Source: a16z
Author: a16z crypto Data Science Partner Daren Matsuoka
Original Title: Stablecoins: A 1+ billion-user onboarding opportunity
Translated and Compiled by: BitpushNews
Stablecoins currently present what I believe is the first credible opportunity to onboard one billion people into the cryptocurrency space.
If you haven't looked at the latest stablecoin data recently, you might be surprised. In the past 12 months, stablecoin trading volume has reached 33 trillion US dollars, continuously setting new historical highs.
From this perspective, this is close to 20 times PayPal's transaction volume, close to 3 times Visa's transaction volume, and is rapidly approaching ACH's transaction volume.
It's incredible to see stablecoins competing with these massive global payment networks that have existed for decades.
One result of all this stablecoin growth is that stablecoins hold 128 billion dollars in US Treasury bonds. This makes them one of the top 20 holders of US Treasury bonds, ahead of entire countries like Saudi Arabia, South Korea, UAE, and Germany.
And all of this has happened within just ten years. Citibank recently predicted that by 2030, stablecoins could hold 3.7 trillion dollars in Treasury bonds, making them the largest holder on this list.
Stablecoin supply is at an all-time high, and another important data point is that over 1% of the total US dollar supply is now tokenized as stablecoins.
In terms of issuance, it's a showdown between USDC and Tether.
In infrastructure, ETH and TRON continue to dominate. But if we look closely at the trends in recent months, we see significant growth on chains like Solana, Arbitrum, and Base.
What excites me most about stablecoins is that all this activity seems unrelated to broader cryptocurrency trading volume, which is a sign of organic use and product-market fit.
For a long time, stablecoins have been criticized as only being used to settle speculative crypto trades, but this data shows otherwise. If you look carefully at the patterns of these two charts, you can see that stablecoin activity forms an active ecosystem independent of the trading market.
Here's my favorite chart in this narrative about stablecoins.
It's not surprising that stablecoins are just beginning to become widespread.
In the past few years, we've made significant progress in blockchain infrastructure. With the emergence of high-throughput Layer 1 chains like Solana and new ETH Layer 2 solutions like Base, we can finally make stablecoins an excellent payment product.
Stablecoins are now the cheapest way to send US dollars—less than 1 second, costing less than 1 cent. Compared to other options we have in the US, some of which are cumbersome and expensive, it's easy to understand why stablecoins are meaningful.
This is a great example of how infrastructure improvements can unlock new applications, and I'm looking forward to seeing what else will be unlocked in the future.
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