Stablecoins are tokenized versions of currencies. They let you hold, send, and use a currency like the US dollar on a blockchain network. You can't put a physical dollar bill on a blockchain, so instead you use a token that stays pegged to one dollar. That's the "stable" part. The most common examples are USDC (issued by Circle) and USDT (issued by Tether), and there are now stablecoins pegged to euros, yen, and pounds as well.
Stablecoins hit $33 trillion in transaction volume in 2024. Their total market cap crossed $300 billion in 2025. If you work anywhere near fintech or blockchain you've heard about them, and I think the hype is mostly deserved. Stablecoins are one of only two things with real product-market fit from the blockchain space. The other is trading.
Stablecoins allow instant transfer and settlement, for readers not spending their days dealing with moving “value” around, this is like discovering fire for the fintech bros.
Recently I was making a payment for something out of the country and had to go through roughly seven steps to even initiate it, only to have it fail for some reason that was completely imperceptible to me. The hoops make sense from an AML/KYC perspective, but to still have the payment fail after all of that was very demoralizing. It took three hours of my life to do something that should have taken five minutes. Stablecoins don't magically fix compliance, but in some near future they could make actions like this more straightforward.
More broadly, I think people should have access to currencies of all kinds. It seems unfair to me that I should be stuck with the monetary policy decisions of a country I just happened to be born in. Stablecoins make it possible for anyone with an internet connection to hold dollars, euros, or whatever currency they choose. That is already a big deal for people around the world.
So basically, I think stablecoins are great. They make money move around the world faster and give people everywhere access to all sorts of money. So, why isn’t everyone using this magic money?
The fee problem
On-ramps and off-ramps suck. On-ramping is the process of converting your regular dollars into stablecoin dollars. An off-ramp is the reverse. In the best case the fee is 0.1%, but this can cost fifty times more depending on how you do it.
If you're willing to use an advanced exchange interface, deposit via ACH (free on every major exchange), and place a limit order, you can get into stablecoins for as little as 0.1% on Binance.US or about 0.4% on Coinbase Advanced. Note that ACH will typically take 3-5 days. But if you use the "simple buy" screen on those same exchanges with a debit card, the total cost balloons to 5% to 7.5% once you factor in deposit fees and spreads. The simple buy interfaces on major exchanges cost 5x to 10x more than their advanced counterparts. There being a fee is already an issue, which is only made worse by the much higher cost for the products marketed towards the average consumer.
Third-party providers that plug into wallets and apps (companies like MoonPay, Transak, and Ramp Network) charge 1% to 4.5% depending on payment method. An aggregator called Onramper routes across 30+ providers and claims to save about 2.5% on average, but even optimized, these are not cheap rails. To put real numbers on it: converting $1,000 into stablecoins costs about $1 through Binance.US the hard way, about $4 through Coinbase Advanced, about $5.50 through Robinhood, and about $45 through MoonPay with a card. If you use Coinbase's simple debit card flow, you're looking at $55 to $70. On a thousand dollars. That is a genuinely absurd spread of outcomes for what is functionally the same action.
Why would any American pay 0.5%, let alone 4.5%, to enter a new financial system denominated in dollars they already have?
Something has to give
I think the fee structure is going to collapse. The on-ramp market was valued at $8.4 billion in 2025, projected to hit $34.6 billion by 2034. That kind of growth attracts exactly the type of companies that are willing to eat margin to win market share.
Stripe acquired Bridge for $1.1 billion in early 2025, its largest acquisition ever, explicitly to build stablecoin infrastructure. Patrick Collison called stablecoins "room-temperature superconductors for financial services." AKA fire for fintech bros. Stripe already processes over $1.4 trillion in annual payment volume. I imagine Stripe won’t kill adoption to keep getting a big cut from people trying to play online poker or predict which words Brian Armstrong will say in the Coinbase quarterly report.
Mastercard followed in March 2026 with its $1.8 billion acquisition of BVNK, a London-based stablecoin infrastructure firm operating across 130+ countries. That deal is the largest stablecoin acquisition to date. Mastercard is not buying BVNK to charge consumers 3% to convert dollars. It is buying BVNK to make stablecoin payment flows native to its network, the same way card payments are native today.
Then there are the companies that are half bank, half stablecoin infrastructure. Column is a good example. Column owns a national bank charter but has rebuilt itself as an API-first technology platform. Brex already uses Column for USDC stablecoin payments with automatic conversion to USD and near-instant settlement routed into deposit accounts over ACH, Fedwire, and FedNow. Cross River Bank launched a similar offering, unifying fiat and stablecoin flows through a single interoperable system. SoFi launched SoFiUSD, becoming the first national bank to issue a stablecoin on a public blockchain, explicitly positioning itself as infrastructure for other banks and fintechs.
These hybrid entities matter because they collapse the distance between your bank account and a stablecoin wallet into a single step. When the bank is the on-ramp, the fee can approach zero. The conversion from dollars in your account to dollars on a blockchain becomes an internal ledger operation, just like transferring to someone with the same bank or over Zelle. The transaction no longer needs to be routed through three intermediaries, each taking a cut.
The GENIUS Act accelerates this. It gives both banks and non-banks a clear path to issue regulated stablecoins with 1:1 reserves. The OCC is actively processing applications. JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citi, and Wells Fargo have been exploring a joint stablecoin through Early Warning Services, the company behind Zelle. The path banks this big will take is a bit less clear. In my mind, they are the best positioned to use stablecoins to extend their reach globally, but their stance on yield makes it clear they like a lot of how banking in America currently works.
Over the next 12 to 24 months I expect significant fee compression across the board. The fee for converting dollars to stablecoins will trend toward the cost of an ACH transfer, which is to say, effectively zero.
Will global finance have two faces?
Fees going to zero might not be enough, there is another related issue. The GENIUS Act explicitly prohibits stablecoin issuers from paying any form of interest or yield to holders. The law says, plainly, that no permitted issuer "shall pay the holder of any payment stablecoin any form of interest or yield (whether in cash, tokens, or other consideration) solely in connection with the holding, use, or retention of such payment stablecoin." The intent is to keep stablecoins as payment instruments, not deposit substitutes. Banks lobbied hard for this provision because they were terrified of deposit flight.
There is some creative maneuvering happening around this. Coinbase offers "USDC Rewards" through what it calls a loyalty program, funded by revenue sharing with Circle. Whether this survives regulatory scrutiny is an open question. The Conference of State Bank Supervisors has already argued that regulators should define "interest" and "yield" broadly enough to capture indirect payments through affiliates and third parties. Columbia Law School published an analysis arguing that the Circle-Coinbase rewards arrangement maps directly onto the statutory prohibition. This lack of yield is another way you are "paying" to hold the US dollar. Holding stablecoins means giving up the yield you would otherwise earn. It's an implicit fee of sorts.
So here is the question for everyday Americans: if I cannot earn yield on my stablecoin dollars, and my regular bank account at least gives me something (even if it is a sad 0.3% savings rate), and there is still any friction or cost to converting between the two, why would I ever move my money into stablecoins?
For people in Argentina or Libya or Turkey, the answer is obvious. Stablecoins give you access to the dollar. That alone is worth a lot when your local currency is losing value each year. The value proposition internationally is so strong that stablecoins will continue to grow regardless of what happens in the US.
But for Americans, they already have the dollar. There is Venmo, Zelle, and Apple Pay. The marginal convenience of stablecoins for a domestic American consumer, absent yield, absent zero fees, is just not compelling enough to change behavior.
And this leads to what I think is a genuinely strange possible outcome. We could end up with two parallel financial systems, both denominated in USD. One is the traditional banking system: regulated, FDIC-insured, yield-bearing (barely, but still real), slow for cross-border but functional for domestic use. The other is the stablecoin system: faster, programmable, globally accessible, but with no yield and some residual friction getting in and out.
That seems like an odd equilibrium for what is arguably the most impressive piece of financial technology to emerge in the last decade. Stablecoins are clearly better infrastructure. They settle instantly. They are programmable. They work across borders without correspondent banking chains. They are transparent in ways that traditional finance is not. And yet, for the average American, none of that matters if the switching cost in fees, in lost yield, and cognitive overhead is not zero.
Do we all get magic internet money?
I think one of three things happens.
First possibility: fees go to zero, the yield prohibition gets loosened or creatively circumvented at scale, and stablecoins become the default payment rail for Americans within a decade. The Stripe and Mastercard acquisitions suggest the infrastructure is being built for this outcome. If your bank account and your stablecoin wallet become functionally indistinguishable, the question of "why would I switch" disappears because there is nothing to switch. Your dollars just happen to move on better rails.
Second possibility: fees go to zero but the yield prohibition holds, and stablecoins become enormous internationally while remaining a niche product domestically. Americans use them for cross-border payments and maybe some DeFi activity but keep their savings in bank accounts. The two-system equilibrium persists.
Third possibility: tokenized deposits, which the GENIUS Act explicitly does allow to pay yield, end up being the vehicle that brings blockchain-based dollar infrastructure to American consumers. Instead of converting dollars to stablecoins, your bank issues you tokenized deposits that live on a blockchain and earn interest. This is arguably the outcome the banks are angling for, and it would let them keep deposits on their balance sheets while still offering the speed and programmability of blockchain rails.
My guess is some combination of all three, with the ratio depending on how aggressively companies like Stripe and Column push fees down and how regulators interpret the yield prohibition over the next couple of years.
But one thing feels clear to me. If the fee to get into stablecoins does not go to zero, and if Americans cannot earn any yield on their stablecoin balances, this technology will remain a tool for cross-border payments and crypto-native users rather than a true upgrade to everyday American finance. To me, that seems like a waste of good tech.