The technology is no longer the question. By 2026 the debate has shifted: stablecoins work. The issue now is who captures the economic value created by their movement.
2025 did not produce a single breakout consumer app or a cultural “aha” moment. Instead, digital dollars quietly became embedded as working capital inside financial plumbing. They operate today like invisible infrastructure—useful, ubiquitous, and largely taken for granted.
The important metric is velocity, not market cap. While much crypto conversation still centers on coin prices and rivalries, on-chain data shows stablecoin transaction volume in 2025 exceeded $33 trillion, a 72% increase from 2024. With supply sitting in the low hundreds of billions, that level of flow implies intense reuse across settlements, payments, corporate treasuries, and rails. Transfer volume grew faster than supply, signaling that stablecoins have decoupled from a narrow role in spot trading and become instruments of repeated economic activity.
That dynamic echoes the Quantity Theory of Money: money that circulates faster reduces the supply required to support the same level of transactions. The combination of higher velocity and modest supply demonstrates real utility, and the clearest evidence is outside wealthy, stable-currency markets.
Latin America is a blueprint for how stablecoins function as infrastructure. In developed markets stablecoins are often used for yield chasing or as a trading utility. In Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela they are tools of preservation—mechanisms to protect purchasing power and move value quickly amid inflation and currency volatility. In Argentina, stablecoins represent a majority of on-chain activity. Where local currency fails as a dependable store of value, stablecoins step in as essential plumbing, a pattern likely to repeat wherever macro stress makes native money less useful.
So who benefits? A hierarchy of rent-seekers has already formed. Issuers earn from reserve management and distribution economics — Tether’s outsized profitability per employee is illustrative. Exchanges and custodians capture fees on settlement and routing. Banks and neobanks collect margins by offering tokenized deposits and on-chain settlement services. Regulators may not take those rents directly but they determine who is permitted to extract them through licensing and compliance regimes.
In regions like Latin America, new on- and off-ramps, wallets, and local exchanges are competing to capture fee margins. Their success doesn’t depend on perpetual market growth; it depends on sustaining velocity.
For that velocity to be durable, incentives matter. Instead of cascading fees up the stack, the ecosystem should consider returning more value to the end users who create activity—merchants, remitters, and everyday savers deserve a fairer share of the economic upside.
When stablecoins become so ordinary people stop talking about them, they will have become infrastructure. With 2025 proving they can handle tens of trillions in flows, the technical experiment is over. The real question ahead is governance: who gets paid, how the returns are distributed, and which models will best align incentives with broad, sustainable use.
Opinion by Jeff Handler, co-founder at OpenTrade.