Introduction: A Historic Turning Point for the Stablecoin Ecosystem

In 2024-2025, the global stablecoin market is experiencing unprecedented explosive growth. As of October, the total market capitalization of stablecoins has surpassed $300 billion, an 82.9% year-on-year increase from $166.3 billion at the end of 2024. This growth not only sets a new historical record but also marks a fundamental shift of stablecoins from speculative tools on the fringe to mainstream financial infrastructure.

A historic breakthrough in the regulatory environment has provided strong impetus for this growth: In July 2025, the US GENIUS Act was officially signed into law, establishing the first federal-level stablecoin payment framework. Simultaneously, the EU's MiCA regulation came into full effect in December 2024, laying a solid foundation for the standardized development of the stablecoin industry.

Although USDT and USDC still dominate, their combined market share has decreased from 91.6% to 83.6%. The stablecoin market is undergoing a quiet transformation, with emerging stablecoin projects rising rapidly, such as:

• Ethena's USDe reaching a market cap of $11 billion

• PayPal's PYUSD surpassing a market cap of $2.76 billion

• The RWA-backed stablecoin market size reaching $35 billion, with 46% annual growth

Dedicated Stablecoin Public Chains: Infrastructure Revolution

Traditional blockchains reveal significant pain points when handling stablecoin transactions: Ethereum's high gas fees often reach tens of dollars, with transaction confirmation times ranging from seconds to minutes; While Tron has lower fees, it faces centralization risks and technical limitations.

The new generation of dedicated stablecoin public chains has achieved a qualitative breakthrough through technological innovation. These chains generally support high throughput of 1000+ TPS, zero or very low fees, and sub-second transaction confirmation. More importantly, they design stablecoins as native gas tokens, completely eliminating the impact of cryptocurrency price volatility on user experience.

Plasma: The Flagship Project of the Tether Ecosystem

As a leading project in the field, Plasma has raised a total of $75.8 million, including a $20.5 million Series A round led by Bitfinex and Framework Ventures in February 2025, with participation from notable investors like Peter Thiel and Bybit. After its mainnet test launched on September 25, 2025, its TVL quickly reached $5.3 billion.

Technically, Plasma employs a custom PlasmaBFT consensus mechanism, achieving sub-second finality and processing capability of 2000+ TPS. Its core innovation lies in the Paymaster system, enabling truly zero-fee USDT transfers while supporting custom gas tokens and confidential payment features. The project has integrated Chainlink oracles and, via a non-custodial Bitcoin bridge for pBTC, has built a complete DeFi ecosystem.

Stable: Institutional-Grade USDT Optimization Solution

Stable is positioned as the "payment rail for the real world," focusing on institutional-grade USDT applications. The project secured $28 million in seed funding in July 2025, co-invested by Franklin Templeton, Hack VC, PayPal Ventures, and Bitfinex. It uses the StableBFT consensus, supports 10k TPS and second-level finality, while maintaining EVM compatibility.

Stable's technical characteristic is using USDT as the native gas token, achieving zero-fee P2P transfers through account abstraction. Enterprise features include batch transfer aggregation, compliant private transfers, and cross-chain USDT0 support. The project has integrated PayPal's PYUSD stablecoin and focuses on developing fiat on/off ramps and debit card issuance services.

Arc: Circle's Exclusive Ecosystem

Developed by Circle, Arc is positioned as the "home for stablecoin finance," deeply integrated with the Circle ecosystem. The project uses USDC as the native gas token, ensuring a predictable fee structure denominated in US dollars. Technically, it employs the Malachite BFT consensus engine, supporting 3000 TPS and sub-second finality.

Arc's uniqueness lies in its built-in FX engine, supporting quote-based stablecoin conversion, and optional privacy features for compliant shielding. The project is also exploring reversible USDC transactions to combat fraud and is collaborating with Deutsche Börse to promote adoption in the EU market.

Based on funding scale and technical progress, Plasma holds a leading advantage due to support from the Tether ecosystem and the earliest mainnet launch. Stable builds differentiated competitiveness through its institutional positioning and partnership with PayPal, while Arc leverages Circle's compliance advantages and USDC ecosystem status. All three projects utilize BFT consensus mechanisms, which are more suitable for payment scenarios compared to the probabilistic finality of traditional PoS.

Yield-Bearing Stablecoins: Innovative Yield Models

Yield-bearing stablecoins provide users with a yield experience that surpasses traditional bank savings by embedding yield directly into the stablecoin itself.

Ethena USDe

USDe's market capitalization surged from $86 million in January 2024 to $11.04 billion in October 2025, an astounding increase of 13,750%, making it the world's third-largest stablecoin.

USDe's technical innovation lies in using a delta-neutral strategy to maintain stability, by staking assets like ETH and WBTC while simultaneously opening hedging futures positions on exchanges, creating a non-directional risk exposure. sUSDe offers holders an annualized yield of 2.56%-3.72%, sourced from Ethereum staking rewards, perpetual contract funding rates, and stablecoin fixed income.

Sky Ecosystem

The Sky Ecosystem (formerly MakerDAO) has reshaped the decentralized stablecoin lending market through brand upgrades and product innovation. USDS, as a reward-bearing stablecoin, has reached an $8 billion market cap and provides users with a 4.75% annualized yield through the Sky Savings Rate mechanism.

The yield originates from protocol surplus, including lending fees and liquidation revenue, distributed to savers via the SSR mechanism. The project also launched the Endgame plan involving SubDAO restructuring, offering various services through specialized sub-protocols like Spark, Grove, and Keel.

Stablecoin Payment Infrastructure: Reshaping Global Finance

In 2025, stablecoin cross-border payment processing volume reached $46 trillion, equivalent to over 50% of Visa's throughput. Traditional cross-border payment fee structures are typically 2-7%, including transfer fees, exchange rate spreads, and intermediary fees, while stablecoins can reduce costs to 0.5-2%, saving 50-80% in high-frequency cross-border scenarios. More importantly, stablecoin settlement time is reduced from the traditional 3-5 business days to under 3 minutes, significantly reducing pre-funding needs and cash flow disruption.

BVNK's Strong Rise

As a stablecoin infrastructure provider, BVNK experienced strong business growth in 2025, processing over $20 billion in annual transaction volume, primarily serving enterprise clients like Worldpay, Flywire, and dLocal. Citi Ventures made a strategic investment in BVNK in October 2025, supporting its global stablecoin payment rail expansion. Concurrently, Coinbase and Mastercard are in talks to acquire BVNK, with a valuation of $1.5-2.5 billion, which would be the largest stablecoin acquisition in history, highlighting its core position in enterprise-grade stablecoin payments.

Stripe's Innovative Layout

Stripe launched a stablecoin subscription payment feature, supporting automatic USDC deductions on Base and Polygon chains, targeting the needs of AI and SaaS companies. This feature halves settlement costs, with AI companies reporting 20% of payments shifting to stablecoins. Stripe also introduced the Open Issuance platform to help businesses issue custom stablecoins and integrated AI agent payment tools.

Stablecoin AI Integration Applications: The Future of Finance

With the rise of the AI agent economy, traditional API keys and subscription models can no longer meet the demands for autonomous machine-to-machine transactions, giving birth to payment protocols and infrastructure specifically optimized for AI agents.

KITE AI: Building the Layer-1 for the Agent Internet

As a leading project in this field, KITE AI is dedicated to building the first Layer-1 blockchain optimized for the AI agent economy. KITE completed an $18 million Series A funding round led by PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst.

The project's core innovation lies in three technical pillars: an encrypted Agent Identity Resolution (AIR) system, programmable permission management, and on-chain attribution Proof of AI (PoAI). AIR serves as an agent app store, solving trust issues among AI agents, allowing developers to deploy custom agents via low-code interfaces and access the ecosystem market.

Recently, KITE and Brevis announced a strategic partnership to leverage zero-knowledge proof technology to enhance the transparency and autonomy of agent identity and payment modules. The first batch of modules is deployed on BNB Chain, with subsequent expansion to KITE L1 for cross-chain proof relay.

x402 Protocol: Redefining the HTTP Payment Standard

The x402 protocol is promoted by tech giants like Coinbase, Google, and Cloudflare. When a client (like an AI agent or application) accesses a protected resource, the server returns a 402 status code and payment details in JSON format, including amount, currency, and recipient address. The client then constructs a signed payment transaction and resends the request with an X-PAYMENT header. After a third-party facilitator like Coinbase verifies the on-chain payment, the server grants resource access. The entire process achieves trustless execution, with payments settled on-chain to ensure auditability.

x402's technical advantage lies in its native HTTP integration and extremely low transaction costs. USDC settlement on Base can be completed within 2 seconds, with gas fees below $0.0001 and zero protocol fees.

Investment Outlook and Risk Assessment

Stablecoin sub-sectors are moving from concept to reality, from speculation to application. Among the four emerging sectors, dedicated stablecoin public chains show the clearest investment value. Plasma, with the support of the Tether ecosystem and a validated $5.3 billion TVL, demonstrates clear market demand and a technological moat. As enterprise payment demand explodes, such infrastructure projects are expected to receive premium valuations. Enterprise payment solutions benefit from an improved regulatory environment, with BVNK's $1.5-2.5 billion acquisition valuation reflecting traditional finance giants' recognition of stablecoin infrastructure. Although AI integration applications are in the early stages, the pace of technological innovation and application scenario validation exceeds expectations, making them suitable for investors with higher risk tolerance. Yield-bearing stablecoins present the most complex risk-reward ratio, and the de-peg risk of synthetic models under extreme market conditions cannot be ignored.

Regulatory risk remains the biggest variable. Although the GENIUS Act and MiCA regulations provide a framework for industry development, specific implementation rules and enforcement standards are still evolving. Projects in the stablecoin space need to continuously monitor compliance costs and policy changes. Competition risk intensifies as traditional finance giants enter the field; strategic moves by companies like Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard will reshape the market landscape, requiring emerging projects to maintain leadership in technological innovation and ecosystem building.

Investing in the new stablecoin frontiers requires finding a balance between technological innovation, regulatory compliance, and market demand. As key projects go live in 2025 and regulatory frameworks become clearer, this wave of stablecoin infrastructure upgrades is expected to reshape the global payment landscape, bringing substantial returns to early participants.