Stablecoins become internet money

1/ Stablecoins are becoming internet money because they solve a boring but expensive problem: moving dollars across platforms, borders and time zones without waiting for bank hours. McKinsey said tokenized cash is emerging as a global alternative to conventional payments infrastructure, with use cases in cross-border payments, capital-markets settlement, treasury and cash management. (mckinsey.com) 2/ The shift is visible in the numbers. Stripe said stablecoins processed $9 trillion in adjusted payment activity between October 2024 and October 2025, up 87% year over year. Crypto.news separately reported stablecoins settled $33 trillion in 2025, a figure it said exceeded Visa’s annual payment volume. (stripe.com) 3/ That does not mean people are buying coffee onchain at scale. It means stablecoins are increasingly used as the working dollar for internet-native finance: exchange settlement, cross-border transfers, treasury movement, collateral, and merchant or platform payouts. McKinsey said stablecoins are still used mostly as an intermediary today, but the infrastructure around them is expanding. (mckinsey.com) 4/ In crypto markets, stablecoins matter because they are the base pair for activity. JPMorgan said tokenized money market funds are still only about 5% of the stablecoin universe, and crypto participants continue to favor stablecoins because they are easier to use as collateral, settlement cash and a medium of exchange. (coindesk.com) 5/ That is why stablecoins sit at the center of DeFi lending. Borrowers want debt denominated in dollars rather than volatile tokens. Lenders want collateral and repayment streams they can measure in dollars. When more users hold stablecoins, lending markets get a deeper pool of usable onchain cash. This is an inference from how stablecoins function as the preferred intermediary and collateral layer in crypto markets. (mckinsey.com) 6/ The same logic applies to DEX liquidity. A large share of onchain trading routes through stablecoin pairs because traders need a neutral quote asset that does not swing like ETH or SOL. More stablecoin supply generally means more potential liquidity for swaps, market making and arbitrage across venues. Alchemy said Ethereum remains the anchor of the market, with its L1 and L2 ecosystem accounting for well over half of all stablecoin supply. (alchemy.com) 7/ Ethereum and its rollups benefit because that is where regulated finance and crypto-native finance increasingly meet. Alchemy said Ethereum mainnet alone had about $161 billion in stablecoin market cap and roughly $2.09 trillion in trailing 30-day transfer volume, the largest of any chain it tracked. It also said Western institutions and fintechs tend to plug into Ethereum and the EVM ecosystem first. (alchemy.com) 8/ Rollups matter because they lower the cost of using those dollars. If stablecoins are the asset and Ethereum is the trust anchor, rollups are the cheaper settlement lanes for payments, trading and tokenized assets. That helps explain why the stablecoin story is also a market-structure story: usage can migrate to whichever rails keep fees low without sacrificing liquidity or compliance. This is an inference supported by Alchemy’s description of Base, Arbitrum and Polygon extending Ethereum’s reach to cheaper settlement layers. (alchemy.com) 9/ Tokenized real-world assets fit neatly into this model. If a fund, bond or receivable is represented onchain, investors still need cash-like instruments to subscribe, redeem, post margin and settle trades. McKinsey identified trading and capital-markets settlement as a major stablecoin use case, which is why RWA growth tends to pull stablecoin demand with it. (mckinsey.com) 10/ The old payments companies are no longer treating this as a crypto side project. Visa said in December 2025 that U.S. issuer and acquirer partners could settle with Visa in Circle’s USDC, and it put annualized stablecoin settlement volume at more than $3.5 billion. Mastercard said in June 2025 it would enable USDG, PYUSD, USDC and FIUSD across its network. Stripe has published business guides arguing stablecoin payments are becoming practical for cross-border commerce. (usa.visa.com) 11/ Western Union has gone further and launched its own payment stablecoin. The company said this month that USDPT, issued by Anchorage Digital Bank and built on Solana, is designed for real-world payment systems and global settlement. That is a sign incumbents now see stablecoins as infrastructure they may need to issue, not just connect to. (ir.westernunion.com) 12/ The investment implication is straightforward. If stablecoins keep gaining utility, demand should rise for the rails that move them: blockspace, wallets, custody, compliance tooling, liquidity venues, lending markets and settlement protocols. The winners are not automatically the stablecoin issuers alone; they can also be the networks and applications that capture fee flow from stablecoin movement. That conclusion is an inference from the adoption and infrastructure trends described by McKinsey, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard and Alchemy. (mckinsey.com) 13/ The main limit is that stablecoins are still small relative to global money flows. McKinsey said daily stablecoin transactions were about $30 billion when it published in July 2025, less than 1% of global money flows. So the story is not that banks are gone. It is that internet-native dollar rails are becoming too useful for banks, fintechs and crypto platforms to ignore. (mckinsey.com) 14/ Put simply: Bitcoin is a reserve asset story, but stablecoins are increasingly a payments-and-plumbing story. And plumbing tends to matter most when more of the financial system starts running through it. (mckinsey.com)