The signing of the GENIUS Act that occurred in July was a pivot to the uptake of stablecoins in the West. It was the first introduction of a federal license framework of dollar-pegged tokens in the U.S. which had to be fully backed in cash and short-term treasuries. This regulatory disambiguation led to innovation like the introduction of Tempo, a payments chain based on stablecoins and focused on payrolls, remittances and machine to machine payments, by Stripe and Paradigm.
Big throughput and huge market potential.
Currently, McKinsey estimates that stablecoin use is 20-30 billion a day with projections climbing to 250 billion in 2028. The groundwork is laid now that USDC and EURC are incorporated into the settlement layers of card networks. Such as Visa and Mastercard, and chains such as Solana are allowing transactions of less than a penny. The merchants would save about 9 billion dollars a year, assuming a migration of only 5% of U.S. Card volume to stablecoins.
Revenue and Yield Dynamics
GENIUS would prohibit paying interest to its users. However, a stablecoin float of $2 trillion would yield 80 billion a year in reserves. Part of this can be retained by issuers as net margin. Furthermore, it can be distributed by means of rewards–a revenue model even without the issuers providing direct yield. Billions more may be charged at the network level and new enterprise-oriented rails such as Tempo.
The Big Picture: Risks, Winners and Outlook.
The adoption is dependent on regulatory fit, FX reach, and tech tooling. USDC, EURC and PYUSD are the leading ones. Though there are risks. Legal gray areas of rewards, expenses of issuances in case of bankruptcy of issuers and the increasing costs of compliance. Nevertheless, as real-world application grows, stablecoins are now more than theory. They are competing on an equal footing with cards and wires.
