In-depth Analysis of the Stablecoin Ecosystem: A Dual Perspective of Technology and Business

The global financial system is undergoing profound changes. Traditional payment networks are facing a comprehensive challenge from stablecoins due to outdated infrastructure, lengthy settlement periods, and high costs. These digital assets are revolutionizing the patterns of cross-border value flow, corporate transaction paradigms, and access to personal financial services.

In recent years, stablecoins have continued to develop and have become an important infrastructure for global payments. Large fintech companies, payment processors, and sovereign entities are gradually integrating stablecoins into consumer-facing applications and corporate cash flows. At the same time, emerging financial tools such as payment gateways, deposit and withdrawal channels, and programmable yield products have greatly enhanced the convenience of using stablecoins.

This report provides a deep analysis of the stablecoin ecosystem from both technical and business perspectives, studying key participants, core infrastructure, and driving demand, exploring how stablecoins give rise to new financial application scenarios, as well as the challenges they face in integrating into the global economy.

1. Why Choose Stablecoin Payments?

To understand the influence of stablecoins, we must first examine traditional payment solutions. These systems include cash, checks, debit cards, credit cards, international wire transfers (SWIFT), automated clearing house (ACH), and peer-to-peer payments, among others. While they have become integrated into daily life, many payment channels like ACH and SWIFT have infrastructure that has existed since the 1970s. Although groundbreaking at the time, most of these global payment infrastructures are now outdated and highly fragmented. Overall, these payment methods suffer from high fees, high friction, long processing times, inability to settle around the clock, and complex back-end procedures. In addition, they often bundle unnecessary additional services such as authentication, lending, compliance, fraud protection, and bank integration.

Stablecoin payments are effectively addressing these pain points. Compared to traditional methods, blockchain payment settlements greatly simplify the process, reduce intermediaries, achieve real-time visibility of fund flows, shorten settlement times, and lower costs.

The main advantages of stablecoin payments include:

• Real-time settlement: Transactions are completed almost instantaneously, eliminating delays of traditional banking systems.
• Safe and Reliable: The immutable ledger of blockchain ensures transaction security and transparency, providing protection for users.
• Cost reduction: Eliminating intermediaries significantly lowers transaction fees, saving expenses for users.
• Global Coverage: Decentralized platforms can reach markets that are underserved by traditional financial services, achieving financial inclusion.

2. Landscape of the stablecoin payment industry

The stablecoin payment industry can be divided into four technological stack levels:

1. First layer: Application layer

The application layer is mainly composed of various payment service providers ( PSP ), integrating multiple independent deposit and withdrawal payment institutions into a unified aggregation platform. These platforms provide users with convenient stablecoin access methods, offer tools for developers developing on the application layer, and provide credit card services for Web3 users.

a. Payment Gateway

The payment gateway is a service that securely processes payments to facilitate transactions between buyers and sellers.

Well-known companies include:

• Stripe: A traditional payment provider that integrates stablecoins like USDC for global payments.
• MetaMask: does not provide direct fiat currency exchange functionality itself; users can perform deposit and withdrawal operations through integration with its third-party services.
• Helio: 450,000 active wallets and 6,000 merchants. With the Solana Pay plugin, millions of Shopify merchants can settle payments with cryptocurrency and instantly convert USDY to other stablecoins.
• Some Web2 payment applications like Apple Pay and PayPal also allow users to pay with stablecoins, further expanding the application scenarios.

Payment gateway providers can be divided into two categories: developer-oriented and consumer-oriented.

1. Developer-oriented payment gateway

Provide services for enterprises and fintech companies that need to embed stablecoin infrastructure into their workflows. Typically offer APIs, SDKs, and developer tools for integration into existing payment systems. Some emerging projects focused on such tools include:

• BVNK: Provides enterprise-level payment infrastructure for easy integration of stablecoins. Offers API solutions, cross-border commercial payment platforms, corporate accounts, etc. Handles over $10 billion in annualized transaction volume, with a year-on-year growth rate of 200%, and a valuation of $750 million.
• Iron (beta): Provides API to seamlessly integrate stablecoin trading into existing businesses. Offers global deposit and withdrawal channels, stablecoin payment infrastructure, wallets, and virtual accounts for enterprises.
• Juicyway: Provides enterprise payment, salary distribution, and batch payment APIs, supporting multiple currencies. Mainly targeted at the African market.

2. Consumer-facing payment gateway

Focusing on users, providing a simple and easy-to-use interface to facilitate stablecoin payments, remittances, and financial services. Usually includes mobile wallets, multi-currency support, fiat currency deposit and withdrawal channels, and cross-border transactions. Some well-known projects include:

• Decaf: An on-chain banking platform covering personal consumption, remittances, and stablecoin transactions in over 184 countries. Collaborating with local channels in Latin America to achieve nearly zero withdrawal fees.
• Meso: Deposit and withdrawal solutions, directly integrated with merchants, allowing users and businesses to easily convert between fiat currency and stablecoin. Supports Apple Pay to purchase USDC.
• Venmo: The stablecoin wallet feature is integrated into the existing consumer payment application, allowing users to use digital dollars without directly interacting with blockchain infrastructure.

b. U Card

Cryptocurrency cards allow users to spend cryptocurrency or stablecoins at traditional merchants. Typically integrated with traditional credit card networks, they automatically convert crypto assets to fiat currency at the point of sale.

Main projects include:

• Reap: Asian card issuer, serving over 40 enterprises, mainly relying on transaction fee commissions. In July 2024, the transaction volume reached $30M.
• Raincards: Americas card issuer, supports multiple companies for card issuance, can serve users in the US and Latin America.
• Fiat24: European card issuer + web3 bank, serving European + Asian users. Total users 20,000, monthly revenue $100K-150K.
• Kast: A rapidly growing U-card on Solana, issuing over 10,000 cards, with 5-6 thousand monthly active users, a transaction volume of $7 million in December 2024, and revenue of $200,000.
• 1Money: stablecoin ecosystem, recently launched a credit card that supports stablecoins.

2. Second Layer: Payment Processor

Payment processors are the backbone of payment channels, mainly including deposit and withdrawal service providers and stablecoin issuance service providers.

a. Deposit and Withdrawal Processor

• Moonpay: Supports over 80 cryptocurrencies, providing various deposit and withdrawal methods as well as token swap services.
• Ramp Network: Covers over 150 countries and provides deposit and withdrawal services for more than 90 types of crypto assets.
• Alchemy Pay: A hybrid payment gateway solution that supports two-way exchange and payment between fiat currencies and crypto assets.

b. Stablecoin Issuance & Coordination of Processors

• Bridge: Provides coordination API and issuance API to help enterprises integrate various stablecoin payments and exchanges, supporting rapid issuance of stablecoins.
• Brale (beta): A regulated stablecoin issuance platform that provides stablecoin coordination and reserve management APIs.
• Perena (beta): The Numeraire platform reduces the issuance threshold for niche stablecoins through a centralized liquidity pool.

3. Layer Three: Asset Issuers

Asset issuers are responsible for creating, maintaining, and redeeming stablecoins. The business model typically revolves around the balance sheet, similar to bank operations. Innovations in stablecoins can be divided into three levels:

1. Static reserve-backed stablecoin

The first generation of stablecoins is centralized issued tokens supported by a 1:1 ratio of fiat reserves held by traditional financial institutions. Major participants include Tether's USDT and Circle's USDC.

2. Yield stablecoin

Stablecoins with embedded native yield generation features, providing on-chain returns for holders. Notable protocols include:

• Ethena: Issues USDe, backed by hedged crypto assets, current annual yield of 6.00%.
• Mountain: A yield stablecoin with an annualized return of 4.70%.
• Level: A stablecoin composed of re-staked US dollars.
• CAP Labs (Beta): Developing the next generation stablecoin engine on the megaETH blockchain.

3. Yield Sharing stablecoin

Integrate built-in monetization mechanisms to allocate part of the profits to users, publishers, terminal apps, and ecosystem participants.

• Paxos: Launched USDG, sharing stablecoin profits and reserve asset interest income with partners.
• M^0: Composed of former senior personnel from MakerDAO and Circle, the vision is to act as a neutral settlement layer.
• Agora: AUSD shares profits with integrated applications and market makers.

4. Layer Four: Settlement Layer

It consists of a blockchain network ( that processes and verifies stablecoin transactions in real-time. The main networks include:

• Solana: A high-performance blockchain that has become a key settlement layer for stablecoin transactions.
• Tron: holds an important market share in the stablecoin payment sector.
• Codex )beta(: OP L2 for cross-border B2B payments.
• Noble: A USDC native asset issuance chain designed for the Cosmos and IBC ecosystems.
• 1Money )beta(: An L1 built specifically for stablecoin payments.

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3. Expanding the Application of Stablecoins: Serving Non-Crypto Native Users

) 1. Current Bottleneck

• Regulatory uncertainty: clearer policy guidance is needed.
• User side: The use cases for stablecoins are scarce, lacking actual demand.
• Enterprise side: Insufficient willingness and ability to accept.

2. On the enterprise side: How to increase the adoption rate of stablecoin payments?

• stablecoin integrated into mainstream payment applications
• Encourage enterprises with profit-sharing stablecoins
• Provide convenient enterprise-specific stablecoin issuance services
• B2B stablecoin liquidity and fund management solutions
• Payment infrastructure for developers### enterprises(
• A settlement network designed for cross-border payments

) 3. Consumer side: How to expand non-crypto native users?

• Embedded stablecoin payments in e-commerce and remittances
• On-chain yield products for non-crypto users
• Optimize KYC process for seamless user access

4. Native Economy of Stablecoins: Will Consumers Bypass Fiat?

Key factors:

1. On-chain yield and capital efficiency
2. Reduce reliance on custodial intermediaries
3. Mature Regulation and Institutional Adoption

The transition to a stablecoin native economy may impact existing payment rails and traditional banking business models.

V. Conclusion: How to Accelerate the Adoption of Stablecoins?

• Payment application layer: Simplify consumer experience, build regulation-first solutions
• Payment Processor Layer: Build enterprise-friendly, out-of-the-box infrastructure middleware
• Asset Issuer Layer: Pass stablecoin earnings to non-crypto native users
• Settlement Network Layer: Multiple competitions accelerate stablecoin payments into real life

The collaborative cooperation between mature financial giants and Web3 startups is crucial for driving mass adoption. Stablecoins have the potential to reshape the global financial transaction landscape, but the key lies in bridging the gap between the on-chain ecosystem and the broader economy.

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