Introduction: The Historical Turning Point of 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, a year-on-year growth rate of 82.9% compared to $166.3 billion at the end of 2024. This growth not only breaks historical records but also marks a fundamental shift of stablecoins from marginal speculative tools to mainstream financial infrastructure.
*Current market stablecoin total volume trading 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 will come into full effect in December 2024, laying a solid foundation for the standardized development of the stablecoin industry.
*GENIUS Act after stablecoin growth
Although USDT and USDC still dominate, their market share has dropped from 91.6% to 83.6%. The stablecoin market is quietly undergoing changes, with emerging stablecoin projects rapidly rising, such as:
- Ethena's USDe market value reached 11 billion USD
- PayPal's PYUSD market cap surpasses $2.76 billion
- The RWA-supported stablecoin market size reaches 35 billion USD, with an annual growth of 46%.
*Market share of each stablecoin
Dedicated Public Chain for Stablecoins: Infrastructure Revolution
Traditional blockchain exposes significant pain points when handling stablecoin transactions: Ethereum's high gas fees often reach several dozen dollars, and transaction confirmation times vary from seconds to minutes; while Tron has lower fees, it faces centralization risks and technical limitations.
The new generation of specialized stablecoin public chains achieves a qualitative breakthrough through technological innovation. These public chains generally support high throughput of 1000+ TPS, zero or extremely 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
Plasma, as a leading project in the field, 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 launched on September 25, 2025, the TVL quickly reached $5.3 billion.
On the technical level, Plasma adopts a customized PlasmaBFT consensus mechanism, achieving sub-second finality and over 2000 TPS processing capability. Its core innovation lies in the Paymaster system, which enables USDT transfers to achieve truly 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, creating a complete DeFi ecosystem.
Stable: Institutional-level USDT Optimization Plan
Stable is positioned as the “payment track of 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 adopts the StableBFT consensus, supporting 10k TPS and second-level finality, while maintaining EVM compatibility.
The technical features of Stable lie in using USDT as the native gas token, achieving P2P transfers with zero fees through account abstraction. The enterprise features 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 services.
Arc: Circle's exclusive ecosystem
The Arc developed by Circle is positioned as the “home of stablecoin finance,” deeply integrated into the Circle ecosystem. The project uses USDC as its native gas token, ensuring a predictable fee structure denominated in US dollars. Technically, it employs a Malachite BFT consensus engine, supporting 3000 TPS and sub-second finality.
The uniqueness of Arc lies in its built-in FX engine, which supports price inquiry-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.
From the perspective of financing scale and technological progress, Plasma has a leading advantage due to the support of the Tether ecosystem and its early mainnet launch. Stable builds differentiated competitiveness through institutional-level positioning and collaboration with PayPal, while Arc relies on Circle's compliance advantages and the USDC ecosystem status. All three projects adopt the BFT consensus mechanism, which is more suitable for payment scenarios compared to the probabilistic finality of traditional PoS.
Yield Stablecoin: Innovative Earning Model
Yield stablecoins provide users with a yield experience that surpasses traditional bank savings by embedding earnings directly into the stablecoin.
Ethena USDe
The market value of USDe surged from 86 million USD in January 2024 to 11.04 billion USD in October 2025, an astonishing increase of 13750%, rising to become the third largest stablecoin in the world.
The technological innovation of USDe lies in adopting a delta-neutral strategy to maintain stability by staking assets such as ETH and WBTC, while also opening hedging futures positions on exchanges, creating a non-directional risk exposure. sUSDe offers holders an annualized yield of 2.56%-3.72%, with returns coming 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 capitalization of 8 billion dollars, providing users with an annual yield of 4.75% through the Sky savings rate mechanism.
The income comes from the protocol surplus, including borrowing fees and liquidation income, and is distributed to savings users through the SSR mechanism. The project also launched the Endgame plan for SubDAO restructuring, providing different services through specialized sub-protocols such as Spark, Grove, and Keel.
Stablecoin Payment Infrastructure: Reshaping Global Finance
By 2025, the processing volume of stablecoin cross-border payments is expected to reach $46 trillion, which is more than 50% of Visa's throughput. The cost 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 working days to under 3 minutes, significantly reducing pre-financing requirements and cash flow interruptions.
The strong rise of BVNK
As a stablecoin infrastructure provider, BVNK achieved strong business growth in 2025, processing over $20 billion in annual transaction volume, 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-grade stablecoin payments.
Stripe's innovative layout
Stripe has launched a stablecoin subscription payment feature that supports automatic deductions of USDC on the Base and Polygon chains, targeting the needs of AI and SaaS companies. This feature reduces settlement costs by half, and AI companies report a 20% shift in payment volume towards stablecoins. Stripe has also launched the Open Issuance platform to help enterprises issue custom stablecoins and integrate AI agent payment tools.
Stablecoin AI Integration Applications: Future 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, giving rise to payment protocols and infrastructure specifically optimized for AI agents.
KITE AI: Building the Layer-1 for Agent Internet
KITE AI, as a leading project in this field, is committed to building the first Layer-1 blockchain specifically optimized for the AI agent economy. KITE has completed a $18 million Series A financing round, led by PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst.
The core innovation of the project lies in three major technological pillars: the Agent Identity Resolution (AIR), programmable permission management, and on-chain attribution intelligent proof (PoAI). AIR serves as an agent app store, addressing the trust issues between AI agents, allowing developers to deploy custom agents and connect to the ecosystem market through a low-code interface.
Recently, KITE and Brevis announced a strategic partnership to enhance the transparency and autonomy of the agent identity and payment module using zero-knowledge proof technology. The first modules of this collaboration will be deployed on the BNB Chain, with plans to expand to KITE L1 for cross-chain proof relaying.
x402 Protocol: Redefining HTTP Payment Standards
The x402 protocol is jointly promoted by technology giants such as Coinbase, Google, and Cloudflare. When a client (such as an AI agent or application) accesses a protected resource, the server returns a 402 status code and payment details in JSON format, including the amount, coin type, and recipient address. The client then constructs a signed payment transaction and resends the request via the X-PAYMENT header. After third-party facilitators like Coinbase verify the on-chain payment, the server grants access to the resource. The entire process achieves trustless execution, with payments settled on-chain to ensure auditability.
The technical advantage of x402 lies in its native HTTP integration and extremely low transaction costs. USDC settlements based on Base can be completed in 2 seconds, with gas fees under 0.0001 dollars, and protocol fees are zero.
Investment Outlook and Risk Assessment
The stablecoin sub-sector is transitioning from concept to reality, from speculation to application. Among the four major emerging sectors, dedicated stablecoin public chains exhibit the clearest investment value. Plasma, backed by the Tether ecosystem and a TVL of $5.3 billion, validates market demand, with a significant technological moat. As enterprise-level payment demands explode, these types of infrastructure projects are expected to achieve premium valuations. Enterprise-level payment solutions benefit from an improved regulatory environment, with BVNK's acquisition valuation of $1.5-2.5 billion reflecting traditional financial giants' recognition of stablecoin infrastructure. Although AI-integrated applications are in the early stages, the speed of technological innovation and application scenario validation exceeds expectations, making it suitable for high-risk tolerance investors. The risk-return ratio of yield-generating stablecoins is the most complex, and the decoupling risk of synthetic models in extreme markets cannot be ignored.
Regulatory risk remains the biggest variable. Although the GENIUS Act and MiCA regulations provide a framework for industry development, the specific implementation details and enforcement standards are still evolving. Projects in the stablecoin sector need to continuously pay attention to compliance costs and policy changes. Competitive risks are exacerbated with the entry of traditional financial giants, and the strategic layouts of companies like Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard will reshape the market landscape, requiring emerging projects to maintain a leading edge in technological innovation and ecosystem development.
Investing in the new track of stablecoins requires finding a balance among three dimensions: technological innovation, regulatory compliance, and market demand. With key projects launching one after another in 2025 and the regulatory framework becoming clearer, this round of stablecoin infrastructure upgrades is expected to reshape the global payment landscape, bringing substantial returns to early participants.
