become the next-generation cross-border payment infrastructure, controlling stablecoins means controlling dollar hegemony in the digital age.
This is the underlying logic behind the Trump family's entry and the reason why the GENIUS Act passed with rare bipartisan consensus: in Washington, stablecoins are no longer a小众 issue for the crypto circle but a strategic resource concerning national interests.
The Imminent Battle
Whether $U will succeed is still uncertain. Its current circulating market cap is negligible compared to USDT's nearly $200 billion and USDC's nearly $80 billion.
But it represents a new paradigm in stablecoin competition.
Competition in the 1.0 era was about going it alone: Tether established a monopoly with first-mover advantage, Circle tried to leverage compliance to撬动 the market, and Binance fought for pricing power through BUSD. The core question was "who can survive."
Competition in the 2.0 era is about forming alliances. PayPal issued PYUSD, Ripple launched RLUSD, Robinhood teamed up with Galaxy Digital and Kraken to form the USDG alliance. Traditional financial giants, crypto-native players, sovereign capital, and political forces have all entered the arena.
The new core question becomes "who can tie more players together."
$U's strategy is to achieve aggregation through "nesting": not making enemies with any party, but turning everyone into its "underlying asset." Binance's intention is to build a "decentralized centralization": using an aggregated architecture to分散 regulatory risk while maintaining control over the core ecosystem.
This hundred-army battle has no final outcome. The regulatory balance is still swaying, technological boundaries are still expanding, and political variables are still accumulating.
The only certainty is: stablecoins have moved from being supporting actors in cryptocurrency to key infrastructure in the global financial system. An annual trading volume of $27 trillion is enough to make anyone who underestimates it pay the price.
