Cryptocurrency tokens backed by holdings of Treasury bills or other dollar-denominated assets, designed to maintain a stable value pegged to the dollar. Proponents see them as a safer store of value than many fiat currencies and a more viable means of payment than other crypto, whose price can swing wildly day to day. They also fuel demand for Treasuries, making it easier for America to finance its budget deficits.
The stablecoin market was worth some $300bn in November 2025. After growing by 30% in the six months to late October 2025, total stablecoin assets had barely budged by April 2026. Announcements of new stablecoin experiments have not been explosive: in October 2025 ten big banks from America, Britain, Canada, Europe and Japan formed a group "to explore" if stablecoins had merit, but the exploration had yet to lead to discoveries. Rumoured stablecoins from retailers such as Walmart and Amazon remained rumours.
Research by Franklin Noll of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City finds that nearly half of all stablecoins play the role of crypto-trading assets. Less than 1% of stablecoins in circulation are used for payments. Boston Consulting Group and Allium, a blockchain-data firm, arrive at a similar figure looking at annual transaction values. The lion's share of transactions concerns trading and transfers associated with the crypto industry, not the real world.
President Donald Trump, whose family has extensive crypto interests and has issued meme coins, is a fan of stablecoins. In July 2025 Congress passed the Genius Act, regulating stablecoins in America. A loophole in the law lets stablecoins offer a deposit-like yield without bank-like regulatory burden. The American Bankers Association warned that a $2trn market for stablecoins could lead to a 10% decline in bank deposits, raise average funding costs for lenders by about a quarter of a percentage point and drive up interest rates on loans.
A follow-up bill, the Clarity Act, passed the House in a more restrictive version in July 2025.
In November 2025 Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, predicted the stablecoin market could grow ten-fold by 2030. In February 2026 Standard Chartered forecast it could be worth $2trn by the end of 2028. In April 2026 the Treasury released a proposal that would treat stablecoin issuers as financial institutions for the purposes of anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer laws, requiring the same onerous monitoring and compliance procedures as banks.
China banned cryptocurrency trading in 2021, but Chinese mainlanders still trade more stablecoins than the authorities would like: a paper by Marco Reuter of the IMF estimates that in 2024 China bought $18.6bn of stablecoins from the rest of the world and sold $3.6bn.
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.