Source: insights4vc; Compiled by: Shaw, Golden Finance

Stablecoins can no longer be understood only as collateral for crypto transactions. According to data from the Federal Reserve, as of April 2026, the stablecoin market size has reached approximately US$317 billion, an increase of more than 50% from the beginning of 2025. At the same time, the focus of policy discussions has shifted. Today, the core institutions studying stablecoins are no longer just crypto market participants, but also include the International Monetary Fund, the Bank for International Settlements, the European Central Bank and central banks of various countries. This is an important signal:Stablecoins are increasingly being considered for research and analysis as payment tools, reserve asset carriers, U.S. debt market participants, cross-border settlement tools, and the underlying building blocks of tokenized capital markets.

The core trade-off today is not the opposition between regulation and innovation, but a series of interrelated financial trade-offs:

• Stricter and safer reserve rules can reduce the risk of runs, but will compress the issuer’s profit margin;

• Prohibiting issuers from directly paying interest income may alleviate the risk of bank deposit loss, but it will push market demand to packaged products, wallets, exchanges, tokenized funds, and higher-risk income structures;

• USD stablecoins have boosted the demand for safe assets in the United States and expanded the scope of the US dollar, but also heightened other countries’ concerns about the damage to their monetary sovereignty;

• Instant settlement and all-weather liquidity optimize some payment and fund management processes. Once stablecoins form large-scale applications, they will be deeply bound to short-term U.S. debt, bank deposits, foreign exchange, custodians, market makers, payment processors, and tokenized securities markets.

Clear category classification is crucial: Payment-type stablecoins are digital bearer instruments, designed to maintain parity and serve as quasi-currency settlement assets. They are usually endorsed by cash, short-term treasury bonds, repurchase agreements, bank deposits, and can also be supported by central bank balances under some regulatory frameworks; income type stablecoins add investment income in addition to the base currency value, and can pay interest directly, or It can be realized indirectly through packaging products; Tokenized money market funds are essentially fund shares, not payment currencies - even if they circulate on the chain and the net value remains stable, their properties are completely different; Tokenized deposits are digital liabilities of commercial banks, retaining a two-tier currency system structure, and completing settlement through regulated intermediaries; Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) It is the direct liability of the central bank.

These are not differences in literal concepts, but fundamental differences that directly determine risk-bearing entities, income attribution, exchange mechanisms, and monetary policy transmission paths.

For institutional readers, the reality is very clear: the higher the compliance and security of a stablecoin, the closer it is to a regulated financial infrastructure; and when it attracts users with income returns, incentive rights, programmability, and all-weather liquidity, it will directly compete with bank deposits, money market funds, and the sovereign currency system.

Because of this, the winning business model is no longer limited to simply issuing stablecoins, but extends to channel distribution, ecological coordination, compliance risk control, settlement and clearing, corporate fund management integration, and comprehensive risk management. Stable currency issuance is gradually becoming one of the layers in the entire financial structure.

The stablecoin market has left the native encryption stage

Nowadays, the stablecoin market is large enough to have a substantial impact on traditional finance. The Federal Reserve estimates that as of April 6, 2026, the total market value of stablecoins is approximately US$317 billion. On May 8, 2026, European Central Bank President Lagarde said: Stablecoins have moved from the fringes of policy issues to the core stage. In six years, their scale has grown from less than US$10 billion to more than US$300 billion, and the market is still mainly denominated in US dollars. She also mentioned that Tether and Circle alone control nearly 90% of the market share.

This market concentration is not an abstract concept. Tether disclosed that as of March 31, 2026, its token liabilities were approximately US$183.4 billion, its direct and indirect exposure to US short-term Treasury bonds was approximately US$141 billion, and its reserve buffer amounted to US$8.23 billion. The company also describes itself as the 17th largest holder of U.S. Treasury securities in the world. At the end of the same quarter, the size of USDC in circulation on Circle was $77 billion. The size of leading stablecoin issuers has now reached a new level: reserve management, asset custody, counterparty structure, and regulatory adaptation are no longer just niche issues in the crypto circle, but have become core issues at the level of financial market infrastructure.

Major foreign holders of U.S. Treasury securities

It is also crucial to distinguish between the total amount of transfers on paper and the actual size of payments in the economy. In discussions related to stablecoins, many analyzes have still not been able to strictly clarify the differences between the two. A 2026 McKinsey analysis citing research from Artemis and Castle Island estimated that the bottom-up real payment scale of stablecoins in 2025 will be approximately US$390 billion, of which business-to-business (B2B) payments will be approximately US$220 billion, person-to-person (P2P) transfers will be approximately US$100 billion, and bank card-related transfers will be approximately US$30 billion.

Although these volumes are of practical significance, they are still far lower than the total amount of transfers on the original chain. The Bank of Italy has also made a similar classification: the market often cites the annual transaction scale of stablecoins as approximately 26 trillion to 35 trillion U.S. dollars, but the real scale of use in the real economy is reasonably estimated to be only about 400 billion to 1.3 trillion U.S. dollars; the bank also estimates that the scale of stablecoin bank card-related business in 2025 will be approximately 4.5 billion U.S. dollars.

This is why 2025-2026 should be regarded as a transition period for the industry, rather than the final steady state. The U.S. "GENIUS Act" has been implemented into the federal payment-based stablecoin regulatory framework; the European Union's "Cryptocurrency Asset Market Regulation (MiCA)" will be fully effective from December 2024; Circle will become a public information disclosure company; Visa will expand stablecoin settlement to nine blockchains; Mastercard officially announced the acquisition of crypto payment company BVNK; Stripe completed the acquisition of Bridge; PayPal expanded the PYUSD stablecoin in its full application ecosystem.

At the same time, Europe continues to pilot euro stablecoins and tokenized deposit infrastructure, but compared to the United States, it has always maintained a more cautious attitude towards treating stablecoins as monetary tools.

The stablecoin industry has passed through the first stage of development - In the early days, it was mainly used for exchange settlement, offshore US dollar acquisition, and crypto-leveraged lending; now it is entering the second stage: Regulators, asset managers, payment networks, banks and enterprise software giants are all working together to define the shape of a secure stablecoin economic system. In the next ten years, the profit margins of issuers, the progress of payment popularization, and the regulatory structure will all be settled in this context.

The underlying logic of traditional finance embracing stablecoins

Traditional finance’s entry into stablecoins stems from pragmatic business needs rather than conceptual recognition. The strongest implementation scenarios in the short term are still cross-border payments and corporate fund management. The Federal Reserve’s March 2026 research report clarified the reasons behind this: cross-border payments have long relied on lengthy chains of correspondent banks, high fixed costs of compliance, and foreign exchange inventory management, while the network coverage of correspondent banks continues to shrink. Stablecoins allow individuals, businesses and small and medium-sized banks to directly transfer payment tokens, reducing intermediate friction; large banks still play an important role as liquidity and compliance counterparties.

But stablecoins cannot completely eliminate payment friction. The Federal Reserve clearly reminds: The cost of on-chain transfers may be very low, but the cost of deposits and withdrawals of fiat currencies remains high; foreign exchange clearing still needs to be finally implemented, and local fiat currency liquidity remains critical; because payees are often unwilling to bear foreign currency exposure, market maker inventory entities are still indispensable. In addition, whether stablecoins are backed by deposits, short-term U.S. Treasuries or reserves, they may still have an impact on central bank balance sheets. Fabio Panetta, the former governor of the Bank of Italy, gave a pragmatic empirical reminder in May 2026: cross-border remittance solutions based on stable coins do not have systemic cost advantages in all channels, and the cost of fiat currency deposits and withdrawals in some channels is even as high as 9%.

The current area where stablecoins have the most prominent advantages is not general mass retail payments, but high-friction, all-weather, uninterrupted segmented business processes. Payment data in 2025 shows that B2B corporate payment is currently the largest application category in the real economy; although bank card-related projects are growing, the absolute scale is still small. Visa's own stablecoin settlement pilot has an annualized scale of US$7 billion as of April 2026. It has supported more than 130 stablecoin-related card projects in more than 50 countries, and its business covers nine blockchains. Compared with the total scale of global bank cards, these values ​​are still not large, but they are enough to prove the actual implementation of the system at the institutional level, rather than a simple experiment.

The appeal of stablecoins to enterprises is obvious: 24×7 liquidity, programmable automatic settlement, real-time transaction finality on the chain, and the ability to easily embed multi-party collaborative business processes that are not restricted by bank business hours. Circle highlights corporate treasury management integration cases, such as treasury management platform Kyriba, which has embedded USDC functionality for corporate treasury teams.

The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Tokenization Report also summarizes the underlying common logic: Shared ledgers, programmability, flexible custody, and composability. These differentiated characteristics make tokenized finance superior to the traditional decentralized and fragmented ledger and message interaction system in terms of operational efficiency.

There is another type of forward-looking scenario that is still in its early stages but deserves to be taken seriously: Machine-native payment and AI agent payment. The intelligent technology stack and gateway micro-payment solution launched by Circle is designed for zero gas fees, high-frequency small-amount transfers, and even supports micro-transactions of less than 1 cent - such transactions are completely uneconomical on traditional payment tracks.

This does not mean that the current volume of AI payments is huge, but that issuers increasingly regard the machine business ecosystem and developer infrastructure as future revenue growth points, especially in the context of continued narrowing of reserve spreads. The core key lies not in the hype of the AI ​​concept, but in the logic of the business model: once stablecoin profits no longer rely on reserve interest margins, issuers must turn to transaction fees, ecological coordination services, and software infrastructure to obtain revenue.

Therefore, institutions should maintain a rational and balanced perspective. At present, stablecoins have been implemented in cross-border capital flows, dealer settlements, encryption-related commerce, corporate liquidity management, and bank card related pilots. In the next three to five years, it is expected to be further popularized into a wider range of B2B payments, supplier payments, tokenized fund settlements, and smart agent payment tracks. However, it is not yet mature enough to become the base of universal retail currency, and the existing data cannot support this conclusion.

Reserve asset security and issuer’s profit model

The report released by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in April 2026 is the most authoritative analytical benchmark for interpreting the industry landscape. Its core conclusion is very straightforward: Payment-type stablecoins can improve payment efficiency, empower innovation, and expand financial inclusion, but they are naturally vulnerable to runs; forcing issuers to allocate high-security assets can reduce the risk of runs, but it will reduce profit margins and even weaken the initial motivation of companies to issue stablecoins.

In the IMF model, issuers without regulatory constraints will actively allocate high-risk assets to obtain higher profits; from the perspective of society as a whole, a safer reserve asset structure is more stable, but it will compress the economic returns of issuance - unless other sources of income are developed, the willingness to issue will be significantly reduced.

This set of theoretical deductions has been confirmed in market data. The Federal Reserve pointed out that in 2025, the market acceptance of stablecoins with safer and more liquid reserves will grow at a significantly higher rate; at the same time, the quality of reserve assets of various issuers varies significantly.

According to the Federal Reserve's summary of public assurance disclosures: Tether's total reserves are approximately 1.04 times for every US$1 of circulating tokens, but high-grade reserves (U.S. debt, U.S. debt repurchases, bank deposits) are only approximately 0.74 times. In contrast, USDC is fully reserved with high-grade assets throughout the process. In other words, asset security has become the core competitive variable of stablecoins.

But security does not come without a price. Once reserve assets are limited to cash, short-term Treasury bills, repurchase agreements, bank deposits, money market claims, or central bank reserves, the attributes of stablecoin issuers tend to be that of a narrow group of regulated banks or money market infrastructure institutions. At this time, the core profit basically becomes the reserve interest margin business plus compliance costs.

Circle's financial report clearly reflects the high sensitivity of this profit to interest rates: in the first quarter of 2026, benefiting from the growth in USDC circulation, reserve interest income reached US$653 million, but the reserve yield fell by 66 basis points; distribution and other operating costs reached US$407 million, and management clearly mentioned the increase in distribution expenses. This is no longer a profit model for pure software companies, but a capital-heavy model that uses balance sheet interest income to offset distribution and infrastructure operating costs.

Case Study of Listed Enterprises: Circle’s Business Status

Circle’s financial report for the first quarter of 2026 clearly reflects the structural characteristics of the industry: the USDC circulation scale at the end of the quarter was US$77 billion; the scale of on-chain transactions in a single quarter reached US$21.5 trillion; the overall revenue plus reserve interest revenue was US$694 million, the net profit from continuing operations was US$55 million, and the adjusted profit before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization was US$151 million; non-interest income such as subscriptions, services, and transactions was US$42 million.

As of the last 30 days of data calculations as of March 31, 2026, the annualized transaction size of the Circle payment network reached US$8.3 billion. In April, a custodial payment service was launched, allowing financial institutions to access stablecoin payments without directly managing digital assets.

These data point to two major conclusions: First, reserve interest is still the basis of revenue; second, Circle has begun to reduce its dependence on reserve interest margins and continues to lay out the upstream and downstream infrastructure ecology: developer tools, enterprise payments, payment network routing, AI agent underlying architecture, etc.

The logic of Circle’s ARC project can also be understood from this perspective: the ARC token pre-sale scale is US$222 million, and the fully diluted network valuation is US$3 billion, but this is not a traditional equity financing. The ARC white paper makes it clear that the token is a network coordination asset, not equity, profit dividend rights, or dividend income rights, and it has not yet been officially launched. The core intention of Circle is to go beyond the simple issuance link and extend to the settlement layer and ecological coordination layer infrastructure.

The situation with Tether is completely different. Tether does not disclose a complete financial report disclosure system like Circle, but its first quarter 2026 assurance report shows the super profitability brought about by the scale effect plus reserve spread, channel voice, and flexible market positioning: single-quarter net profit is approximately 1.04 billion U.S. dollars, reserve buffer funds are 8.23 ​​billion U.S. dollars, and U.S. debt exposure is 141 billion U.S. dollars.

The extremely strong profitability also makes Tether an important capital channel for global offshore dollar demand to flow into the U.S. Treasury market.

Tether’s assets as of March 31, 2026

The price and trade-off are: Tether’s reserve asset model, information disclosure methods, and regulatory boundaries are always different from the standard paradigm that U.S. policymakers are increasingly leaning towards after the implementation of the GENIUS Act.

The more macro conclusion is that stablecoins using a security reserve structure are breaking away from the traditional issuer profit logic in the encryption industry and turning to a financial infrastructure-based profit model. Once interest income from reserve assets continues to shrink, leading issuers must open up new revenue channels: merchant fees, corporate services, transaction routing services, software products, network service fees, or data-related derivative income.

The IMF’s analysis of China’s electronic payment service providers also confirms the same development pattern. After this type of institution's business model approaches that of a narrow bank, merchant fees and data cross-subsidies have become core income sources. Stablecoin issuers are evolving along the same path.

Revenue returns, market popularity and channel competition

The policy logic of regulatory authorities to restrict interest payments on stablecoins is very straightforward: Regulators do not want payment stablecoins to evolve into unregulated bank deposits. A briefing from the Bank for International Settlements Financial Stability Institute (BIS FSI) pointed out that in the mainstream regulatory frameworks it has sorted out, issuers of payment-type stablecoins are uniformly prohibited from paying interest directly on user balances. The Federal Reserve's March 2026 report also clarified the U.S. position: payment-type stablecoins can be fully reserved by safe assets, but issuers are prohibited from paying interest directly, and indirect rewards are not within the scope of the ban.

This regulatory provision leaves a major strategic question: If users cannot obtain direct interest income from the issuer, where will the market demand flow?

The report of the Bank for International Settlements is of great reference value. It divides various sources of stablecoin income: direct interest payment by the issuer, third-party reward and loyalty programs, exchange/crypto asset service provider (CASP) re-lending business, margin and derivatives mortgage, DeFi lending agreement, tokenized fund products, and pure interest-paying stablecoins. These channels are different in terms of economic logic, but from a user perspective, they are essentially all profit-making from U.S. dollar asset management.

This means: Regulation will only change the carrier of income, but it cannot curb the market's demand for profit.

Therefore, the competitors of zero-yield payment stablecoins go far beyond bank deposits, and include: money market funds, tokenized U.S. bond products, brokerage cash management, financial technology platform balances, exchange incentive plans, and packaged derivative assets such as sUSDS.

The European Central Bank indirectly expressed the same view. Lagarde pointed out that the market value of tokenized money market funds will nearly double in 2025 to about 7 billion euros. Franklin Templeton is a typical case: its Franklin Chain U.S. Government Monetary Fund invests at least 99.5% of its funds in U.S. government securities, cash and U.S. debt repurchase products; as of April 30, 2026, its net assets reached US$824.6 million, with daily dividends and dividends; and a clear reminder: This product is not a bank account and does not enjoy government deposit insurance. It is not a currency in itself, but it is precisely the main target for stablecoin users to divert their profits.

The market has circumvented the ban on direct interest payments through channel distribution. PayPal announced in March 2026 that it would launch PYUSD in 70 countries and regions through PayPal accounts and provide currency holding rewards to currency holders in the APP. The issuer, Paxos, separately emphasized that its reserve assets consist of U.S. dollar deposits, U.S. debt and cash equivalents.

The key to the underlying architecture is that reserve asset endorsement is only one layer, and user-oriented incentive rights can be placed at other levels of the financial architecture. This is the quasi-regulatory arbitrage space that policymakers are trying to define but are difficult to clarify. It is also destined that the boundaries between payment instruments and investment products will remain controversial for a long time.

Osero and the rise of stablecoin yield infrastructure

The most noteworthy industry case in May 2026 is no longer just an ordinary stablecoin issuer, but an underlying service provider for professional income distribution. According to Stablewatch’s incubation industry research report, Osero completed US$13.5 million in financing, led by Sky Ecosystem and co-led by Plasma.

The product structure is of great industry enlightenment. Osero Earn is designed for wallets, digital banks, custodians, exchanges and similar platforms, helping such platforms to access Sky savings yields without building their own asset management infrastructure. Osero App provides direct access for retail users and institutional users; Osero Foundry serves as the asset creation base for asset managers and structured product issuers.

There is still limited public information about its actual operating data, but its product logic is very clear: If the regulated payment stablecoin cannot directly pay interest, then channel distribution, asset encapsulation, and embedded income underlying facilities may become one of the most valuable core control nodes in the entire market.

The underlying revenue engine is equally critical. Sky Ecosystem's first quarter report of 2026 shows that the size of sUSDS at the end of the quarter reached US$6.49 billion, becoming the largest income-based stablecoin in existence; during the same period, USDS circulation reached US$11.7 billion. Sky’s public information positions sUSDS as a floating-rate savings token rather than a payment token. This definition is crucial: the market has begun to separate and isolate U.S. dollar assets for trading and U.S. dollars for income management.

The actual implementation level means: the interest payment regulatory rules for payment-type stablecoins cannot eliminate competition with bank deposits. They will only shift the competition from stablecoin issuers to asset encapsulation protocols, ecological platforms, embedded income products, fund management infrastructure and other tracks.

For institutions that need to make decisions in an increasingly fragmented market, Stablewatch is more suitable as a market intelligence and risk analysis platform rather than a source of asset allocation investment advice. Its research content focuses on real-time data analysis of stablecoins and income-based stablecoins, covering dimensions such as annualized yields, total locked assets, real-world assets, treasury mechanisms, and token-level risk indicators.

The emergence of professional analysis tools is a signal in itself. Stablecoin economics have become complex enough that tracking revenue sources, collateral quality, liquidity levels, legal structures, and platform risks now requires specialized intelligence and analysis infrastructure.

Dollarization, spillovers and the public debt channel

A working paper by the European Central Bank on private currency and public debt is one of the most important results in the recent field of stable currency research. It no longer regards stablecoins as just payment instruments, but repositions them as macro-financial transmission mechanisms.

The core point of view is:The U.S. dollar-backed payment stablecoin forms a global safe asset transmission channel, directly binding private currency creation and global payment demand to U.S. public debt. When overseas users increase their holdings of U.S. dollar stablecoins, the issuer will increase its holdings of short-term U.S. Treasury bonds; when demand shrinks, the issuer will sell U.S. debt. This will not only expand the global reach of the U.S. dollar, lower the U.S. risk-free rate of return, but also intensify cross-border financial spillover effects; if the scale continues to expand, the stability of the digital currency system with the U.S. dollar as its core may decline.

A working paper by the Bank for International Settlements on stablecoins and safe asset prices provides market empirical evidence for this transmission mechanism. Through daily data calculations from 2021 to 2025, it is found that when there is a net inflow of funds of two standard deviations in the US dollar stable currency, the three-month U.S. bond yield will fall by about 2.5-3.5 basis points; during the period of scarcity of U.S. bond supply, the decline can reach 5-8 basis points.

This does not mean that stablecoins currently dominate the U.S. debt market; rather, as their popularity continues to increase, stablecoin capital flows may become a non-negligible component of short-term public debt demand, and at the same time open up new channels to allow encryption and payment-related needs to directly affect the pricing of safe assets.

This also explains why stablecoins are strategically attractive to the United States, but make other countries feel passive. The Bank for International Settlements pointed out in its study of the international monetary system that approximately 98% of the world's stablecoin assets are denominated in US dollars, and its widespread adoption is likely to strengthen the existing currency hierarchy. The report also warned that digital dollarization will seriously erode the monetary sovereignty of other countries and is particularly dangerous to emerging markets and developing economies whose macroeconomics are already fragile.

Thus, stablecoins are not just a payment technology, but also a private distribution channel for offshore dollars.

Europe’s response is not simply to question the boycott, but to build an alternative financial architecture. In her speech in May 2026, Lagarde stated that Europe should not default to overseas private assets as the default settlement object for tokenized finance; instead, it should rely on tokenized deposits, interoperable euro instruments, and central bank currencies as core settlement anchors.

The European Commission has a unanimous position. Its April 2026 report believes that although stablecoins can optimize some cross-border payments, tokenized deposits can retain the current two-tier currency system and are more suitable for European corporate capital management, liquidity operations and tokenized securities settlement scenarios. The "Crypto-Asset Market Regulations (MiCA)" also sets rigid requirements for prudent operations, corporate governance and reserve assets for stablecoin issuers. Compliant issuers are also required to deposit large amounts of reserve funds in credit institutions.

The British position is closer to the European camp. The Bank of England has formulated regulatory rules for the systemically important pound stablecoin, focusing on currency stability, operational resilience, local asset endorsement and local regulatory jurisdiction. On the one hand, the consultation document recognizes the payment potential of stablecoins, but on the other hand, it emphasizes that stablecoins and central bank digital currencies are different tools; systemically important stablecoins require prudential regulatory standards that are much higher than the loose rules of the ordinary encryption market.

Global regulatory and strategic differences have become clear: the United States is more inclined to leverage stablecoins to extend U.S. dollar financial infrastructure around the world; Europe and the United Kingdom pay more attention to currency control, prudential supervision, and the independent control of the underlying settlement structure.

Banks, tokenized markets and deep strategic implications

The core risk in the next stage is not the run on a single stable currency, but the superposition and resonance of the run risk and the risk of deep financial correlation. The Federal Reserve's 2026 Financial Stability Report pointed out three emerging vulnerabilities: complex intermediary chains, vertical business integration, and deep binding to traditional finance. Typical manifestations include: wallet service providers rely on third-party stablecoin infrastructure, payment institutions build their own issuance platforms, exchanges operate exclusive public chains, and stablecoin issuers build self-developed underlying structures, etc.

To put it bluntly, the stablecoin industry structure has been layered, and operational shocks, liquidity shocks, and market confidence shocks can be transmitted in multiple directions and cross-diffused at each level.

Banks have two key roles in this round of transformation:

• First, we are facing the pressure of deposit loss. The European Central Bank’s March 2026 Monetary Policy Transmission Working Paper proposed the deposit substitution effect: the popularity of stablecoins will cause retail bank deposits to flow to digital assets, forcing banks to rely more on wholesale financing, and in some cases will compress credit to the real economy.

• Second, banks can proactively issue tokenized currencies to respond. JPMorgan Chase positions JPM Coin as a 1:1 bank deposit token, providing all-weather settlement services for institutions; Reuters reported in March 2026 that Bank of Montreal plans to launch a tokenized cash platform to serve exchange margin trading and corporate fund management scenarios.

Industry strategic differentiation is becoming increasingly clear: Banks prefer tokenized deposits/tokenized cash; financial technology and native crypto institutions prefer open stablecoins.

This difference also shapes the landscape of tokenized capital markets. The final steady-state pattern will not be winner-take-all, but layered coexistence:

• Stablecoin: As a common cash base for various tokenized markets that can be transferred across platforms;

• Tokenized money market fund: undertakes the underlying function of income management;

• Tokenized deposits: Becoming a bank’s native underpinning for regulated balance sheets and corporate treasury processes;

• Central Bank Digital Currency (especially wholesale CBDC, distributed ledger channel connecting central bank currency): as a public settlement anchor.

The World Economic Forum, the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the Bank of Italy have all reached a consensus: Tokenization can only develop safely and on a large scale when settlement assets, legal rights, governance rules, and cross-chain interoperability are unified and collaboratively designed.

As a result, the industry competition landscape has long gone beyond the single dimension of "which stablecoin will ultimately win."

• Issuing side: The leaders are still Circle and Tether, PayPal and Paxos have entered the market as mainstream channels, and Societe Generale FORGE and Qivalis represent the European banking system;

• Payment orchestration layer: Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Bridge, and BVNK are building connection infrastructure between legal currency and on-chain assets;

• Income and real-world asset layer: Sky, tokenized funds, asset encapsulation protocols, on-chain treasury service providers, competing for the "interest-bearing digital dollar" track;

• Data analysis and risk layer: Tools such as Stablewatch are increasingly valuable - it is no longer possible to judge mortgage quality, liquidity and return risks based on token codes alone.

For investors and practitioners, the most valuable track is often close to the issuance process, rather than simply the issuance itself. Including: stablecoin business orchestration, compliance and wallet infrastructure, corporate fund management tools, fiat currency deposit and withdrawal liquidity services, accounting and clearing reconciliation, risk intelligence analysis, revenue routing and distribution, tokenized fund settlement, AI intelligent agent payment channel, etc.

The industry still has several core issues that need to be answered: Will regulation reduce stablecoin issuance to a homogeneous general business? In a low interest rate environment, can the original profit model of the issuer be sustained? Are users willing to accept interest-free payment stablecoins, or will asset encapsulation products become a truly popular carrier? Will the large-scale development of stablecoins amplify spillover fluctuations in the U.S. bond market? Will banks choose to cooperate with and compete head-on with the stablecoin ecosystem, or fall back on the self-developed deposit token model? Among the current massive transactions, how many are sustainable real economy payments, and how many are just exchange settlements, fund transfers, and liquidity turnover in the native crypto market?

Currently, the public data on the real scale of stablecoin use in the real economy is still incomplete, and the data gaps outside of bank card-related businesses and corporate reporting channels are particularly obvious.

A clear conclusion can be drawn from all the evidence: Stablecoins are being deeply integrated into traditional finance, not by maintaining the attributes of crypto products under loose supervision, but by transforming into regulated payment, reserve, settlement and revenue infrastructure.

The more secure the stablecoin reserve structure becomes, the closer the issuer will be to narrow banks, money market operating institutions or payment network nodes; and the more attractive the product will be with its benefits, incentives, and cross-platform circulation, the more directly it will compete with bank deposits, fund products, and the sovereign currency system.

ThereforeThe real proposition of the next stage is not whether stablecoins can survive under supervision, but rather what type of financial institution a successful stablecoin issuer will eventually evolve into when security, profitability, channel distribution, and monetary policy impacts are all priced by the market.