Stablecoins, unpacked

Foundation document. “Stablecoins” is used as if it were one competitor. It isn’t. Last updated November 9, 2026.

Why this page

The word covers very different kinds of money: tokens from companies that can freeze them, bank deposits on a blockchain, synthetic dollars built from trading positions, tokenized gold, euros and yen. It mixes payments with trading. It counts announcements as adoption. And it assumes everyone wants dollars. This page separates those things, so claims like “stablecoins are winning” can be made precisely.

Kinds of stablecoin

Kind	Backed by	Who can freeze	Yield to holders	Examples	Size (Nov 8, 2026)
Company-issued, fiat-backed	Cash and short-term government debt held by the issuer	The issuer, often at government request	Not from issuers under US law; sometimes via third parties	USDT, USDC, PayPal USD, Ripple USD, Global Dollar, USD1	Fiat-backed total about $274 billion
Consortium-issued	The same, with revenue shared among partner businesses	The managing organization	Shared with businesses, not holders	Open USD	About $0.9 billion
Bank-issued	Bank deposits	The bank	Possibly, as deposits	Various pilots	About $0.24 billion
Crypto-backed	Other crypto held as collateral in smart contracts	Varies; some have freeze functions	Sometimes, through savings modules	USDS, Dai, GHO	Crypto-backed total about $4.7 billion
Synthetic	Trading positions that offset price swings	Varies	Yes, from trading income	Ethena USDe	About $4.9 billion
Non-dollar fiat	Euros, yen, Swiss francs, real, pesos	The issuer	Generally no	EURC, JPYC, BRL tokens	Under $1.5 billion in total
Tokenized gold	Physical gold in vaults	The issuer	No	Tether Gold, PAX Gold	About $5.1 billion
Bitcoin-based synthetic dollars	Bitcoin plus a hedge, held by a service	The service, if custodial	No	Stablesats (Blink)	Small

Category sizes are CoinGecko’s (CoinGecko), retrieved November 8, 2026. Categories overlap.

Size and concentration

Total: about $288 billion, against bitcoin’s market capitalization of about $1.53 trillion.
Dollars are almost everything: dollar stablecoins are about $285 billion, 99% of the total.
Two issuers dominate: USDT about $177 billion (61%) and USDC about $70 billion (24%). The next largest, USDS, is under $9 billion.
Non-dollar stablecoins are tiny: euro about $830 million, yen about $236 million, Swiss franc about $89 million, pound about $27 million, Korean won and Mexican peso under $1 million each.

All CoinGecko, November 8, 2026.

Payments versus everything else

Headline figures overstate payments:

Measure	Figure	Source
All stablecoin transaction volume, past year	~$46 trillion	a16z State of Crypto 2025 (Finextra)
Adjusted for bots and wallet shuffling	~$9 trillion	Same
Estimated actual payments, last year	$350–550 billion	Cited by DigitalToday, April 2026
Payment companies studied by Artemis (31 firms, annualized)	~$72 billion	Yahoo Finance on Artemis, 2025

So actual payments are roughly 1% of headline volume. “Stablecoins process more than Visa” compares trading and treasury movements with card purchases.

Payments are becoming local, not cross-border: the domestic share of stablecoin transactions rose from about 50% in early 2024 to about 75% in early 2026, according to a16z’s Robert Hackett and Jeremy Zhang (DigitalToday).

Where they run

Tron’s share is falling on some measures: from 36% of stablecoin transaction volume at the start of 2025 to 14.6% in February 2026, with Solana and Ethereum gaining, per Visa’s onchain analytics (ForkLog).
But Tron still dominated payment companies’ volume (about 60%) in Artemis’s 2025 study. Different measures, different answers: Tron remains the default for emerging-market payments, while other chains grow in overall volume.
New chains built for payments: Stripe and Paradigm’s Tempo launched on mainnet on March 18, 2026, with partners including Visa, Mastercard, Deutsche Bank, Shopify, OpenAI and Anthropic. No usage figures have been published (DEV Community).

Announced, live, used

Project	What	Status	Signs of use
Open USD	Consortium stablecoin by Open Standard, 140+ backers including Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, BlackRock, Coinbase; reserve income shared with participating businesses; fee-free minting and redemption; natively on Tempo (The Block)	Announced June 2026; listed on CoinGecko by November [to verify: launch date]	About $0.9 billion market cap
Tempo	Payments chain by Stripe and Paradigm	Live since March 18, 2026	No published figures
PayPal USD	PayPal’s stablecoin	Live	About $2.8 billion
Ripple USD, Global Dollar, USD1	Company-issued dollar tokens	Live	About $2.7, $2.7 and $3.4 billion
JPYC	First regulated yen stablecoin, under Japan’s revised Payment Services Act, launched October 27, 2025; target ¥10 trillion in three years (Unlock)	Live	All yen stablecoins together about $236 million
Korean won stablecoins	Legislation under debate	Mostly not live	Under $1 million
Bank-issued tokens	Deposit tokens from banks	Pilots	About $0.24 billion in total

Market caps from CoinGecko, November 8, 2026.

The lesson: announcements from large companies are treated as competition years before they carry payments. The library tracks use, not press releases.

Who wants dollars, and who doesn’t

People who want dollars live where the local currency is losing value or can’t be trusted. A BIS working paper (March 2026) found over 70% of net stablecoin inflows came from non-dollar currencies, rising as local currencies weakened. Flows reached about 7–8% of GDP in parts of Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and the Middle East (LSE Business Review, May 2026) (Shaping Tomorrow summary). The earlier scans show the same in Argentina, Nigeria, Bolivia, Iran and Lebanon.

Most people don’t want dollars. For anyone whose salary, rent and prices are in a stable currency (euros, yen, won, pounds, Swiss francs), holding dollars adds risk: their money moves against the euro or the yen. “Stable” means stable in their currency. That’s why:

Non-dollar stablecoins are small but growing as working money. A Visa and Dune report found non-dollar stablecoin supply reached $1.1 billion in February 2026, about three times its January 2023 level, with transfer volume up over 1,600% to $10 billion. Euro stablecoins are over 80% of that, Brazilian real about 10%. The authors describe them as “operational money for cross-border payments, remittances, B2B settlement, and FX management” (The Block).
Governments are pushing back on dollar tokens. The ECB’s Isabel Schnabel warned in June 2026 that dollar stablecoins endanger monetary sovereignty in economies with weaker monetary credibility. China and several Gulf states have banned them; Japan chose licensed domestic stablecoins; the UK an authorization regime (Shaping Tomorrow summary); Brazil banned stablecoin settlement in cross-border payments (CoinDesk).
Some people want neither dollars nor bitcoin: tokenized gold is about $5.1 billion, larger than all non-dollar stablecoins combined.

For this library: a K-pop group order priced in won, otoshidama in yen or a Berlin club collective’s kitty in euros doesn’t need dollars at all. Outside dollarizing economies, the question isn’t “bitcoin or stablecoins” but “how do people think and price in their own currency while bitcoin moves underneath?”

Properties compared with bitcoin

	Company-issued dollar stablecoin	Bitcoin
Issuer	A company (or consortium)	None
Can be frozen	Yes, by the issuer	No
Value	Stable in dollars; moves against other currencies	Volatile in every currency
Yield	US law (GENIUS Act, signed July 18, 2025) bars issuers from paying holders for holding; whether third parties can pass on “rewards” is still debated (Spark research). Open USD shares reserve income with businesses.	None
Self-custody	Possible, but the issuer can still freeze	Full
Privacy	Public on most chains; issuers and exchanges see identities	Varies by layer (on-chain public; Lightning and Ark more private)
Regulation	Licensing regimes (GENIUS, MiCA, Japan, UK)	Mostly treated as an asset
Rails	Many chains: Tron, Ethereum, Solana, Tempo and more	Bitcoin, Lightning, Ark, Liquid and others

Stablecoins on bitcoin

Lightning: USDT through Taproot Assets has been live since March 2026, still nascent (Spark research).
Ark: Tether backed Ark Labs’ seed round to bring stablecoins to Arkade (The Block). As of November 2026, Second hasn’t announced stablecoin plans for Bark. [to verify]
Other bitcoin layers: Spark, Liquid and RGB support or plan dollar tokens [from memory; to verify].
Synthetic bitcoin-based dollars: Blink’s Stablesats (Blink).
Swaps instead of holding: atomic swaps between Lightning and USDT (Bitcoin Magazine on Boltz).

“Bitcoin versus stablecoins” is partly a false choice: the same rails can carry both.

What it means for the research areas

Area	What changes
11 Community-driven economies	Most of these communities price in their own currency (won, yen, euros). Local-currency pricing and conversion matter more than dollars.
12 Earning in bitcoin	Dollar stablecoins win where earners want dollar income, mostly in weak-currency economies. Elsewhere, earners want their own currency.
13 Agentic payments	Agent payments are dollar-denominated (USDC on x402) by default.
14 Dollars and bitcoin	The real competitor is specific: USDT on Tron in emerging markets. The stance question widens from “dollars” to “the user’s own currency.”
15 Money that can’t be frozen	Freezes are an issuer property; the argument for bitcoin is strongest against company-issued tokens.
18 Last-mile infrastructure	Swaps should reach local currencies and local stablecoins (euro, real, yen), not only USDT.

Open questions

How much of the $350–550 billion in stablecoin payments is cross-border, and in which corridors?
Who actually uses non-dollar stablecoins, and for what?
Will Open USD’s revenue sharing with businesses pull distribution away from USDT and USDC, and does it touch emerging markets at all?
Does Tempo carry real payment volume yet?
In stable-currency countries, do people want a stable token at all, or just good local payment apps?