The stablecoin question is: Who gets paid?

Opinion by: Jeff Handler, co-founder at OpenTrade.

The tech has been solved. The digital dollars are flowing. In 2026, the only variable left is understanding who actually gets to collect and enjoy the fare.

2025 wasn’t the year stablecoins “went mainstream”, at least not how crypto pundits had envisioned. No specific app that dominated the download charts, nor was there a particular moment when stablecoins suddenly clicked for normies. Instead, by intentional design, digital dollars quietly and efficiently became working capital, nestling neatly into the world’s financial plumbing.

Now, as is the case with many elite technologies, stablecoins are invisible infrastructure.

That signals the start of a new era, not to drive their usage, but to capture the value in their movement.

The velocity imperative

In hindsight, the crypto industry has largely obsessed over the wrong metrics. The old mindset focused on market caps and coin wars, with tribalistic investors arguing about “Ethereum Killers” and coins that would go “only up”. No coin is ever destined for pure appreciation, so total market cap can be considered a vanity metric for static assets. Velocity is a far more interesting data point for promising infrastructure.

Onchain data suggests that total stablecoin transaction volumes in 2025 exceeded $33tn, up 72% from 2024. Considering the supply sat in the low hundreds of billions, that gap tells us the same dollars were being reused across settlements, payments, treasuries, and other contexts, flowing between wallets, exchanges, and rails, all on-demand. Transfer volumes outpaced market expansion, while stablecoins finally decoupled from spot trading.

Then, as movement overpowered markup, the Quantity Theory of Money became relevant. This theory suggests that money which circulates rapidly reduces the amount of supply needed to support a given level of economic activity. In short, the quantity and velocity of stablecoins reached sufficient levels for them to be considered a proven and necessary technology. This was especially felt in Latin America.

LatAm is the ideal utility blueprint

In the context of use cases, the US and Europe see stablecoins as a yield play or trading settlement tool (at least for now), with investors holding them or deploying them to earn interest or move between assets. In Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela, however, they are tools for survival against high inflation, local currency volatility, and economic uncertainty.

In Latin America, local currencies must move quickly to preserve their purchasing power. This provides a fertile environment for stablecoins, where Argentines deploy them for 61.8% of all on-chain activity, just ahead of Brazil’s 59.8% figure.

While developed markets in the West are busy debating regulatory frameworks and nuanced tax setups, the Latin world has already substituted in stablecoins to escape local currency risk. The former sees them as a “nice to have.” The latter sees them as a necessity.
Related: AI and stablecoins are winning despite 2026 crypto market slump

At a macro level, financial instruments demonstrating clear utility (over the promise of outsized gains) are more likely to become infrastructure. Therefore, Latin America is not really an outlier, but simply the first region to realize stablecoins could maintain value in a way local currencies cannot. It’s not hard to imagine similar economic circumstances on other continents driving even more stablecoin adoption.

The ongoing battle for rent extraction

Users who avoid overnight local FX spikes are not the only winners here. Major entities are already capturing “rent” on stablecoin reuse, with a pyramid-like structure of issuers, exchanges, and custodial services all quietly enjoying their returns.

Stablecoin issuer revenue comes from intelligent reserve management and distribution relationships. Tether, the issuer of USDT stablecoins, is now the world’s second most profitable company per employee. They are profiting from the float.

Exchanges are next in line, extracting fees from settlement and internal routing services. After them, traditional banks and neobanks have embraced stablecoins to permit tokenized deposits or on-chain settlement services, generating additional revenue streams.

At the bottom of the pyramid there are regulators, who may not profit directly from stablecoins, but ultimately influence who does. Through licensing and compliance frameworks, they indirectly shape who really profits from facilitating stablecoin transfers and under what conditions.

To reference Latin America again, this region can already see the rent extraction battle being played out. New on-ramps and off-ramps, stablecoin-friendly wallets, and crypto exchanges are all competing for attention to capture the fee margins. These services don’t need to see market growth. They simply need to drive velocity so that everyone can win.

Yet, for velocity to become sustainable, the incentives must align. Instead of letting yields cascade up to intermediaries, the industry should turn its attention to returning earnings directly back to the users. The people who are driving this economic activity are the ones who ultimately merit a share in the rewards.

Infrastructure is the endgame

When stablecoins are widely used around the world, to the extent that people stop talking about them as a “promising technology”, then they will have already become invisible infrastructure.

If stablecoins aren’t there already, then they must be close. 2025 proved stablecoins could handle tens of trillions in value flows, becoming popular instruments of settlement and achieving widespread validation in the process. With their velocity established, time will tell who captures and governs the infrastructure from here.

The experiment is over. The business can now truly begin.
Opinion by: Jeff Handler, co-founder at OpenTrade.