$300 billion new blue ocean: Three main lines of the stablecoin ecosystem

I. Introduction: A Historic Turning Point in the Stablecoin Ecosystem

From 2024 to 2025, the global stablecoin market is experiencing unprecedented explosive growth. As of October, the total market capitalization of stablecoins has surpassed $300 billion, up from $166.3 billion at the end of 2024, with an annual growth rate of 82.9%. This growth not only sets a new historical record but also signifies a fundamental shift of stablecoins from marginal speculative tools to mainstream financial infrastructure.

Current market total stablecoin volume and trading volume data.

The historic breakthrough in the regulatory environment has provided strong momentum for this growth: In July 2025, the U.S. GENIUS Act was officially signed into law, establishing the first federal-level stablecoin payment framework. Meanwhile, the EU MiCA regulation came into full effect in December 2024, laying a solid foundation for the standardized development of the stablecoin industry.

Stablecoin growth after the GENIUS Act.

Although USDT and USDC still dominate the market, their market share has decreased from 91.6% to 83.6%. The stablecoin market is quietly changing, with emerging stablecoin projects rapidly rising, such as:

• Ethena's USDe market cap reaching $11 billion
• PayPal's PYUSD market cap surpassing $2.76 billion
• RWA-backed stablecoin market size reaching $35 billion, with an annual growth of 46%

Market share of various stablecoins here.

II. Dedicated Public Chains for Stablecoins: A Revolution in Infrastructure

Traditional blockchains have exposed significant pain points when handling stablecoin transactions: Ethereum's high gas fees often reach dozens of dollars, and transaction confirmation times can range from seconds to minutes; while Tron has lower fees, it faces centralization risks and technical limitations.

The new generation of dedicated stablecoin public chains has achieved qualitative breakthroughs through technological innovation. These public chains generally support over 1000 TPS high throughput, zero or very low fees, and sub-second transaction confirmations. More importantly, they design stablecoins as native gas tokens, completely eliminating the impact of cryptocurrency price fluctuations on user experience.

Plasma: The Flagship Project of the Tether Ecosystem

As the leading project in the field, Plasma has raised a total of $75.8 million, including a $20.5 million Series A round led by Bitfinex and Framework Ventures in February 2025, with participation from notable investors such as Peter Thiel and Bybit. After the mainnet test launch on September 25, 2025, the TVL quickly reached $5.3 billion.

On the technical side, Plasma employs a customized PlasmaBFT consensus mechanism, achieving sub-second finality and over 2000 TPS processing capacity. Its core innovation is the Paymaster system, enabling USDT transfers to achieve true zero fees while supporting customizable gas tokens and confidential payment features. The project has integrated Chainlink oracles and bridged pBTC through a non-custodial Bitcoin bridge, building a complete DeFi ecosystem.

Stable: An Institutional-Level USDT Optimization Solution

Stable is positioned as "the payment track for the real world," focusing on institutional-level USDT applications. The project secured $28 million in seed funding in July 2025, jointly invested by Franklin Templeton, Hack VC, PayPal Ventures, and Bitfinex. The project uses StableBFT consensus, supporting 10k TPS and second-level finality while maintaining EVM compatibility.

Stable's technical features include using USDT as the native gas token, achieving zero fees for P2P transfers through account abstraction. Enterprise functionalities include batch transfer aggregation, compliant private transfers, and cross-chain USDT0 support. The project has integrated PayPal's PYUSD stablecoin, focusing on developing fiat deposit and withdrawal channels and debit card issuance.

Arc: Circle's Exclusive Ecosystem

Developed by Circle, Arc is positioned as "the home of stablecoin finance," deeply integrating the Circle ecosystem. The project uses USDC as the native gas token, ensuring a predictable fee structure in USD. Technically, it employs the Malachite BFT consensus engine, supporting 3000 TPS and sub-second finality.

Arc's uniqueness lies in its built-in FX engine, supporting price-based stablecoin conversions and optional privacy features for compliance masking. The project is also exploring reversible USDC transactions to address fraud issues and is collaborating with the German stock exchange to promote EU market adoption.

In terms of financing scale and technological progress, Plasma holds a leading advantage due to Tether ecosystem support and the earliest mainnet launch time. Stable builds differentiated competitiveness through its institutional-level positioning and partnership with PayPal, while Arc relies on Circle's compliance advantages and USDC ecosystem status. All three projects adopt BFT consensus mechanisms, which are more suitable for payment scenarios compared to traditional PoS's probabilistic finality.

III. Yield-Generating Stablecoins: Innovative Yield Models

Yield-generating stablecoins provide users with a yield experience that surpasses traditional bank savings by embedding returns directly into the stablecoins.

Ethena USDe

The market cap of USDe skyrocketed from $8.6 million in January 2024 to $11.04 billion in October 2025, an astonishing increase of 13,750%, making it the third-largest stablecoin globally.

The technical innovation of USDe lies in its use of a delta-neutral strategy to maintain stability by staking assets like ETH and WBTC while opening hedging futures positions on exchanges, creating a risk-free exposure. sUSDe offers holders an annual yield of 2.56%-3.72%, with returns sourced from Ethereum staking rewards, perpetual contract financing rates, and stablecoin fixed income.

Sky Ecosystem

The Sky ecosystem (formerly MakerDAO) has reshaped the decentralized stablecoin lending market through brand upgrades and product innovations. USDS, as a reward-based stablecoin, has reached a market cap of $8 billion, providing users with an annual yield of 4.75% through the Sky savings rate mechanism.

Returns are sourced from protocol surplus, including borrowing fees and liquidation income, distributed to savings users through the SSR mechanism. The project has also launched the Endgame plan for SubDAO restructuring, offering different services through specialized sub-protocols like Spark, Grove, and Keel.

IV. Stablecoin Payment Infrastructure: Reshaping Global Finance

In 2025, the cross-border payment processing volume of stablecoins reached $46 trillion, accounting for over 50% of Visa's throughput. The fee structure of traditional cross-border payments typically ranges from 2-7%, including transfer fees, exchange rate spreads, and intermediary fees, while stablecoins can reduce costs to 0.5-2%, saving 50-80% in high-frequency cross-border scenarios. More importantly, the settlement time for stablecoins has been shortened from the traditional 3-5 business days to under 3 minutes, significantly reducing pre-funding requirements and cash flow interruptions.

The Strong Rise of BVNK

As a stablecoin infrastructure provider, BVNK achieved strong growth in 2025, processing over $20 billion in transactions annually, primarily serving enterprise clients such as Worldpay, Flywire, and dLocal. Citi Ventures strategically invested in BVNK in October 2025 to support its global stablecoin payment track expansion. Meanwhile, Coinbase and Mastercard are negotiating to acquire BVNK, with a valuation of $1.5-2.5 billion, which would be the largest stablecoin acquisition in history, highlighting its core position in enterprise-level stablecoin payments.

Stripe's Innovative Layout

Stripe has launched a stablecoin subscription payment feature, supporting automatic deductions of USDC on the Base and Polygon chains, targeting the needs of AI and SaaS companies. This feature halves settlement costs, with AI companies reporting a 20% shift in payment volume towards stablecoins. Stripe has also introduced the Open Issuance platform to help enterprises issue customized stablecoins and integrate AI agent payment tools.

V. Stablecoin AI Integrated Applications: The Future of Finance

With the rise of the AI agent economy, traditional API keys and subscription models can no longer meet the needs of autonomous trading between machines, prompting the emergence of payment protocols and infrastructure optimized specifically for AI agents.

KITE AI: Building Layer-1 for the Agent Internet

KITE AI, as a leading project in this field, aims to build the first Layer-1 blockchain optimized for the AI agent economy. KITE has completed a $18 million Series A funding round, led by PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst.

The project's core innovations lie in three major technological pillars: the Cryptographic Agent Identity Resolution (AIR), programmable permission management, and on-chain attribution smart proofs (PoAI). AIR serves as an agent application store, addressing trust issues between AI agents, allowing developers to deploy custom agents through a low-code interface and access the ecosystem market.

Recently, KITE announced a strategic partnership with Brevis to enhance the transparency and autonomy of agent identity and payment modules using zero-knowledge proof technology. The first batch of modules will be deployed on the BNB Chain, with plans to expand to KITE L1 for cross-chain proof relaying.

x402 Protocol: Redefining the HTTP Payment Standard

The x402 protocol is jointly promoted by tech giants such as Coinbase, Google, and Cloudflare. When a client (such as an AI agent or application) accesses protected resources, the server returns a 402 status code and payment details in JSON format, including amount, currency, and recipient address. The client then constructs a signed payment transaction and resends the request via the X-PAYMENT header. Third-party facilitators like Coinbase verify the on-chain payment, after which the server grants access to the resource. The entire process achieves trustless execution, with payments settled on-chain to ensure auditability.

The technical advantages of x402 lie in its native HTTP integration and extremely low transaction costs. USDC settlements based on Base can be completed within 2 seconds, with gas fees below $0.0001 and zero protocol fees.

VI. Investment Outlook and Risk Assessment

The stablecoin sub-track is transitioning from concept to reality, from speculation to application. Among the four emerging tracks, dedicated stablecoin public chains exhibit the clearest investment value. Plasma, supported by the Tether ecosystem and validated by a $5.3 billion TVL, demonstrates market demand with a significant technological moat. As enterprise-level payment needs explode, such infrastructure projects are expected to achieve premium valuations. Enterprise-level payment solutions benefit from an improved regulatory environment, with BVNK's $1.5-2.5 billion acquisition valuation reflecting traditional financial giants' recognition of stablecoin infrastructure. Although AI integrated applications are still in the early stages, the speed of technological innovation and application scenario validation exceeds expectations, making them suitable for high-risk tolerance investors. The risk-reward ratio of yield-generating stablecoins is the most complex, with the risk of decoupling in synthetic models under extreme market conditions not to be overlooked.

Regulatory risk remains the biggest variable. Although the GENIUS Act and MiCA regulation provide a framework for industry development, specific implementation details and enforcement standards are still evolving, requiring stablecoin track projects to continuously monitor compliance costs and policy changes. Competitive risks are exacerbated by the entry of traditional financial giants, with strategic layouts from companies like Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard reshaping the market landscape, necessitating emerging projects to maintain a leading edge in technological innovation and ecosystem building.

Investing in the new stablecoin track requires finding a balance among technological innovation, regulatory compliance, and market demand. With the rollout of key projects in 2025 and further clarification of the regulatory framework, this round of stablecoin infrastructure upgrades is expected to reshape the global payment landscape, bringing substantial returns to early participants.