I. Basic Outlook of the Stablecoin Sector
From the perspectives of scale and structure, stablecoins are undergoing a threefold growth inflection point of “volume–price–usage”. 1) Volume level: Since Q3 2025, multiple authoritative and industry media sources have almost simultaneously observed the global stablecoin market cap as “approaching or first exceeding $300 billion.” On the capital market side, the Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME) anchored the figure at a more conservative $286 billion in its September report. The discrepancy mainly arises from differences in statistical windows and inclusion criteria, but there is no dispute about the overall trend of “returning to and surpassing historical highs.” AFME further points out that U.S.-dollar-pegged stablecoins account for 99.5% of the total, pushing the structural certainty of “unipolar dollarization” to a historical peak. Meanwhile, FN London (part of the Financial Times) examines issuance patterns and finds that USDT and USDC form a duopoly, dominating both market share and liquidity. Across different metrics and time points, their combined share remains in the 70–80% range, reinforcing the anchoring role of dollar-pegged stablecoins on on-chain capital flows and price quotation systems. 2) Usage level: Cross-border settlement/remittances and B2B fund transfers have become the strongest engines adopted in the real world. For example, Morgan Stanley Investment Management disclosed that in 2024 Turkey alone had cross-border stablecoin payments exceeding $63 billion; India, Nigeria, Indonesia and others have entered the list of high-adoption nations for stablecoins. This type of demand is not “within-crypto-ecosystem circulation” but a systemic substitution of traditional cross-border finance characterised by friction and uncertainty. Further, Visa’s latest white paper extends the technical envelope of stablecoins from “payments” to “cross-border credit/on-chain credit infrastructure”, emphasising that under programmable cash plus smart contracts, global lending will embrace the full lifecycle of “matching–contracting–performing–settling” with higher automation, lower friction and higher verification. That means the marginal value of stablecoins shifts from “reducing cross-border payment costs” to “rewriting the cross-border credit production function”. 3) Price level (i.e., efficiency and financial conditions): Layer-2 chains (e.g., Base) and high-performance public chains (e.g., Solana) are laying down lower-latency and lower-fee “last-mile” settlement networks, which, coupled with compliant RWAs (real-world assets) and short-term Treasury tokenised asset pools, allow stablecoins not only to function as “transferable dollars” , but also to be re-pledged and integrated into capital flows, thereby reducing the time for capital turnover and improving turnover efficiency per unit time. These three inflection points jointly drive a paradigm shift from cyclical rebound to structural penetration: “thickening” market cap, “strengthening” the dollar anchor, “deepening” scenarios, and by virtue of higher capital reuse, turning stablecoins from a “matching medium” into “the foundation for capital operation and credit generation”. Along this trajectory, short-term sentiment or isolated events (e.g., a recent case of a certain stablecoin over-minting in internal transfers and quickly rolling back) are more like “risk-monitoring & audit visualisation” stress tests — they do not change the main trend: historical new highs in aggregate, structural hyper-dollarization, and evolving usage from “payments” to “credit”.
On the driver side, demand and supply form a dual-curve superposition featuring “real-world rigid demand × regulatory-dividend”, reinforcing the above threefold growth. On the demand side: firstly, there is the rigid demand for “currency substitution” in emerging markets — under high inflation or high depreciation backgrounds, on-chain dollars as a “hard currency” and settlement medium are increasingly adopted spontaneously; Morgan Stanley & Chainalysis’s joint observation shows that bottom-up cross-border payments/remittances become the fastest channel for stablecoin penetration, exhibiting a counter-cyclical characteristic of “the more turmoil, the greater the volume”. Secondly, demand comes from the constraints that global corporations face in capital operation efficiency: cross-border e-commerce, foreign trade, outbound platforms and the developer economy all demand T+0/minute-level settlement with low risk of chargebacks. As a result, stablecoins have become the “second track replacing SWIFT/agent-bank networks”. Leveraging the technological dividends brought by parallel excution across multichains and L2 adoption, they continue to drive down the “last-mile” cost. Cross-border settlement/remittance, B2B payment & fund-pool turnover represent the foremost real-world use cases for stablecoins. On the supply side: the curve of regulatory dividend is key. The U.S. GENIUS Act (came into effect on July 18, 2025) establishes the first federal uniform framework for stablecoins, requiring 100% high-liquidity reserves (dollars or short-term Treasuries etc.) with monthly disclosure, and clarifies redemptions, custody, supervision and enforcement powers — effectively imposing the strong restriction on ensuring “safe, transparent and redeemable” stablecoins. Hong Kong’s Stablecoins Ordinance (effective on August 1, 2025) implements a licensing regime and sets the boundary for stablecoins, and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) has published guidance documents and detailed rules to ensure reserve quality, redemption mechanism and comprehensive risk management. The EU’s Markets in Crypto‑Assets Regulation (MiCA) began its phased implementation at the end of 2024, and the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has successively issued Level-2/3 technical standards and competence/knowledge guidelines, marking that Europe has now brought stablecoins into the prudential regulatory system governing financial infrastructure. Clearly defined regulation produces two main effects: On one hand, it significantly reduces compliance uncertainty and cross-border costs for issuers, settlement networks and the merchant acceptance side, leading to a continuous decrease in friction for "real-world adoption"; on the other hand, it changes the industry’s “risk–return–scale” function by internalising the externalities of reserve security and information disclosure into compliance costs, thereby raising industry entry thresholds and accelerating “the strong get stronger” dynamic. Coupled with the trajectory of public-chain technology — including the adoption of L2 solutions and high-TPS chains — and the RWA capital trend, including the tokenization of short-term bonds and on-chain money market funds, stablecoins have expanded from serving as a “cross-border payment gateway” to becoming the foundation for “cross-border credit and on-chain capital markets.” Visa in its latest white-paper explicitly states that stablecoins will become the “foundation layer of the global credit ecosystem”, and the automation capabilities of smart contracts across pre-loan matching, during-loan monitoring, and post-loan settlement and disposition imply that the generation, circulation, and pricing of credit are shifting from a manual, voucher-based approach to a code- and data-driven model. This also explains why, against the current backdrop of near-record aggregate volumes and a highly dollarized structural composition, industry logic has shifted from a cyclical rebound to structural penetration. In this process, the U.S. federal anchoring, the implementation of Hong Kong licensing regime, and the EU MiCA roll-out together constitute a triple-pronged institutional convergence across continents, elevating the global expansion of stablecoins from “a commercial phenomenon” to "a coordinated system of policy and financial infrastructure” , and providing credible, auditable and composable underlying cash and settlement layers for subsequent cross-border credit, receivables securitisation, inventory financing, factoring and other more complex trade-finance modules.
II. Trend & Analysis of U.S. Dollar-Pegged Stablecoins
In the global stablecoin landscape, U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins are not simply a market product, they also serve as key fulcrums of national interests and geofinancial strategy. The underlying logic can be understood from three dimensions: preserving the U.S. dollar hegemony, alleviating fiscal pressure, and leading global rule-making. First, U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins have become a new lever to preserve the international status of the dollar. Traditional dollar hegemony depended on its reserve-currency status, the SWIFT system and the petrodollar mechanism. However, over the past decade the global “de-dollarization” trend — though slow — has been steadily eroding the dollar’s share in both settlements and reserves. In this context, the expansion of dollar-pegged stablecoins offers a non-symmetric pathway — one that bypasses sovereign-currency systems and capital controls to deliver directly the “dollar-value proposition” to end-users. Whether in high-inflation economies such as Venezuela or Argentina, or in cross-border trade scenarios in Africa and Southeast Asia, stablecoins have effectively become “on-chain dollars” actively chosen by local residents and enterprises, and are penetrating into the local financial system in a low-cost and little-friction manner. This kind of penetration doesn’t require military or geostrategic tools — it is achieved through market-driven behavior of “digital dollarization”, thereby extending the coverage of the dollar ecosystem. As noted in Morgan Stanley’s recent research, by 2027 stablecoin expansion may deliver an additional structural demand worth $1.4 trillion for the dollar, effectively offsetting part of the de-dollarization trend. This means America has strengthened its monetary hegemony through stablecoins in a low-cost manner.
Second, in fiscal and financial terms, dollar-pegged stablecoins are becoming an important new source of demand supporting the U.S. Treasury market. Though global demand for U.S. Treasuries remains strong, growing deficits and interest-rate volatility pose long-term pressure on U.S. government financing. The stablecoin issuance mechanism is inherently tied to high-liquidity reserve asset configuration, and the GENIUS Act explicitly requires that these reserves must mainly consist of short-term Treasuries or cash-equivalents. Therefore, as the stablecoin market cap expands from hundreds of billions to multi-trillion dollars over time, the underlying reserve assets will become a stable and rising buy-side force in the Treasury market, akin to a “quasi-central-bank buyer”. This not only can improve the maturity structure of U.S. government debt, but may also reduce overall financing cost — providing the U.S. Treasury with a new structural fulcrum. Several research institutions have already modelled that by 2030 the potential scale of stablecoins could reach around $1.6 trillion, bringing additional Treasury demand of several hundred billion dollars. Third, on the regulatory-rule-making side, the U.S. has shifted from “suppression” to “incorporation” of stablecoins. In its early days, regulators were unfriendly to stablecoins, worrying about their implications for monetary policy and financial stability. However, as the market continued to expand, the U.S. quickly realized it could not suppress the trend and instead adopted a “recognition–regulation–incorporation” strategy. The GENIUS Act, which came into effect in July 2025, marked a milestone: It established a unified federal regulatory framework. It has not only set mandatory requirements for reserve quality, liquidity and transparency, but also legitimised both bank and non-bank issuance channels. Besides, it enshrined AML/KYC, redemption mechanisms and custody responsibilities into enforceable hard constraints so as to maintain control over stablecoins. More importantly, the Act gives the U.S. a head start in international standard setting: Through federal legislation the U.S. can apply its stablecoin regulatory logic in future platforms such as the G20, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Bank for International Settlements (BIS) — making the U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins dominant not only in markets, but also as the de facto global standard at the institutional level.
In summary, the U.S. strategic logic on dollar-pegged stablecoins reflects a threefold convergence: At the international-monetary level, stablecoins are the extension of digital dollarization, a low-cost means to maintain and expand dollar hegemony; at the fiscal-financial level, stablecoins cultivate a new long-term buyer base for Treasuries, easing fiscal pressure; at the regulatory-institutional level, the U.S. via the GENIUS Act has completed the legal recognition and incorporation of stablecoins, securing its discourse power in the future global digital-finance order. These three strategic pillars not only complement each other but in practice form a synchronous resonance: As the market cap of the dollar-pegged stablecoins expands into the multi-trillion-dollar range, they will simultaneously reinforce the dollar’s international monetary status, support domestic financing sustainability, and establish global regulatory standards through legal and institutional frameworks. The combination of “institutional priority” and “first-mover advantage in networks” positions dollar-pegged stablecoins not merely as market products, but also as a strategic tool for advancing U.S. national interests. In the future global stablecoin competition landscape, this moat will persist. While non-dollar-pegged stablecoins may have regional development space, in the short term they are unlikely to challenge the dominant position of dollar-pegged stablecoins. In other words, the future of stablecoins will be not only a market choice in digital finance, but a currency strategy in great-power game — and the United States has clearly already gotten the upper hand in this game.
III. Trend & Analysis of Non-U.S. Dollar-Pegged Stablecoins
The overall landscape of non-dollar-pegged stablecoins is exhibiting a typical "globally weak, locally strong" pattern. In 2018, their market share approached 49%, nearly balancing with dollar-pegged stablecoins. However, within a few years, this share has plummeted to less than 1%, with industry data platforms like RWA.xyz estimating a low of 0.18%. Euro-pegged stablecoins have become the only non-dollar stablecoins of notable scale, with a total market capitalization of approximately $456 million, accounting for the vast majority of the non-dollar stablecoin market. Stablecoins pegged to other regional currencies, including those in Asia and Australia, remain in the early or pilot stages. Meanwhile, the Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME) reported in September that dollar-pegged stablecoins now account for 99.5% of the market share, indicating that global on-chain liquidity is almost entirely dependent on one single currency — the U.S. dollar. This excessive concentration poses a structural risk: Any extreme regulatory, technological, or credit shocks within the U.S. could rapidly transmit through the settlement layer to global markets. Therefore, promoting the uptake of non-dollar-pegged stablecoins is not merely a matter of commercial competition but a strategic necessity to maintain system resilience and monetary sovereignty.
In the non-USD camp, the Eurozone is leading the way. The EU's MiCA regulation has provided unprecedented legal certainty for stablecoin issuance and circulation. Circle announced that its USDC/EURC products fully comply with MiCA requirements and is actively advancing a multichain deployment strategy. Driven by this, the market capitalization of Euro stablecoins achieved a three-digit growth in 2025. EURC alone surged by 155%, from $117 million at the beginning of the year to $298 million. Although the absolute scale of Euro stableconis is still far smaller than that of dollar-pegged stablecoins, the growth momentum is to be reckoned with. The European Parliament, ESMA, and the ECB are intensively launching technical standards and regulatory rules, imposing strict requirements on issuance, redemption, and reserves, gradually constructing a compliant cold-start ecosystem. Australia's approach differs from the Eurozone, leaning more towards a traditional bank-led, top-down experiment. Two of the four major banks, ANZ and NAB, have launched A$DC and AUDN, respectively. In the retail market, licensed payment companies like AUDD fill the gap, primarily targeting cross-border payments and efficiency optimization. However, overall development remains at the stage of small-scale institutional and scenario pilots, failing to come into large-scale retail application. The biggest uncertainty lies in the absence of a nationwide unified legal framework, while the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) is actively researching a digital Australian dollar (CBDC). Once officially issued, it could potentially replace or even squeeze out existing private stablecoins. If regulation looses in the future, leveraging both bank endorsement and retail payment scenarios, the Australian dollar stablecoin has the potential for rapid replication. However, its relationship with CBDC—whether substitutive or complementary—remains an unresolved issue. The South Korean market presents a paradox: despite the country's high acceptance of crypto assets, the development of stablecoins has nearly stagnated. The key issue is severe legislative lag. With the earliest expected enactment in 2027, conglomerates and major internet platforms collectively adopt a wait-and-see approach. Additionally, regulators tend to promote "controllable private chains", and the domestic short-term government bond market's scarcity and low yields impose dual constraints on issuers in terms of profit models and commercialization incentives. Hong Kong is one of the few places where "regulation precedes the market". In May 2025, the Hong Kong Legislative Council passed the "Stablecoin Ordinance", which came into effect on August 1, positioning Hong Kong as the first major financial center to introduce a comprehensive stablecoin regulatory framework. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority subsequently released implementation details, clarifying compliance boundaries for Hong Kong dollar-pegged stablecoins issued domestically. However, despite leading in institutional frameworks, the market has experienced "localized cooling". Some Chinese institutions, due to prudent attitudes in mainland regulation, have chosen to proceed cautiously or delay applications, leading to a decline in market enthusiasm. It is expected that by the end of 2025 or early 2026, regulatory authorities will issue a very limited number of initial licenses, implementing a phased pilot program under a “prudent and gradual” approach. This means that although Hong Kong possesses advantages as an international financial hub and in regulatory leadership, its development pace is constrained by mainland cross-border capital controls and risk isolation considerations, and the breadth and speed of market expansion remain uncertain. By contrast, Japan has taken a unique path in institutional design, becoming an innovation model of "trust-based strong regulation". Through the Amendment to the Fund Settlement Act, Japan has established a regulatory model of "trust custody with licensed financial institutions taking the lead", ensuring that stablecoins operate entirely within a compliant framework. In the fall of 2025, JPYC was approved as the first compliant Japanese yen stablecoin, issued by Mitsubishi UFJ Trust's Progmat Coin platform, with plans to issue stablecoins worth ¥1 trillion over three years. Reserve assets are pegged to Japanese bank deposits and government bonds (JGBs), targeting cross-border remittances, corporate settlements, and DeFi ecosystems.
Overall, the development status of non-U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins can be summarized as "overall dilemma, regional differentiation". On a global scale, the extreme concentration of U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins has compressed the space for other currencies, causing a significant collapse in the share of non-U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins. However, in regional dimensions, the Euro and Japanese yen represent long-term routes of "sovereignty and regulatory certainty", with the potential to form differentiated competitiveness in cross-border payments and trade finance; Hong Kong maintains a unique position, leveraging its strengths as a financial hub and in regulatory leadership; Australia and South Korea are still in exploratory and wait-and-see stages, with breakthroughs depending on legal frameworks and CBDC positioning. In the future stablecoin system, non-U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins may not be able to challenge the dominance of the U.S. dollar, but their existence itself has strategic significance: They can serve as buffers and backup solutions for systemic risks and help countries maintain monetary sovereignty in the digital age.
IV. Investment Outlook and Risks
The investment logic of stablecoins is undergoing a profound paradigm shift, transitioning from the past "Coin-M" thinking centered on token prices and market share to a "cash flow and regulatory framework-based" model grounded in cash flows, institutions, and rules. This shift is not only an upgrade in investment perspective but also an inevitable requirement for the entire industry to move from the crypto-native stage to financial infrastructure. Viewed through the lens of the layered industry chain, the issuance side stands to benefit the most. With the implementation of America's GENIUS Act, the EU's MiCA, and Hong Kong's Stablecoin Ordinance, issuers, custodians, auditing institutions, and reserve managers have gained clear compliance paths and institutional guarantees. Although requirements for mandatory reserves and monthly information disclosure increase operational costs, they also raise industry entry barriers, accelerating the concentration of the industry and strengthening the scale advantages of leading issuers. This means that leading institutions can secure stable cash flows through interest income, reserve asset allocation, and compliance dividends, creating a "winner-take-all" pattern.
Apart from issuers, settlement and merchant acceptance networks will be the next important investment direction. Those who can first integrate stablecoins into enterprise ERP systems and cross-border payment networks will be able to build sustainable cash flows in payment commissions, settlement fees, and working capital management financial services. The potential of stablecoins lies not only in on-chain exchanges but also in whether they can become "daily monetary tools" in enterprise operations. Once this embedding is achieved, it will release long-term, predictable cash flows, similar to the moat established by payment network companies. Another area worth attention is the tokenization of RWAs (real-world assets) and short-term bonds. As the scale of stablecoins expands, the allocation of reserve funds will inevitably need to seek sources of yield. Tokenizing short-term government bonds and money market funds not only meets reserve compliance requirements but also builds an efficient bridge between stablecoins and traditional financial markets. Ultimately, stablecoins—short-term bond tokens—fund markets are expected to form a closed loop, making the entire on-chain U.S. dollar liquidity curve more mature. Additionally, compliance technology and on-chain identity management are also areas worth investment. The America's GENIUS Act, the EU's MiCA, and Hong Kong's regulations all emphasize the importance of KYC, AML, and blacklist management. This means that "regulatable open public chains" have become an industry consensus. Technology companies providing on-chain identity and compliance modules will play an important role in the future stablecoin ecosystem. From a regional comparison perspective, the U.S. is undoubtedly the market with the largest scale dividend. The first-mover advantage of the U.S. dollar, combined with clear federal legislation, enables banks, payment giants, and even technology companies to actively participate in the stablecoin market. Investment targets include both issuers and financial infrastructure builders. The EU’s opportunity lies in institutional-level B2B settlements and the euro-denominated DeFi ecosystem. The MiCA compliance framework and the anticipation of a digital euro together shape a market space grounded in “stability + compliance”. Hong Kong, leveraging its first-mover regulatory advantage and internationalised financial infrastructure, has the potential to become a bridgehead for offshore RMB, the Hong Kong dollar and cross-border asset allocation. Against the backdrop of cautious advancement by mainland Chinese institutions, foreign and local financial institutions may gain access to faster channels. Japan, through its “trust-based strong regulation” model, has built a highly secure template. If JPYC and its follow-on stablecoins reach an issuance scale of ￥1 trillion, then they may alter the supply-demand dynamics in certain maturity segments of Japanese government bonds (JGBs). Australia and South Korea are still in their exploratory stages and investment opportunities currently lie more in small-scale pilots and the policy-dividend window following regulatory relaxation. In terms of valuation and pricing frameworks, the revenue model of issuers may be simplified as interest income on reserve assets multiplied by assets under management, then adjusted according to the sharing ratio and incentive cost. Critical variables for profitability include scale, interest spread, redemption rate and compliance cost. Revenue from settlement and merchant-acquisition networks stems primarily from payment commissions, settlement fees and financial value-added services; core variables here are merchant density, ERP integration depth and compliance loss rate. On-chain funding-market income is directly related to net interest spread, programmable credit stock and risk-adjusted capital return — the key is the stability of asset sources and efficiency of default resolution.
However, the risks in the stablecoin sector should not be overlooked. The most central risk is systemic concentration. At present, U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins account for as much as 99.5% of the market, and global on-chain liquidity is almost entirely reliant on one single currency — the U.S. dollar. It means that any major U.S. domestic legislative reversal, regulatory tightening or technical event could trigger a global chain reaction of de-leveraging. Regulatory re-pricing risk also exists: Even if the U.S. implements the GENIUS Act, its detailed regulations and cross-agency coordination may still alter the cost curve and boundary for non-bank issuers. The strict constraints of the EU’s MiCA may force some overseas issuers to “exit Europe” or switch to a restricted model; Hong Kong and Japan’s high compliance costs, stringent custody and supplementary clauses raise the thresholds for capital and technology. The potential “crowding-out effect” of CBDCs is also not to be ignored. Once a digital euro or digital Australian dollar is operational, the public-service, tax-and-benefit distribution scenarios may tilt toward them, compressing the space for private stablecoins denominated in the local currency. Operational risk is immediately visible: Recently a few issuers mis-minted excess tokens — though they were quickly rolled back, this underscores the need for rigorous audit of reserve reconciliation and mint/burn mechanisms. The mismatch between Interest-rate and maturity pose another latent risk: If issuers chase yield but mis-align assets and redemption obligations, panic bank withdrawals and market turbulence may emerge. Finally, geopolitical and sanctions compliance risks are increasing: As stablecoins act as extensions of the U.S. dollar, in certain scenarios they will face enhanced compliance pressure and blacklist-management complexity. Overall, the stablecoin sector holds an enormous prospect for investment, but it is no longer a story of "simply betting on scale" — it has become a compound game of cash flows, rules and institutional certainty. Investors need to judge which entities can establish stable cash-flow models under compliance frameworks, which regions can release structural opportunities amid evolving rules, and which segments can deliver long-term value through regulatory tech and on-chain credit expansion. At the same time, they must stay acutely alert to systemic concentration and regulatory re-pricing risks — particularly in a context of the dominance of U.S. dollar and accelerating CBDC roll-out.
V. Conclusion
The evolution of stablecoins has reached a critical inflection point, transitioning from being merely a question of “how high market capitalization can rise” to a leap from dollar-denominated tokens to a global financial operating system. At first, stablecoins function as assets, serving basic roles in market-neutral holdings and on-chain transactions. Through network effects, they then expand into global B2B and B2C micro and high-frequency settlement scenarios. Ultimately, reinforced by both regulatory frameworks and code, they evolve into a programmable cash layer capable of supporting credit extension, collateralization, promissory notes, inventory financing, and other complex financial services. Under the combined strength of monetary, fiscal and regulatory policy, the U.S. has shaped U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins into an institutional tool of digital dollarization: expanding the dollar’s global penetration, stabilizing demand for U.S. Treasuries, and securing international discourse power. Although non-U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins are inherently disadvantaged in network effects and interest-spread, their existence supports regional financial sovereignty and systemic resilience. Regions such as the EU, Japan and Hong Kong are finding their own survival niches through compliance-first or institutional design approaches. For investors, the key is to complete the shift in framework: from thinking about token price and market share to validating business models built on cash flows, rules and compliance technology. In the next two to three years, stablecoins will see multiple jurisdictions complete roll-outs of compliant models, evolving from “off-ramp assets” to “the foundation of the global financial operating system", profoundly altering money-transmission channels and the way financial services are provided.
