Stablecoins Enter the $300 Billion Era: Three Main Themes Reveal the Next Growth Cycle

Author: Biteye Core Contributor Louis

Editor: Biteye Core Contributor Denise

Community: @BiteyeCN

Original Title: $300 Billion New Blue Ocean: Three Main Lines of the Stablecoin Ecosystem

01. Introduction: A Historic Turning Point for the Stablecoin Ecosystem

From 2024 to 2025, the global stablecoin market is experiencing unprecedented explosive growth. As of October, the total market capitalization of stablecoins has surpassed $300 billion, up from $166.3 billion at the end of 2024, representing a staggering annual growth rate of 82.9%. This growth not only sets a new historical record but also marks a fundamental shift for stablecoins from marginal speculative tools to mainstream financial infrastructure.

Current total stablecoin market and trading volume data

A historic breakthrough in the regulatory environment has provided strong momentum for this growth: In July 2025, the US GENIUS Act was officially signed into law, establishing the first federal-level stablecoin payment framework. Meanwhile, the EU's MiCA regulations came fully into effect in December 2024, laying a solid foundation for the standardized development of the stablecoin industry.

Stablecoin growth after the GENIUS Act

Although USDT and USDC still dominate, their market share has dropped from 91.6% to 83.6%. The stablecoin market is quietly changing, with emerging stablecoin projects rising rapidly, such as:

• Ethena's USDe market cap reaches $11 billion

• PayPal's PYUSD market cap surpasses $2.76 billion

• The RWA-backed stablecoin market size reaches $35 billion, with an annual growth of 46%

Market share of various stablecoins

02. Dedicated Stablecoin Public Chains: Infrastructure Revolution

Traditional blockchains expose significant pain points when processing stablecoin transactions: Ethereum's high gas fees often reach tens of dollars, and transaction confirmation times range from seconds to minutes; while Tron has lower fees, it faces centralization risks and technical limitations.

The new generation of dedicated stablecoin public chains has achieved qualitative breakthroughs through technological innovation. These chains generally support high throughput of 1000+ TPS, zero or ultra-low fees, and sub-second transaction confirmation. More importantly, they design stablecoins as native gas tokens, completely eliminating the impact of cryptocurrency price volatility on user experience.

Plasma: The Flagship Project of the Tether Ecosystem

As a leading project in the sector, Plasma has raised a total of $75.8 million, including a $20.5 million Series A round in February 2025 led by Bitfinex and Framework Ventures, with participation from notable investors such as Peter Thiel and Bybit. After the mainnet test launch on September 25, 2025, TVL quickly reached $5.3 billion.

On the technical side, Plasma adopts a customized PlasmaBFT consensus mechanism, achieving sub-second finality and processing capacity of over 2000 TPS. Its core innovation lies in the Paymaster system, enabling truly zero-fee USDT transfers, while supporting custom gas tokens and confidential payment features. The project has integrated Chainlink oracles and built a complete DeFi ecosystem through non-custodial Bitcoin bridging (pBTC).

Stable: Institutional-Grade USDT Optimization Solution

Stable is positioned as "real-world payment rails," focusing on institutional-grade USDT applications. In July 2025, the project secured $28 million in seed funding, jointly invested by Franklin Templeton, Hack VC, PayPal Ventures, and Bitfinex. The project uses StableBFT consensus, supports 10k TPS and second-level finality, while maintaining EVM compatibility.

Stable's technical features include using USDT as the native gas token and achieving zero-fee P2P transfers through account abstraction. Enterprise features include batch transfer aggregation, compliant private transfers, and cross-chain USDT0 support. The project has integrated PayPal's PYUSD stablecoin, focusing on fiat on/off ramps and debit card issuance.

Arc: Circle's Dedicated Ecosystem

Developed by Circle, Arc is positioned as the "home of stablecoin finance," deeply integrated with the Circle ecosystem. The project uses USDC as the native gas token, ensuring a predictable USD-denominated fee structure. Technically, it adopts the Malachite BFT consensus engine, supporting 3000 TPS and sub-second finality.

Arc's uniqueness lies in its built-in FX engine, supporting quote-based stablecoin conversion and optional privacy features for compliant shielding. The project is also exploring reversible USDC transactions to address fraud issues and is collaborating with the German Stock Exchange to promote adoption in the EU market.

In terms of fundraising scale and technical progress, Plasma holds a leading edge with the support of the Tether ecosystem and the earliest mainnet launch. Stable builds differentiated competitiveness through institutional positioning and PayPal collaboration, while Arc relies on Circle's compliance advantages and USDC ecosystem status. All three projects adopt BFT consensus mechanisms, which are more suitable for payment scenarios compared to the probabilistic finality of traditional PoS.

03. Yield-Bearing Stablecoins: Innovative Yield Models

Yield-bearing stablecoins embed returns directly into the stablecoin, providing users with a yield experience that surpasses traditional bank savings.

Ethena USDe

USDe's market cap skyrocketed from $86 million in January 2024 to $11.04 billion in October 2025, an astonishing increase of 13,750%, making it the world's third-largest stablecoin.

USDe's technical innovation lies in maintaining stability through a delta-neutral strategy, staking assets such as ETH and WBTC while opening hedged futures positions on exchanges to create a non-directional risk exposure. sUSDe provides holders with an annual yield of 2.56%-3.72%, with returns sourced from Ethereum staking rewards, perpetual contract funding rates, and stablecoin fixed income.

Sky Ecosystem

The Sky ecosystem (formerly MakerDAO) has reshaped the decentralized stablecoin lending market through brand upgrades and product innovation. USDS, as a reward-based stablecoin, has a market cap of $8 billion and offers users an annual yield of 4.75% through the Sky Savings Rate mechanism.

Returns come from protocol surplus, including lending fees and liquidation income, distributed to savings users via the SSR mechanism. The project has also launched the Endgame plan for SubDAO restructuring, providing different services through specialized sub-protocols such as Spark, Grove, and Keel.

04. Stablecoin Payment Infrastructure: Reshaping Global Finance

In 2025, stablecoin cross-border payment processing volume reached $46 trillion, equivalent to more than 50% of Visa's throughput. The cost structure of traditional cross-border payments is typically 2-7%, including transfer fees, exchange rate spreads, and intermediary fees, while stablecoins can reduce costs to 0.5-2%, saving 50-80% in high-frequency cross-border scenarios. More importantly, stablecoin settlement time is reduced from the traditional 3-5 business days to under 3 minutes, greatly reducing pre-financing needs and cash flow interruptions.

The Strong Rise of BVNK

As a stablecoin infrastructure provider, BVNK achieved strong business growth in 2025, processing over $20 billion in annual transaction volume, mainly serving enterprise clients such as Worldpay, Flywire, and dLocal. Citi Ventures made a strategic investment in BVNK in October 2025, supporting its global stablecoin payment rail expansion. At the same time, Coinbase and Mastercard are negotiating to acquire BVNK at a valuation of $1.5-2.5 billion, which would be the largest stablecoin acquisition in history, highlighting its core position in enterprise-level stablecoin payments.

Stripe's Innovative Strategy

Stripe has launched a stablecoin subscription payment feature, supporting automatic USDC deductions on Base and Polygon chains, targeting the needs of AI and SaaS companies. This feature halves settlement costs, and AI companies report that 20% of payment volume has shifted to stablecoins. Stripe has also launched the Open Issuance platform to help enterprises issue custom stablecoins and integrated AI agent payment tools.

05. Stablecoin AI Integrated Applications: The Future of Finance

With the rise of the AI agent economy, traditional API key and subscription models can no longer meet the needs of autonomous machine-to-machine transactions, giving rise to payment protocols and infrastructure optimized specifically for AI agents.

KITE AI: Building Layer-1 for the Agent Internet

KITE AI, as a leading project in this field, is committed to building the first Layer-1 blockchain optimized for the AI agent economy. KITE completed an $18 million Series A round led by PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst.

The project's core innovation lies in three technological pillars: the encrypted agent identity system (AIR – Agent Identity Resolution), programmable permission management, and on-chain attribution intelligent proof (PoAI). AIR serves as an agent app store, solving the trust problem between AI agents. Developers can deploy custom agents and access the ecosystem marketplace through a low-code interface.

Recently, KITE and Brevis announced a strategic partnership to enhance the transparency and autonomy of agent identity and payment modules using zero-knowledge proof technology. The first batch of modules will be deployed on BNB Chain, and will later expand to KITE L1 to achieve cross-chain proof relays.

x402 Protocol: Redefining the HTTP Payment Standard

The x402 protocol is jointly promoted by tech giants such as Coinbase, Google, and Cloudflare. When a client (such as an AI agent or application) accesses a protected resource, the server returns a 402 status code and payment details in JSON format, including amount, currency, and recipient address. The client then constructs a signed payment transaction and resends the request with the X-PAYMENT header. Third-party facilitators such as Coinbase verify the on-chain payment, after which the server grants resource access. The entire process achieves trustless execution, with payments settled on-chain for auditability.

The technical advantage of x402 lies in its native HTTP integration and extremely low transaction costs. USDC settlement on Base can be completed within 2 seconds, with gas fees below $0.0001 and zero protocol fees.

06. Investment Outlook and Risk Assessment

The stablecoin sub-sector is moving from concept to reality, from speculation to application. Among the four emerging tracks, dedicated stablecoin public chains demonstrate the clearest investment value. Plasma, with the support of the Tether ecosystem and $5.3 billion TVL, has validated market demand and established a clear technological moat. As enterprise-level payment demand explodes, such infrastructure projects are expected to command premium valuations. Enterprise-level payment solutions benefit from improved regulatory environments, and BVNK's $1.5-2.5 billion acquisition valuation reflects the recognition of stablecoin infrastructure by traditional financial giants. Although AI integrated applications are still in the early stages, the speed of technological innovation and scenario validation has exceeded expectations, making them suitable for investors with higher risk appetites. Yield-bearing stablecoins have the most complex risk-reward ratio, and the de-pegging risk of synthetic models under extreme market conditions cannot be ignored.

Regulatory risk remains the biggest variable. Although the GENIUS Act and MiCA regulations provide a framework for industry development, specific implementation rules and enforcement standards are still evolving. Stablecoin projects need to continuously monitor compliance costs and policy changes. Competitive risk is intensifying as traditional financial giants enter the market. Strategic moves by companies such as Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard will reshape the market landscape, and emerging projects need to maintain a leading edge in technological innovation and ecosystem building.

Investing in the new stablecoin sector requires finding a balance among technological innovation, regulatory compliance, and market demand. As key projects go live in 2025 and regulatory frameworks become clearer, this round of stablecoin infrastructure upgrades is expected to reshape the global payments landscape and bring substantial returns to early participants.