In 2025, stablecoins emerged as a critical bridge between traditional finance (TradFi) and the crypto economy, driven by regulatory shifts, structural changes in the banking sector, and rising demand for fast, cross-border settlements. More importantly, as stablecoins gained broad adoption among the world’s largest financial institutions, blockchain has increasingly been used as an infrastructure layer within the global digital economy.
This article aims to review the stablecoin sector’s performance in 2025, examine the key trends shaping the market, and outline the forecasts set to define its trajectory in the years ahead.
Stablecoins as a Base Settlement Layer in Digital Financial Ecosystems
By 2025, stablecoins had firmly established themselves as a foundational settlement layer for the digital finance ecosystem, comparable in systemic importance to correspondent accounts and payment gateways in the traditional banking system. Their role has expanded well beyond the crypto market. Stablecoins have become a universal tool for value storage, cross-border settlements, on-chain liquidity, and programmable payments. The question is no longer whether stablecoins are needed, but which use cases make the most sense in practice.
Against this backdrop, Visa’s launch of a global advisory unit for banks, FinTech firms, and corporate clients is particularly telling. The initiative is designed to provide end-to-end solutions focused on assessing stablecoin use cases, guiding technological integration, and shaping long-term deployment strategies.
What distinguishes the current phase of the sector’s evolution is a shift in the factors that underpin trust in stablecoins. Previously, confidence in a stablecoin was driven primarily by technical design or the issuer’s reputation. By 2025, however, decisive weight has shifted to the institutional architecture of issuance. Its core components include:
- Jurisdiction
- Licensing
- Regulatory engagement
- Reporting transparency
- Quality of reserves
This evolution has brought stablecoins closer to traditional financial instruments, while also introducing a new set of systemic challenges. These range from liquidity concentration to the growing influence of political dynamics on the functioning of financial infrastructure.
As a result, stablecoins are no longer a layer built on top of the crypto market. They’ve become its foundation. Any changes to their regulatory treatment, reserve structure, or issuance model now have a multiplicative impact across centralized crypto companies (CeFi), decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, payment providers, and real-economy participants that rely on blockchain networks as a settlement environment.
Regulation as the Primary Driver of the Stablecoin Sector
In 2025, regulation emerged as the defining factor shaping the development trajectory of the stablecoin market. Where regulatory policy had previously been viewed as a source of uncertainty and a constraint on growth, the outcome of 2025 made one point clear. The presence or absence of clear rules now determines competitive advantages among market participants and drives the reallocation of liquidity.
The most consequential regulatory shift was the adoption in the United States of the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act, known as the GENIUS Act, which establishes a federal regulatory framework for stablecoins. The legislation was officially signed into law by U.S. President Donald Trump on July 18, 2025.
Other notable regulatory initiatives across the sector in 2025 included the following:
- Hong Kong adopted a legislative framework for stablecoins and subsequently updated it twice, refining and expanding the licensing requirements for issuers.
- Kazakhstan’s central bank unveiled a comprehensive plan to legalize crypto assets, including stablecoins, and launched a pilot project for a national stablecoin.
- The Bank of England (BoE) released a proposed regulatory regime for systemically important stablecoins, while the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) designated the development and finalization of stablecoin rules as a key priority for 2026.
In addition, Argentina, Brazil, the UAE, Vietnam, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, and other countries adopted legislation governing the crypto market as a whole, including activities related to stablecoins. Several jurisdictions that had already introduced digital asset regulation continued to refine and expand their existing frameworks.
It’s also worth noting that a portion of the most consequential regulatory changes occurred in 2024, although their impact became fully apparent only in the following year. Central to this dynamic was the entry into force of the core provisions of the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation, or MiCA, which took effect on December 30, 2024.
More broadly, according to a PwC report, as of October 2024, 88% of jurisdictions represented on the Financial Stability Board (FSB) had already implemented or were in the process of developing dedicated regulatory regimes for stablecoins.
The emergence of specialized regulatory frameworks has cemented stablecoins’ status as a distinct financial instrument operating at the intersection of FinTech solutions, payment systems, digital assets, and traditional finance. Requirements related to reserves, reporting, risk management, and AML and KYC compliance are no longer optional. They’ve become a prerequisite for business scalability and for meeting the expectations of institutional clients.
As a result, the market has entered a phase of institutionalization. The introduction of transparent regulatory regimes has driven consolidation around large issuers and infrastructure providers capable of meeting the new standards. At the same time, a sharper divide has emerged between the regulated segment focused on real-economy payments and settlements and a less formalized segment that continues to operate with an offshore orientation.
In this sense, regulation in 2025 ceased to serve a purely restrictive role. It now plays a structural role in the stablecoin market, influencing its long-term architecture and setting the bar for transparency and security as the market scales.
Key Quantitative Metrics of the Stablecoin Market
By the end of 2025, the stablecoin market had delivered sustained growth and firmly established itself as one of the largest segments within digital finance. Total market capitalization surpassed $313 billion by year-end, according to CoinGecko. That figure was up more than 50% year over year. Importantly, the expansion was structural rather than speculative, reflecting the continued broadening of real-world stablecoin use cases.
One of the market’s defining features remains its high level of concentration, reflected in two key dynamics:
- U.S. dollar-denominated stablecoins account for 97% of the sector’s total market capitalization.
- USDT alone represents nearly 60% of the stablecoin market, with USDC contributing an additional 25%.
These figures underscore the dominance of a narrow group of issuers and the growing systemic importance of their operational and regulatory decisions. By contrast, the share of alternative and niche stablecoins continued to decline throughout 2025.
Adjusted transaction volumes using stablecoins exceeded $11 trillion in 2025, according to Visa, marking an 85% increase year over year. At the same time, an a16z research report indicates that roughly 20% of total stablecoin turnover in 2025 was only weakly linked to trading activity. This points to rising adoption in settlement and infrastructure-driven use cases.
Data from Artemis shows that monthly stablecoin payment volumes rose by more than 70% between February and August 2025, increasing from $6 billion to $10.2 billion. B2B settlements remain the primary driver of real-world stablecoin usage, with transaction volumes in this segment growing by more than 120% in 2025. Since 2023, cumulative payments executed via stablecoins have exceeded $136 billion, reinforcing their deepening integration into real financial processes.
Taken together, the steady growth in stablecoin usage across payments, settlements, and corporate operations signals a gradual shift in market focus away from speculative activity and toward infrastructure-oriented applications. The quantitative indicators for 2025 highlight not only the scale of the stablecoin market but also its qualitative transformation, including the expanding role of stablecoins as a universal settlement instrument.
Key Strategic Trajectories for the Stablecoin Market
By the end of 2025, the stablecoin market had entered a phase in which further growth will be shaped by infrastructure quality, regulatory clarity, and the depth of integration with the real financial sector. In the years ahead, the market’s evolution will be driven by institutionalization, a redistribution of roles among participants, and deeper functional specialization across stablecoin models.
Key short- and medium-term forecasts include the following:
- Rising regulatory pressure alongside sector-wide standardization. Regulation will extend beyond issuers to the entire value chain, including custodial services, payment providers, and exchange infrastructure such as on-ramp and off-ramp solutions. This will accelerate market consolidation around a limited number of large, regulated issuers and raise barriers to entry for new players. Compliance with regulatory requirements will become the primary prerequisite for scaling and for accessing institutional liquidity.
- Growing use of stablecoins in payment and corporate applications. Cross-border B2B settlements, treasury operations, liquidity management, and intercompany settlements will remain the main demand drivers. As transaction volumes continue to expand, stablecoins will increasingly be viewed not as crypto assets, but as digital equivalents of settlement money embedded directly into the operating workflows of corporations and financial institutions.
- Deeper integration with traditional financial markets. The development of tokenized cash equivalents, tighter links between stablecoins and government securities markets, and the emergence of hybrid reserve management models will strengthen interdependencies between crypto infrastructure and the traditional financial system. This will improve sector resilience, while also making it more sensitive to macroeconomic and monetary conditions.
Finally, competition between privately issued stablecoins, state-backed digital assets, and bank-issued tokenized deposits will be a defining element of the market’s next phase. In the near term, these instruments are likely to coexist, each serving distinct niches. Over the medium term, however, ease of integration, scalability, and regulatory flexibility will determine which payment models gain broader adoption in cross-border settlements and corporate finance.
