1. Current Status of the Stablecoin Market
With the gradual implementation of stablecoin regulatory frameworks, stablecoins have grown into core infrastructure within the crypto-financial system and even cross-border payment networks over the past year. Whether meeting the trading needs of individual investors or traditional institutions exploring clearing, fund transfers, and compliance pilots, stablecoins are serving as a "digital dollar." As of September 2025, the total circulating supply of stablecoins has reached $287 billion, and the market landscape exhibits distinct oligopoly characteristics: Tether's USDT holds approximately 59.6% of the market share, with a market capitalization exceeding $170.9 billion; Circle's USDC ranks second with a 25% share and a market capitalization of $74.2 billion. Together, the two stablecoins account for nearly 85% of the market share. Meanwhile, emerging stablecoins such as USDe, USDS, USD1, and USDf are rapidly emerging and entering the mainstream market. With the rapid expansion of stablecoins, the underlying public chains have become the biggest beneficiaries. In the past month alone, nearly 626 million stablecoin transactions were recorded on-chain, with Ethereum, Tron, Solana, and BNB Chain leading the charge. Tron, for example, saw approximately 69.8 million stablecoin transactions, with an average transaction fee of between $0.14 and $0.25 per transaction. This translates to monthly fee revenue from stablecoins alone of between $9.7 million and $17.4 million. However, this revenue is not accrued to the stablecoin issuers but is captured entirely by the public chains themselves. For a long time, the issuance and circulation of stablecoins have been highly dependent on networks like Ethereum, Tron, and Solana, which provide a trading environment and security. However, with the expansion of transaction volume and application scenarios, the value distribution issues of this dependency model have become increasingly prominent. The transaction fees generated by every stablecoin transfer are captured by the underlying network, leaving issuers with virtually no direct profit sharing. For example, Tron's annual revenue from stablecoin transaction fees alone can reach hundreds of millions of dollars, but the issuer's profit is zero. This asymmetric value distribution pattern has prompted stablecoin issuers to accelerate their exploration of independent public chain strategies. Circle launched the Arc blockchain in 2025, emphasizing compliance and payment optimization. Tether has successively released two dedicated stablecoin chains, Plasma and Stable, aiming to recover value previously flowing to Ethereum and Tron back to its own system. Converge, driven by the Ethena team, has also entered the testnet stage, focusing on a new stablecoin ecosystem that combines DeFi with compliance. With the implementation of these projects, the stablecoin industry is entering a new phase of "token-public chain dual-drive," redefining the landscape of value capture and ecosystem building. 2. Why Do Stablecoin Issuers Build Their Own Public Chains? The core reason for stablecoin issuers to collectively launch chains is to shift from value attachment to value capture. By improving public chain performance and strengthening compliance, they provide on-chain users with a dedicated public chain for their stablecoin, thereby expanding their revenue potential and opening up new business models. The motivations can be summarized as follows: 1. Isolating dependence on public chains and enhancing value capture. For stablecoin issuers like Tether and Circle, the more users and more frequent transactions, the higher the revenue from external public chains, while their own incremental revenue is close to zero. This imbalance in value capture has become a constraint on the expansion of stablecoins. By building their own chains, issuers can fully control the underlying architecture, not only optimizing the stablecoin trading experience but also ensuring that the fees and ecosystem dividends generated by every transaction flow into their own system. 2. Improving the user experience and lowering the barrier to entry. Under the current model, users must hold tokens such as ETH and TRX to pay for gas, which is inconvenient. Dedicated chains can achieve the goal of using stablecoins as gas, allowing users to complete transfers and payments without holding additional tokens. 3. Enhance Compliance Capabilities and Smooth Institutional Integration Compliance has become a necessity for industry development. Proprietary public chains can embed regulatory nodes, blacklists, and auditing capabilities to meet AML/KYC requirements, lower the barrier to entry for institutions and banks, and enhance policy friendliness. 4. Expand Business Models and Ecosystems In the past, stablecoins primarily profited from interest on reserves. However, the launch of a public chain allows for diversified growth through transaction fees, ecosystem applications, and developer networks. For example, Arc emphasizes cross-currency settlement, Stable and Plasma focus on payment networks, and Converge explores the DeFi+ compliance path. 3. Current Issuers' Stablecoin Public Chains Tether's Dual Public Chain Strategy: Plasma and Stable As the world's largest stablecoin issuer, Tether launched both Plasma and Stable in 2025, aiming to further develop its own stablecoin public chain through this dual strategy. Stable targets institutions and cross-border settlement, while Plasma focuses on retail investors and small-value payments. Plasma is a Bitcoin sidechain specifically designed for stablecoin payments and has received $24 million in funding from Tether's parent company, Bitfinex, and Framework. Its governance token, XPL, is now available for pre-market trading on major exchanges, with a market capitalization of approximately $6.5 billion. It is expected to officially launch on September 25th. Its biggest draw is zero-fee USDT transfers. Multiple rounds of USDT staking events have been quickly sold out, demonstrating its market popularity. Plasma's uniqueness lies in its use of the Bitcoin mainnet as the final settlement layer, inheriting the UTXO security while maintaining EVM compatibility for seamless smart contract migration. Furthermore, Plasma supports native privacy, allowing users to hide addresses and amounts. It also introduces BTC through a permissionless bridge, enabling low-slippage swaps and BTC-collateralized stablecoin lending. Stable is a payment-focused Layer 1 blockchain specifically designed for USDT, backed by Bitfinex and USDT0, and with Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino as an advisor. Its core objective is to enable USDT to more naturally integrate into global payments, cross-border settlement, and institutional clearing scenarios. Stable's key advantage is its native USDT gas. Users can initiate transactions without holding the platform's tokens, and peer-to-peer transfers are completely gas-free, significantly lowering the barrier to entry. As the platform's native gas, Stable allows users to trade without holding the platform's tokens, and peer-to-peer transfers are completely gas-free, significantly lowering the barrier to entry. The network utilizes the StableBFT consensus, with a 0.7-second block generation and single-confirmation rate. Parallel processing and a DAG architecture will be introduced in the future, supporting tens of thousands of transactions per second (TPS) and accommodating both small-value payments and institutional clearing. Enterprises can obtain dedicated block space through GuaranteedBlockspace and use Confidential Transfer for compliant and private transfers. Stable is EVM-compatible and provides SDKs and APIs for easy application migration. The wallet supports bank card binding, social login, and easy-to-read addresses, optimizing the Web2 experience. Its strategy is to attract users with zero gas fees and a simplified user experience, using free transfers as a key driver. The network will gradually expand into cross-border payments, corporate finance, DeFi micropayments, and merchant acquiring, building a core USDT payment network and ultimately establishing a hub position once network effects are established. Arc, the most compliant stablecoin public chain, is Circle's Layer 1 platform designed specifically for stablecoin payments and Reliable Web Access (RWA) assets. Its core features include using USDC as its native gas and full EVM compatibility. It also provides a specially designed Paymaster channel, allowing businesses to pay for gas with other stablecoins or tokenized fiat currencies, flexibly supporting diverse payment needs. Arc's greatest advantage lies in its backing by Circle's deep foundation in traditional finance. This gives it a natural compliance advantage, allowing businesses to conduct business on-chain in a regulated environment with manageable risks and regulatory compliance. To meet the needs of institutions, Arc has designed a series of specialized financial tools, including the ability to tokenize traditional assets like real estate and equity, as well as solutions for building enterprise-grade digital payment systems. This not only lowers the barrier to entry for traditional businesses on the blockchain but also provides secure and efficient financial infrastructure for institutions requiring compliance assurance. DeFi + Stablecoin Public Chain: Converge Converge is a public chain for RWA stablecoins jointly developed by Ethena Labs and Securitize. It focuses on building a public settlement chain that meets the compliance needs of financial institutions while fully leveraging the decentralized advantages of DeFi. Its core design highlights high performance: Collaborating with Arbitrum and Celestia, it pushes performance limits to achieve block times of 100 milliseconds, thereby reducing cross-chain asset attrition costs. High compliance: USDe and USDtb are used for transaction fees, with USDtb relying on a stablecoin backed by the BUIDL Fund to achieve high compliance. High security: It incorporates Securitize's RegTech module and a unique Validator Network (CVN), which uses Ethena's ENA tokens for staking to ensure network security. CVN utilizes a permissioned validator model (PoS) and incorporates Know Your Customer (KYC)/Know Your Customer (KYB) mechanisms to ensure validators meet compliance requirements. This design is specifically targeted at institutional users, meeting their risk management and compliance needs. 4. Future Development: From a long-term perspective, the collective launch of self-built public chains by stablecoin issuers will undoubtedly challenge the status of established public chains like Ethereum and Tron. Leveraging their native stablecoin design, these new chains offer unique advantages: fee-free transactions, stablecoins acting directly as gas, and clearing and channel solutions tailored for institutional users. This highly verticalized architecture not only lowers the barrier to user migration but also significantly improves capital flow efficiency. The recent surge in Plasma staking activity is a prime example of rapidly growing market interest in this new type of chain. More importantly, stablecoin issuers already have strong compliance and security systems in place. This inherent credibility will significantly enhance their acceptance among traditional financial institutions and drive further institutional capital inflows. However, realistically, self-built public chains will not completely replace established public chains like Ethereum and Tron in the short term. A more rational structure is one of complementary division of labor: stablecoin public chains focus on deterministic settlement and large-scale payment processing, providing stable and efficient infrastructure; while ETH, SOL, and other chains will remain the core platforms for innovative applications, complex financial instruments, and an open ecosystem. The ecosystems of established public chains like Ethereum are already highly diversified, making them difficult to disrupt for the time being. The biggest potential variable may be TRON, whose stablecoin market share is highly dependent on USDT. Once the Tether-led Stablechain matures, TRON's core advantage will be weakened. Overall, the emergence of stablecoin public chains marks a new phase in the crypto market, driven by a dual focus of stablecoins and public chains. This has the potential to reshape the global payment and clearing system while also forcing traditional finance to reposition its role. The coming years are likely to be a critical turning point in the evolution of global financial infrastructure.
