--- title: "What works, what doesn't, and 2027 to 2030" author: Mariusz Szyma date: 2026-09-24 lang: en canonical: https://szyma.co/en/blog/stablecoins/whats-next/ series: "Stablecoins: Past, Present and Future" series_part: 11/12 series_url: https://szyma.co/en/blog/stablecoins/ data_as_of: 4–10 Sep 2026 --- # What works, what doesn't, and 2027 to 2030 Stablecoins are a 311 bn USD market, but size alone does not show which parts of it have customers who would stay without a subsidy. This chapter separates the uses that work from the stories that have not been proven, names the problems nobody has solved, and lays out three paths to 2030, each with the condition it needs. It ends with the author's own thesis and the evidence that would prove it wrong. ## What you'll learn - Name the four uses where stablecoins have paying customers today. - Apply six survival tests to any token and explain why they beat a supply ranking. - Tell transfer volume from payments, and explain why the difference is so large. - List the open problems that will shape the next five years. - Read the 2027 and 2030 scenarios as if-then conditions, not forecasts. ## 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](/en/blog/stablecoins/payments/) 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. ![Twelve dollar tokens scored against six survival tests on 4 Sep 2026. Only USDT and USDC pass five of six; PYUSD and the algorithmic class pass none. This is the author's scoring, not a credit rating.](https://szyma.co/blog/img/six-tests-twelve-tokens.106c900a.svg) 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. ![Supply change from 1 Jan to 4 Sep 2026. USDe and PYUSD shrank as their yield or rewards faded, while tokenized Treasury funds and newer fiat-backed tokens grew. BUIDL, USYC and USDY are funds, not payment stablecoins.](https://szyma.co/blog/img/incentive-test-2026.daf8ab22.svg) > **My take:** Demand bought with an incentive looks exactly like organic demand until the incentive stops. If you are building on a specific dollar token, the six tests are a better guide to whether it will still be there in two years than its rank by supply. ## 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. > **Watch out:** When a slide says stablecoins "moved more than Visa", check whether the number is transfer volume. Real payments are a small fraction of it, and that fraction is the only part that competes with cards. ## 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](/en/blog/stablecoins/what-one-usdc-means/) 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](/en/blog/stablecoins/regulation/) 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](/en/blog/stablecoins/under-the-hood/) 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. ![Three paths for dollar-stablecoin supply from about 311 bn USD on 4 Sep 2026. Each row is a condition, not a prediction; the base path is highlighted.](https://szyma.co/blog/img/scenarios-to-2030.19dc54c4.svg) 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. > **My take:** My thesis is that by 2030 stablecoins grow mainly in niches where the customer pays a real price without a subsidy, and that USDT and USDC together keep more than 60% of the market because their lead rests on distribution and liquidity that a new token cannot buy quickly. I would drop the thesis if, by 2028, two of these happen: the USDT-plus-USDC share falls below 60% through a rival that keeps growing after its promotions end; real payments pass 2 tn USD a year; Congress allows yield and the market grows fivefold without a Treasury-market scare; or a bank consortium token wins more than 5% of the market within two years of launch. ## 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. ## Key takeaways 1. Stablecoins work where the alternative is slow, costly or missing: dollar access, trading and DeFi, narrow B2B corridors and institutional collateral. 2. A supply ranking measures money that arrived, not money that will stay. Six survival tests separate the two better. 3. Demand bought with rewards disappears when the rewards stop, as USDe and PYUSD showed in 2026 while USDT and USDC held steady. 4. Transfer volume is not payments. Real payments are a small share of on-chain transfers, and they are the only part that competes with cards and banks. 5. Narrow redemption, late rules, an offshore issuer with sovereign-sized Treasury holdings and concentrated control keys are still unsolved. 6. The 2027 to 2030 paths depend on three questions in turn: rules on time, B2B growth, and whether the stablecoin-deposit line holds. 7. A scenario without a named condition is a guess. Read every forecast, including this one, as if-then. ## Glossary - **Survival test**: a question that asks what demand for a token remains when one support, such as rewards or high interest rates, is removed. - **Incentive**: a reward, airdrop or token emission that pays users to hold a token. PYUSD's rewards campaign is an example. - **Transfer volume**: the total value of on-chain token movements, including exchange flows and bots. It is much larger than payments. - **Business-to-business (B2B) payment**: a payment between companies, such as a supplier invoice paid across a border. - **Chargeback**: a card user's right to reverse a disputed payment through the card network. Stablecoin transfers have no equivalent. - **Yield wrapper**: a separate token, such as sUSDe, that pays a return the base stablecoin does not pay. - **Scenario**: a path of market size tied to a named condition. It is not a forecast. ## Go deeper - [Where stablecoins are actually used](/en/blog/stablecoins/payments/): the corridors and the transfer-versus-payment funnel in detail. - [Who's who in stablecoins](/en/blog/stablecoins/whos-who/): the firms behind each path. - [How to analyze any stablecoin in 30 minutes](/en/blog/stablecoins/thirty-minute-teardown/): turn the six tests into a working checklist. - [Tether](/en/blog/companies/tether/) and [Ethena](/en/blog/companies/ethena/): company profiles. - 🟢 BIS, Working Papers No. 1270, stablecoin flows and Treasury bill yields, https://www.bis.org/publ/work1270.htm - 🟢 DefiLlama stablecoin dashboard, https://defillama.com/stablecoins ## Sources - 🟢 DefiLlama, stablecoin supply by token, class and chain, read 4 September 2026, https://defillama.com/stablecoins - 🟢 Tether, Q1 2026 attestation report by BDO, 30 April 2026, https://tether.to/en/transparency/ - 🟢 BIS, Working Papers No. 1270, stablecoin flows and Treasury bill yields, https://www.bis.org/publ/work1270.htm - 🟢 NPCI, UPI product statistics, 2025, https://www.npci.org.in/what-we-do/upi/product-statistics - 🟡 McKinsey and Artemis Analytics, "Stablecoins find their niche", February 2026, https://www.mckinsey.com - 🟡 Yahoo Finance, "GENIUS Act compliance cliff", 3 September 2026, https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/crypto/articles/genius-act-compliance-cliff-137-113348697.html - 🟡 CNBC, "Senate cloture vote on Clarity Act fails", 15 September 2026, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/15/senate-cloture-vote-on-clarity-act-fails-dealing-regulatory-setback-to-crypto-industry.html - 🟡 Citigroup, Citi Institute GPS, "Stablecoins 2030", 25 September 2025, https://www.citigroup.com/global/insights - 🟡 Standard Chartered research note on stablecoin supply, as reported by FinanceFeeds, 24 February 2026, https://financefeeds.com - 🟡 PRNewswire and Securitize, BUIDL accepted as collateral on Binance, 14 November 2025, https://www.prnewswire.com - 🟢 Securitize, "BlackRock's BUIDL, Tokenized by Securitize, Accepted as Collateral on Crypto.com and Deribit", PR Newswire, 18 June 2025, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/blackrocks-buidl-tokenized-by-securitize-accepted-as-collateral-on-cryptocom-and-deribit-302484633.html - 🟢 DefiLlama, stablecoins on Hyperliquid L1, read for 4 September 2026, https://defillama.com/stablecoins/Hyperliquid%20L1 - 🟡 Tech Times, "Felix Pago Raises $200M: Federal Cash Tax Hits Competitors, Exempts Digital Transfers", 1 September 2026, https://www.techtimes.com/articles/326260/20260901/felix-pago-raises-200m-federal-cash-tax-hits-competitors-exempts-digital-transfers.htm - 🟡 Blockhead, "21 Banks Including Citi, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Commit to Joint Stablecoin Venture", 2 September 2026, https://www.blockhead.co/2026/09/02/21-banks-including-citi-goldman-sachs-bank-of-america-commit-to-joint-stablecoin-venture/ ## Caveats - The six-test scoring and the three paths are the author's own work, dated 4 September 2026. They are not a credit rating, a forecast or investment advice. - Estimates of real stablecoin payments differ by method; this chapter uses one study for its figure and treats the rest as a range of the same order.