Member-only story
Stablecoins & PayFi
The New Global Payment Rails Taking Shape
Stablecoins are no longer used for trading. before I used to treat it as parking. You sold something, you didn’t want dollars sitting on an exchange, you parked the cash in USDC or USDT and waited. That was the job. but now they’re becoming the infrastructure for real money movement
What people now call PayFi is less a new coin and more a new habit: using a dollar that already lives on a blockchain to move money the way a wire was supposed to, except it doesn’t take two days and three correspondent banks to get there.
The numbers are large enough to notice and still small enough to keep honest. Total stablecoin supply sits a little above $300 billion. Most of it is still a dollar token. Circle and Tether still issue the bulk of it. Transaction volume looks enormous on paper, one industry tally put 2025 transfer volume above $33 trillion, but a lot of that is trading, internal hops, and wash. The Block’s estimate is that genuine payments, the invoices and remittances and payroll, are still a sliver of that total. Maybe under one percent.
That sliver is the story.
Last summer Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, BNY and more than a hundred other firms lined up behind Open USD, a shared dollar token built for business movement. BNY widened…
