Stablecoin Payments Are Up Only
A growing use case is the sending value using stablecoins on Ethereum and other blockchains. The most popular stablecoins are dollar-pegged, overcollateralized tokens USDC (Circle US dollar) and USDT (Tether). More than 25 million wallets hold stablecoins on-chain - outside of custodians and exchanges. Stablecoins were used to settle over $11 trillion dollars in value in 20221, which is roughly the same total transaction volume of Visa and over 10 times that of PayPal for that year (see table below).
Stablecoin payments are attractive to merchants due to their fast settlement times, low transaction fees, and lack of chargebacks. Visa is expanding its stablecoin settlement product2 and Solana Pay, a payment app with 10 million users, announced an integration with Shopify3, whose network of over 1.75 million merchants represents roughly 10% of the global e-commerce market. Paypal also recently launched its own stablecoin, PYUSD, as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum4 for their 400 million users.
Unique Active Addresses by Stablecoin
Transactions Sent by Stablecoin
The network effects of decentralized finance continue grow as more users are onboarded by holding crypto and stablecoins in their wallets. New use cases become enabled with sufficient liquidity and user base. We consider the number of unique addresses holding stablecoins to be the most important metric for adoption and we expect continued growth in both the number of users and the total value settled using stablecoins.
Further Reading:
The Relentless Rise of Stablecoins