TLDR
Standard Chartered says stablecoins are moving from niche trading tools to core financial plumbing, with usage patterns changing even faster than supply growth.
- The bank reports stablecoin velocity has roughly doubled in two years, driven by AI-related and traditional finance payment use, while still projecting a $2 trillion market by 2028.
- Stablecoins are shifting from mainly crypto trading collateral to high-frequency payment and settlement rails, with USDC leading on Solana and Base and USDT still dominant in emerging market savings.
- The key variables to watch are regulation, yield rules, and whether corporate and machine-to-machine payments keep pushing stablecoins deeper into mainstream finance.
Deep Dive
1. What Standard Chartered Actually Found
Standard Chartereds crypto research team says stablecoin velocity (transactions relative to supply) has doubled over the past two years, now averaging at least six turnovers per month, especially for USDC on Solana and Base chains. This means far more transactions are happening without a proportional increase in stablecoin market cap, a pattern the bank links to new use cases such as AI-driven payments and traditional finance replacement rails, not just speculative trading. Despite the jump in velocity, the bank maintains a forecast that stablecoin market cap could still reach about $2 trillion by late 2028, though it now assumes velocity will keep rising rather than staying flat as earlier models did.
Even if the headline market cap grows slower than volumes, stablecoins are becoming more central to how value actually moves through crypto and adjacent financial systems.
2. From Trading Collateral To Payment Infrastructure
Standard Chartered and related analysis highlight a split in uses. USDT remains the main tool for emerging market savings and basic dollar access, with lower velocity consistent with buy and hold behavior. USDC, by contrast, is increasingly used in faster-turnover roles like cross-border settlement, corporate treasury flows, and AI or API-driven micro-payments, particularly on high-throughput chains such as Solana and Base. Other research notes that annual stablecoin transaction volume already exceeds tens of trillions of dollars and could grow toward more than $50 trillion by 2030, suggesting that payments and settlement, not just trading, will dominate usage.
The structural shift is less about new coins and more about stablecoins replacing parts of card networks, correspondent banking, and FX rails.
3. Regulation, Yields, And The Next Phase
Traditional banks, including Standard Chartered, have warned that if regulators allow full-fledged yield on stablecoins, as much as several trillion dollars of bank deposits could migrate into tokenized dollars, prompting proposals to cap or tightly regulate such yields. At the same time, policymakers are drafting stablecoin-specific rules that will govern reserves, disclosures, and how much these tokens can resemble bank accounts. On the technology side, early agentic systems where software agents pay each other in stablecoins for compute, data, or API calls could further lift velocity and embed stablecoins in AI-driven workflows.
For crypto users, the edge may be in tracking which stablecoin ecosystems win the high-velocity payment and AI niches, and which projects build the infrastructure and fee rails around them.
Conclusion
Standard Chartereds call points to stablecoins becoming core infrastructure for payments and settlement, not just trading chips inside crypto. If high-velocity use cases and supportive regulation take hold, the main opportunities and risks will likely sit around the rails, chains, and protocols that route and secure these flows, rather than the stablecoin tokens themselves, which remain anchored near one dollar.
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