Gate Research Institute | The New Era of Stablecoins: A Comprehensive Study on Compliance, Innovation, and Global Adoption Pathways

Key Summary:

• Explosive growth in the stablecoin market: As of August 2025, the global stablecoin market capitalization has surpassed $280 billion, an increase of more than 660 times compared to early 2019. The on-chain annual settlement volume has exceeded $30 trillion, and its payment volume is now comparable to that of SWIFT and Visa. This explosive growth is primarily attributed to the dual inflection points of regulatory drivers and corporate entry.

• Regulatory acceleration and compliance-driven: The comprehensive implementation of the "GENIUS Act", "Stablecoin Regulations", and the MiCA Act, along with the introduction of differentiated regulatory systems in other economies, marks the entry of stablecoins into the "compliance era of great navigation". This propels stablecoins towards compliance and institutionalization, ushering in a "new era".

• Corporate giants fully enter the market: Traditional financial and technology giants such as PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard are actively positioning themselves, promoting the integration of stablecoins into mainstream scenarios such as cross-border payments, retail, and corporate payments, and creating a multi-asset compatible payment network.

• Market Landscape and New Forces: USDT and USDC still dominate, but USDC has a higher usage rate in payments and settlements. At the same time, innovative yield-bearing stablecoins represented by Ethena Labs' USDe are rising and have gained significant market share in a short period of time.

• Trinity Model: Stablecoins are evolving from a single payment tool to a "Anchor + Yield + Application" trinity model. In terms of payments, cross-border payments, corporate settlements, and retail payments are gradually becoming widespread; in terms of yield, yield-generating and RWA-linked stablecoins are becoming new asset allocation tools; in terms of applications, scenarios such as supply chain finance, salary payments, and capital market collateral are rapidly expanding, promoting on-chain finance to extend into the real economy.

• Intense Infrastructure Competition: The stablecoin sector has shifted from "token competition" to "infrastructure competition." Participants such as Tether, Circle, Stripe, Alchemy Pay, and Converge are vying for control of the payment settlement "highway" by building their own dedicated public chains (such as Tether's Plasma/Stable, Circle's Arc, Stripe's Tempo, Alchemy Pay's Alchemy Chain, and Converge).
• Future Path Development: Technically achieving cross-chain settlement and multi-chain compatibility; in the market, running parallel to traditional payment networks and entering the capital market through RWA; institutionally coexisting with CBDC under a regulatory framework. Stablecoins are transitioning from scale explosion to compliance establishment, from token competition to infrastructure competition, and moving from dollar dominance to regional multipolarity. In the next 3-5 years, participants who first form a closed loop in compliance, infrastructure, and application ecology may define the next generation of global value networks.

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