The "plateau" after reaching a new high: After $300 billion, what are stablecoins waiting for?

Stablecoins have been sitting at the historical high of $300 billion for some time now.

The numbers look impressive, but if you zoom in, you’ll see the other side: over the past six months, stablecoin growth has begun to faintly show the outline of a plateau. This doesn’t mean the market has lost its room for imagination; it means that the logic that supported the scale expansion of the past few years is quietly approaching its own limits.

This means stablecoins need a new story—not just new use cases, but a deeper shift in their underlying attributes: when payment scenarios are no longer just transactions and even the initiator is no longer just human, what role will stablecoins play?

I. A Stuck Ceiling: What Changes and What Doesn’t

Stablecoins are not the first time they’ve reached a point like this.

From USDT to USDC, and then to the various newer types of stablecoins, each round of expansion in the past was almost always accompanied by several familiar scenarios: higher on-chain trading volumes, greater DeFi activity, stronger cross-chain liquidity, and broader global remittance demand.

On the surface, stablecoin growth comes from expansion on the supply side. Stablecoins aren’t the first time they’ve reached a point like this.

And in recent years, nearly all of these core demands have come from human behavior. Whether it’s trading activity at exchanges, collateralized borrowing and lending in DeFi protocols, cross-border transfers and arbitrage paths, or the short-term parking of risk-hedging capital—at its core, everything has revolved around 「trading」 as the center. In other words, the growth of stablecoins in the previous phase was essentially driven by 「people’s trading demand。」

But the problem today is that these demands haven’t disappeared—they’re just getting closer and closer to a 「predictable ceiling」. After all, exchange use cases are still huge, but the competitive landscape is relatively stable; DeFi is still important, but it’s hard to create standalone, explosive incremental growth like in the early days. Cross-border payments and arbitrage are still expanding, but more like a slow penetration process rather than a new story that can rapidly reshape valuation imagination.

That’s why, in today’s market, interest in 「the next stablecoin ecosystem with incremental stories」 is visibly rising.

At present, new incremental demand is roughly concentrated in two directions.

• One is on-chain yield-bearing stablecoins—combining stablecoins with structures like Treasury bills, RWA, and protocol revenues, and repackaging their appeal through 「holding-to-earn」, similar to the yield-stablecoin path that the market has been repeatedly discussing in recent years;
• The other is an even hotter trend recently: on-chain activities of AI agents, and the stablecoin payment and settlement needs built around them;

Actually, compared to the rest, on-chain payments and the stablecoin rail fit the characteristics of this new demand better, because stablecoins naturally have several conditions that traditional payment systems struggle to combine: always-on operation, globally uniform settlement, programmability, support for high-frequency micropayments, and no need for complex intermediaries that authorize layer by layer.

In other words, what stablecoins may be competing for isn’t only the existing cross-border payment stock in today’s market; it may be a larger incremental payment market in the future—especially when the initiator of payments is no longer just human.

II. Exploring New Paths: From Yield-Bearing to AI-Driven

Recently, traditional giants have clearly been doubling down on this new direction.

For example, Visa Crypto Labs launched its first experimental product, Visa CLI, attempting to let AI agents safely complete the required fee payments when writing code and calling services. If you look at this in a broader context, its significance isn’t just that it adds another tool. More importantly, it’s the first time the payment主体 (subject) is starting to shift from 「human」 to 「program」.

In traditional payment systems, all transactions implicitly depend on one premise: the transaction must be initiated by a person. Whether it’s a bank card, an electronic wallet, or mobile payments, everything relies on KYC, manual authorization steps, and finally the bank account system to transfer funds.

In the end, this system is designed around 「human behavior」.

But AI does not belong to this system.

If an AI agent wants to complete a task, it may need to automatically subscribe to data services, pay API fees by number of calls, purchase compute resources across different platforms, and even execute automated trading according to strategy. For this kind of behavior, waiting for a human to manually confirm every step is neither realistic nor able to adapt to the high-frequency, real-time operating rhythm. And traditional bank account systems are not designed for native interactions between machines.

That’s precisely where the advantage of on-chain payments lies. Stablecoins like USDT and USDC, in a sense, are money made for AI: they have no borders, are programmable, and can settle instantly—perfectly matching AI’s extreme pursuit of 「high speed, low cost, and no friction」. This also means that stablecoins plus wallets gives payments true programmability for the first time.

What this creates is a new form called 「Agent Wallet」—wallets gradually evolve into AI’s asset interface and execution terminal, and in practice, it shows several typical patterns (Further reading: 《From 「Collective Intelligence」 to 「Super Individuals」: How AI Is Reshaping DAOs and the Ethereum Ecosystem?》):

• Non-custodial authorization: You can create a dedicated, restricted sub-wallet for your AI agent. It can trade autonomously within your set limits (for example, no more than 500 USDC per transaction) without you manually confirming each time. The master key is always in your hands; the AI is just your authorized agent;
• Cross-chain asset management: AI can query your assets across more than 100 chains in real time, and rebalance, stake, or arbitrage according to strategies you set. You’re freed from tedious daily monitoring and can focus on higher-level strategic decisions;
• Human-AI collaboration: This isn’t a total hands-off approach—it supports flexible confirmation mechanisms, such as automatic execution for small amounts and reminders for large ones. AI discovers opportunities and builds transactions, while you press the final button. This model can also perfectly combine human judgment with AI execution efficiency;

III. From 「Who Issues Stablecoins」 to 「Who Organizes Them into a Network」

If Visa’s experiment represents a change on the demand side, then on the other side, the blockchain project Tempo—supported by Stripe and Paradigm—announcing the launch of its stablecoin mainnet looks more like an upgrade on the supply side.

Its significance isn’t only that there’s another stablecoin project in the market; it’s a reminder again that the core of industry competition is no longer just 「who can issue stablecoins」, but rather 「who can truly organize stablecoins into a running, operational network」。

In the past few years, the stablecoin industry first solved the issue of issuance.

USDT, USDC, and other mainstream stablecoins have completed large-scale on-chain supply of dollars, making 「digital dollars」 the first time become an asset class that can be used globally. But once supply becomes increasingly mature, what’s truly scarce is no longer stablecoin itself, but the ability to connect on-chain accounts, merchant collections, enterprise payments, and fiat-clearing networks.

This also explains why, from Stripe to Mastercard, and then to Visa and PayPal, traditional payment giants have rolled out intensive stablecoin initiatives over the past two years—and even native crypto platforms have started to penetrate TradFi in return:

• In October 2024, Stripe acquired Bridge, a stablecoin API service provider, for $1.1 billion, setting a new record for M&A deal sizes in the crypto payments space at the time;
• This March, Mastercard acquired stablecoin service provider BVNK for $1.8 billion, refreshing this record;
• Meanwhile, Visa has continued to expand cooperation with Bridge, pushing stablecoin-linked cards to a wider market;
• Looking further back, PayPal introduced PYUSD earlier and has already clearly sent strategic signals;
• In the Hong Kong market, the licensed-compliant exchange OSL announced last year that it would pivot toward stablecoin payment and settlement infrastructure. This year, in January it completed the acquisition of Web3 payment service provider Banxa, and in February it launched the enterprise-level dollar stablecoin USDGO, which complies with U.S. federal regulation and can be distributed in Hong Kong in compliance;

Overall, the attitude of the Crypto and payments-at-large industry toward stablecoins has long shifted from 「wait-and-see」 to 「securing position」。

That’s also why projects like Bridge, BVNK, OSL/USDGO, and today’s Tempo—trying to build the stablecoin network layer—suddenly seem so rare. The reason they are most valuable is precisely due to where they sit: one end connects on-chain assets and wallets, and the other end connects merchants, enterprises, payment service providers, and real-world clearing networks.

The industry has already moved past the initial phase of 「who issues stablecoins」 and entered the second half where the question becomes 「who can truly make stablecoins run」。

Final Thoughts

Stablecoin new highs aren’t just a refreshed scale number; they’re also like a watershed.

If in the past few years, stablecoins solved the question of 「how people complete payments on-chain」, then next it has to face the question of: how to network, scale, and automate the impact of stablecoins?

When AI can call wallets autonomously, when payments are embedded to run inside programs, and when stablecoins become the default settlement currency between global trade, the ceiling of stablecoins will no longer depend only on today’s market transaction volume. And it won’t depend only on the speed at which stablecoins replace the cross-border payments stock either. What it may correspond to is a larger new variable.

That’s why the next round of stablecoin developments worth paying attention to isn’t only whether the supply keeps setting new all-time highs, but whether it can further evolve into 「a global settlement interface」。

And perhaps that’s the real driver behind stablecoins breaking out of the new all-time high plateau.