After a Year of Breakneck Growth, Stablecoin Supply Expansion Has Stalled

For a long time, stablecoins have been the backbone of the digital asset ecosystem. They are essential to crypto's liquidity landscape

Stablecoins have long been touted as the backbone of the digital asset ecosystem.

Essential to crypto’s liquidity landscape, they provide the sorts of dollar-pegged assets that facilitate trades and offer safety in otherwise volatile markets. But of late, they’ve been looking a bit less stable—and for a few pretty plausible reasons.

As almost every crypto exchange and trading pair, stablecoins like USDT, USDC, and DAI, have core quote assets. These assets signal capital movement and sentiment. When the supply of these assets is rising, it almost always indicates that an influx of fresh capital is coming into the space and is ready to be deployed into some of the riskier assets. At times when capital isn’t flowing into the forced reserve stablecoins, we can assume that investors are either pulling capital from the space or sitting in the space waiting for clearer market signals.

The recent slowdown in stablecoin supply expansion, while subtle, is adding to accumulating signs that the wider crypto market might be entering a more prudent phase. After a year that was 2024—speculatively by the main meme coin manias, AI token rallies, and a deluge of fresh on-chain projects—that part of the crypto world seemed more like the deep, blue sea than the promising surf zone. And this is not to even mention at the turn from late 2024 into early 2025 and what might happen to crypto price action and trading volume if the Fed persistently keeps interest rates high.

According to reports, stablecoins surpassed Visa's payment volume for the first time in 2024.

Stablecoins Outpace Visa in Transaction Volume

Even with this growth slowdown, stablecoins’ influence in international finance appears to be gaining. Reports suggest that, for the first time ever, stablecoins cleared more in payments than the Visa network does in a year.

That’s quite a milestone for an asset class that many in traditional finance still view as a bit of a wild child. But what’s happening here isn’t just a crypto thing. This is also about transactions based on U.S. dollars, and stablecoins clearing payment volumes in a dollar-dominated world.

Tether (USDT) has seen a 13% increase in users in Q1 2025, showcasing its role as a key financial tool in developing countries facing economic challenges.

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— Cobain (@Cobain_btc) April 15, 2025

Fast, low-cost and borderless transactions—that’s what you get with stablecoins. This makes them a not-so-secret weapon for not just traders but also businesses, remittance platforms, and individuals wandering through the financial desert of unstable monetary policy.

These dollar-backed digital currencies are part of a shift that threatens to take a huge bite out of the payment systems operated by traditional banking giants.

Among all stablecoins, Tether (USDT) remains the forerunner in adoption. In the first quarter of 2025, USDT had a user base that increased by 13%—that is, a significant leap that indicates growing usefulness in the very sort of places where its sort of decentralized functionality is most desired: developing nations. Those from the developed world who are poor and who are told they might as well stay poor are increasingly using Tether to shield themselves and their families from the sorts of things that make a currency unstable, inflation guaranteed, and financial system collapse all but certain.

The expanding utility places stablecoins at a unique intersection of the crypto innovation and real-world financial resilience. While the speculative use cases may ebb and flow, the demand for stable, accessible, and censorship-resistant money remains persistently strong, especially in places where conventional finance fails.

But, the macroeconomic headwinds we encounter don’t just blow against stablecoins; they blow against the whole crypto market and the whole economy. A sustained recession or series of negative quarter-on-quarter GDP reports (which can sometimes happen) can lead to memories of the Great Depression. These are waters the whole crypto market is trying not to tread.

The worry among stablecoin issuers is that regulators may restrict the amount of cash that can back a stablecoin. However, a recent report from the International Monetary Fund notes that funds held at banks may not be enough to back all the stablecoins in circulation. If that’s the case, stablecoins are at another near-death experience.

However, at present, stablecoins exemplify how crypto can shake up and make financial systems more accessible. Stablecoins were in the Digital Dollar 1.0 phase. They now meditate on what the next phase looks like. That is why they are here, reading from the same hymnal but acknowledging in their different ways that the agenda must change.

In the coming year