Opinion by: Jeff Handler, co-founder at OpenTrade.
The technology is proven and digital dollars are circulating. By 2026, the main question isn’t whether stablecoins work but who captures the value of their movement.
2025 didn’t produce a single breakout app or a mass “aha” moment for stablecoins. Instead, by deliberate design, digital dollars quietly became working capital embedded in financial plumbing. Today they operate as invisible infrastructure — useful, ubiquitous, and unnoticed.
The real metric that matters is velocity, not market cap. While crypto discourse long fixated on coin prices and rivalries, on-chain data shows stablecoin transaction volume in 2025 topped $33 trillion, a 72% jump from 2024. With supply in the low hundreds of billions, those figures imply intense reuse across settlements, payments, treasuries, and rails. Transfer volume grew faster than supply, and stablecoins decoupled from mere spot trading.
That brings the Quantity Theory of Money into play: money that circulates faster reduces the supply needed for the same economic activity. Stablecoin quantity and velocity have reached levels that prove their utility, particularly in Latin America.
LatAm offers a clear blueprint. In developed markets, stablecoins are often used for yield or trading. In Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela they are survival tools against inflation and currency volatility. Locals move funds rapidly to preserve purchasing power; in Argentina, stablecoins account for a majority of on-chain activity. Where local currency fails as a store of value, stablecoins fill an infrastructural role — a pattern likely to repeat elsewhere under similar economic pressures.
Who benefits from this movement? A pyramid of rent extractors has already formed. Issuers earn from reserve management and distribution — Tether’s profitability per employee is a telling example. Exchanges take fees on settlements and routing. Banks and neobanks earn by offering tokenized deposits and on-chain settlement. Regulators don’t collect the rents directly but shape who can extract them through licensing and compliance.
In markets like Latin America, new on- and off-ramps, wallets, and exchanges compete to capture fee margins. Their business model doesn’t require overall market growth; it needs sustained velocity.
For that velocity to be durable, incentives must align. Instead of cascading yields up to intermediaries, the ecosystem should consider returning more value to the users who generate activity. Those users — merchants, remitters, and everyday savers — deserve a share of the rewards.
When stablecoins are so commonplace people stop discussing them as a novelty, they’ll have become infrastructure. With 2025 proving they can handle tens of trillions in flows, the experiment is over. The question now is governance and who gets paid as the business of stablecoins truly begins.
Opinion by: Jeff Handler, co-founder at OpenTrade.