When it still made sense to talk about ‘crypto’ eventually going mainstream, stablecoins were already there. The liquidity stablecoins provide to the entire digital asset market have been essential to its operation for years, offering a key bridge between fiat and pure digital assets such as Bitcoin. Now, with the passage of key legislation formalizing the role stablecoins play in the industry (and beyond) and an increasingly volatile global economy making them more attractive to more people, 2025’s legacy seems set to be the year the groundwork was truly laid for stablecoins to take over. Firstly, what is the significance of stablecoins to the digital asset industry?
The total market capitalization of stablecoins is now over $300 billion, a significant share of the $3 trillion attributed to the entire digital asset market. The third-largest coin on the market is a stablecoin: Tether (USDT), whose market cap of $183 billion trails only BTC and Ethereum (ETH). Most significantly, stablecoins dominate in terms of usage. At the time of writing, USDT transaction volume in the past 24 hours was in the neighborhood of $75.5 billion.
This is over $30 billion more than the next-most transacted coin, which was BTC. ETH comes in third, and in fourth place is another stablecoin, USDC, which recorded $18.9 billion in the same period. USDC is leagues ahead of 5th place, which is Solana (pulling in at a measly $3.2 billion). That stablecoins are enjoying such use isn’t a total surprise.
Broadly, they are digital assets that are pegged in some way to the value of another asset, such as a fiat currency. This allows users to enjoy the benefits of true digital assets—fast settlement, ease-of-use, manageability—without needing to be exposed to the volatility of something like BTC. Such assets have special appeal in regions where sending money cross-border (such as in Latin America, which hosts many diasporas across a mobile workforce and is likely to need cost-effective ways to send wages to family back home), but the use cases are many. You might be tempted to attribute the booming figures around stablecoin usage to the passage of the GENIUS Act, the U.S.’s landmark regulatory framework for stablecoins, which entered into force in July 2025.
Indeed, that Act might be the most significant stablecoin development across the entire year. It did much to clarify the role stablecoins will play in the U.S. financial system, providing regulatory paths (two, in fact) for issuers who can choose to seek approval under either state or federal frameworks, depending on their size. It specifies they must be backed 1:1 by high-quality, sufficiently liquid assets, though it is more permissive in precisely what assets are deemed acceptable. It also requires that the reserve be segregated from the rest of the issuer’s assets and must be redeemable.
The passage of the Act serves as something of a green light to institutions and corporations still reluctant to integrate stablecoins into their businesses and balance sheets: positive sanction by the U.S. government will naturally go a long way to piercing that reluctance. “Stablecoins seem here to say,” writes Teresa Ho, head of the institution’s U.S. Short Duration Strategy. But it’s telling that stablecoins enjoyed practically the same share of the pie before the passage of GENIUS, which came into law in July. Although GENIUS had been on the cards for some time (as well as competing stablecoin bill proposals), it’s clear that in passing that framework, the U.S. was scrambling to address what had become an enormous and vital part of the digital asset market and beyond.
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