Stablecoins as Infrastructure: Who Captures the Profit?

• Stablecoin transaction volumes reached a staggering $33 trillion in 2025, representing a 72% increase compared to the previous year.
• The industry is shifting focus from market capitalization to velocity, as digital dollars become the invisible plumbing of the global financial system.
• Latin America has emerged as a leader in adoption, with Argentina and Brazil using stablecoins for survival against high inflation and local currency volatility.

Evolution into Invisible Infrastructure

By 2026, the technical challenges of stablecoins have largely been resolved. Instead of being dominated by speculative retail apps, digital dollars have quietly integrated into the world's financial plumbing as essential working capital. This transition marks a new era where the primary goal is no longer driving adoption, but understanding who captures the value generated by the movement of these assets.

Industry experts like Jeff Handler, co-founder of OpenTrade, argue that traditional metrics like market cap are becoming vanity figures. Instead, velocity—the frequency with which a currency is used—is the critical data point. The Quantity Theory of Money suggests that high velocity allows a smaller supply of stablecoins to support massive levels of economic activity.

Record Growth and Regional Utility

On-chain data reveals that stablecoin transfer volumes have decoupled from spot trading, indicating their use in settlements, payments, and corporate treasuries. While the total supply remains in the low hundreds of billions, the $33 trillion in volume shows these dollars are being reused constantly across different networks.

• Argentina leads the world with 61.8% of all on-chain activity involving stablecoins.
• Brazil follows closely with 59.8% of activity dedicated to digital dollars.
• In these regions, stablecoins are not just yield-bearing assets but tools for economic survival and capital preservation.

The Battle for Rent Capture

As stablecoins become a fundamental utility, a hierarchy of entities has begun to capture the "rent" or fees associated with their movement. Tether, the issuer of USDT, has become the world’s second most profitable company per employee by managing reserves and profiting from the float.

Behind issuers, exchanges extract fees from internal routing and settlement services, while traditional banks are beginning to enter the space with tokenized deposits. Regulators play an indirect role by determining who can profit through licensing frameworks. However, the future sustainability of this ecosystem may depend on shifting these rewards away from intermediaries and back to the users who are driving the economic velocity.