Stablecoins

Stablecoins offer businesses a faster, cheaper, and more programmable way to move money globally. They eliminate many of the delays, costs, and operational constraints of legacy rails, enabling use cases ranging from remittances and global payouts to automated treasury operations and agentic commerce.

What are stablecoins?

Stablecoins are digital representations of money on blockchains designed to hold a steady value. Unlike volatile cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ether, whose prices fluctuate based on market conditions, stablecoins are pegged to established currencies like the U.S. dollar or Euro.

Real-world utility, increasing regulatory clarity, and growing institutional adoption are driving rapid growth in stablecoin usage. The circulating supply of stablecoins has grown more than tenfold over the past five years, reaching roughly $300 billion today. The U.S. Treasury now projects that this figure could rise to $3 trillion by 2030.

How stablecoins work

Fully-reserved fiat-backed stablecoins are issued by regulated entities ("stablecoin issuers") and are backed 1:1 with reserves such as cash and short-term government securities held at licensed financial institutions. Stablecoin issuers use a mint-and-burn process to keep the supply aligned with underlying reserves and ensure that holders can always redeem stablecoins at face value.

When a user deposits fiat currency with an issuer, the issuer mints the corresponding amount of stablecoins onchain and sends them to the user. When the user later redeems stablecoins for fiat, the issuer receives the tokens, burns them, and sends the equivalent amount of fiat from its reserves to the user.

With the introduction of regulatory frameworks like MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets) in the EU and the GENIUS Act in the U.S., stablecoins now operate under clearer rules governing reserve management, audits, and disclosures. As a result, they have become compliant, transparent, and reliable instruments for modern payments and financial operations.

Why stablecoins matter for businesses

For financial institutions, corporations, and payment providers, fully-reserved fiat-backed stablecoins enable near-instant payments that operate 24/7, work across borders, and bypass much of the friction found in legacy payment rails.

They support established use cases such as remittances, global payouts, and embedded finance, while also enabling newer applications made possible by blockchain rails, including microtransactions and agentic commerce.

Programmable money

Stablecoins also open the door to programmable money: smart contracts, programs that run on the blockchain, can execute payments automatically based on predefined rules or conditions, improving the efficiency and transparency of payment processing, liquidity management, and reconciliation.

For example, a global enterprise can use a smart contract to automatically top up or sweep the wallets of its subsidiaries based on balance thresholds and predefined rules. This allows routine treasury actions, such as maintaining minimum operating balances or consolidating excess funds, to run automatically onchain. In practice, the smart contract replaces functionality that would otherwise require custom integrations with multiple banking partners.

In short, stablecoins provide the stability and familiarity of fiat currency with the speed and innovation of blockchains, offering institutions and enterprises of all sizes a faster, more efficient way to move value globally.

Stablecoin use cases

Stablecoins enable a wide range of payment and financial use cases across industries: