What works, what doesn't, and 2027 to 2030

Four uses with paying customers

A use works when the customer pays a market price and comes back without points, airdrops or rewards. Four uses meet that bar in 2026, and they share one feature: the alternative is slow, expensive or missing.

The first is dollar access for people who cannot open a dollar bank account. Remittance firms run a "stablecoin sandwich": dollars in, USDC or USDT across the border, local currency out. Felix Pago, which runs this over WhatsApp, had moved more than 8 bn USD for over 6 million customers in Latin America by September 2026, according to Tech Times, with stablecoin fees on the US-Mexico corridor below 1% against 5 to 7% on traditional channels. In high-inflation economies the same tokens also work as savings, which is why USDT's share of exchange trading is higher than its share of supply: part of the supply sits still in wallets.

The second is the unit of account in crypto markets. Exchanges quote prices in stablecoins, and lending protocols lend them out. Hyperliquid, a derivatives exchange with its own chain, where stablecoins serve as trading margin, held about 7 bn USD of them on 4 September 2026, almost all of it USDC, according to DefiLlama. Traders pay fees and interest for this without any subsidy.

The third is business payments in narrow corridors, where banks are slow and costly. Business-to-business (B2B) payments are transfers between companies, such as a supplier invoice paid across a border. McKinsey and Artemis estimated real stablecoin payments at about 390 bn USD in 2025, of which B2B was 226 bn USD. The payments chapter shows where those flows go.

The fourth is collateral for institutions. BlackRock's tokenized Treasury fund BUIDL became accepted as collateral on Crypto.com and Deribit in June 2025, so a trading firm can post a yield-bearing fund instead of idle cash. Binance followed in November 2025.

Six tests that beat a supply ranking

A supply ranking tells you how much money came in. It does not tell you whether it came for a lasting reason or for a reward that is about to end. The author scores each token with six tests, each asking what remains when one support is removed:

1. Zero rates: does the product still make sense if US interest rates fall to zero?
2. No incentive: what demand remains when rewards and token emissions stop?
3. A 50 mn USD exit: can that amount leave in a day without moving the price more than a few basis points?
4. The last crisis: how did the token behave in its most recent documented stress?
5. A paying user: is there a customer who pays a market price today and would return without a subsidy?
6. The 2027 rules: does the design survive the US payment-stablecoin rules expected from January 2027?

USDT and USDC pass five of six. USDT fails the rules test because it sits outside both MiCA in Europe and the GENIUS Act in the US. USDC's weak point is the crisis column, the March 2023 weekend when its bank failed. The surprises are further down. RLUSD, with a supply of about 2.4 bn USD, passes four tests, while USDe, about twice its size, passes only one. PYUSD, with PayPal behind it, passes none, because its supply followed a reward rather than payments.

2026 ran the incentive test in public. Total dollar-stablecoin supply peaked in May 2026 and then shrank slightly, the first decline in the record that did not follow a crash. USDT and USDC barely moved. USDe lost about a third of its supply as futures funding fell, and PYUSD lost about a sixth after its rewards campaign ended. Tokenized Treasury funds and newer bank-grade tokens such as USDG and RLUSD grew over the same months.

What does not work yet

Four stories get more attention than their evidence supports.

Mass shopping payments are the first. PayPal gives PYUSD access to hundreds of millions of accounts, yet its supply was about 3 bn USD in September 2026. When Visa settles in USDC, the cardholder swipes the same card; only the bank-to-bank step changes. Cards also offer something stablecoins lack. A chargeback is the right of a card user to reverse a disputed payment through the card network. A stablecoin transfer is final, so a merchant who accepts it takes on risk the card network carries today.

Yield as a lasting product edge is the second. Ethena's sUSDe paid about 17% in April 2024 and around 4% in 2026, because its return comes from futures funding, which rises and falls with speculation. The GENIUS Act bars payment-stablecoin issuers from paying interest, so yield moves into separate wrapper tokens whose legal status is still open.

Bank consortium announcements are the third. A group of 21 banks announced a joint project on 1 September 2026 and had disclosed no token, chain or company name three days later. An announcement is an intention.

Algorithmic designs are the fourth. Four years after Terra's UST collapsed in May 2022, algorithmic tokens held about 0.2% of the market on DefiLlama's count.

The biggest gap is between transfers and payments. On-chain transfer volume counts every movement, including exchange deposits, trading bots and an issuer moving its own funds. Studies that strip those out find real payments in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year, against tens of trillions of transfers. India's UPI payment system alone handled about 3.4 tn USD in 2025, several times the global stablecoin payment estimate. That comparison is a scale check. UPI moves rupees inside one country; stablecoins earn their place on routes where no cheap rail exists.

Problems nobody has solved

Several problems will shape the next five years, and none has a clear fix yet.

Redemption is narrow. Only verified clients of an issuer's desk can hand tokens back for dollars at par; everyone else sells on a market. Chapter 1 showed what that meant for USDC in March 2023.

The rules are late. The GENIUS Act was signed on 18 July 2025, but its one-year deadline for implementing rules passed with no final rule from any regulator, so the law takes effect on the fallback date of 18 January 2027. The broader market-structure bill, the CLARITY Act, failed a Senate procedural vote on 15 September 2026. The regulation chapter covers both laws.

The largest issuer is systemic and offshore. Tether reported about 141 bn USD of US Treasury exposure at the end of March 2026 and described itself as the 17th-largest holder of US government debt, a list otherwise made of countries. The Bank for International Settlements measured the link to the bond market: a 3.5 bn USD inflow into stablecoins cut three-month Treasury bill yields by about 0.7 basis points the same day, and outflows move yields more than inflows do.

Control is concentrated. Two tokens hold over 80% of supply, a few exchanges decide which tokens get liquidity, and issuers can freeze addresses from a small set of keys, as the under-the-hood chapter explains. None of that is visible in the price of 1.00 USD.

Three paths to 2030

A scenario here is a path of market size with the condition it depends on, not a forecast. All three start from about 311 bn USD of dollar-stablecoin supply on 4 September 2026. Each horizon is decided by a different question.

Through 2027 the question is whether US rules arrive on time and banks ship real products. In the bear path, final GENIUS Act rules miss January 2027, bank projects slip, and supply drifts to about 279 bn USD by the end of 2027. In the bull path, a new bank-issued token takes several percent of the market in its first year, much as USD1 went from nothing to billions in about a year.

From 2028 to 2030 the question is whether business payments keep growing after the first wave of companies moves money off correspondent banking. The base path, about 950 bn USD by the end of 2030, needs B2B stablecoin payments to keep growing above 50% a year. The bear path, about 300 bn USD, is what happens if that growth drops to single digits and banks win corporate demand with tokenized deposits.

After 2030 the question is whether the legal line between a stablecoin and a bank deposit holds. If Congress lets payment stablecoins pay interest, the two start to compete head on, and the bull path, about 2.1 tn USD by the end of 2030, becomes plausible.

Large banks publish higher numbers. Citi's base case is 1.9 tn USD by 2030, and Standard Chartered expects 2 tn USD by the end of 2028. The author's base is lower because it assumes the ban on paying yield survives the whole period.

What to watch next

• The OCC's final GENIUS Act rule, promised by November 2026: a rule on time points to the base path; another delay feeds the bear path.
• A token name and a chain for the bank consortia: a named product before the end of 2026 is the first bull signal; silence into mid-2027 is a bear signal.
• Year-on-year growth of B2B stablecoin payments in the next annual studies: two reports in a row below 50% would move the 2030 picture toward the bear path.
• The USDT-plus-USDC share, about 83% in September 2026: a durable fall below 60% would break the author's thesis.
• Any change to the yield ban in the GENIUS Act or its rules: it would redraw the line between stablecoins and deposits.