On the 5th of February 2023, Patrick Hansen, director of EU strategies in Circle, went on Twitter to call stablecoins like USDC and USDT crypto killers with faster adoption than any other project.
1/16 Stablecoins are undeniably crypto's killer use case atm and going to mainstream faster than any other application.
Don't take my word for it, look at the data 🧵
— Patrick Hansen (@paddi_hansen) February 5, 2023
According to Hansen, the rate at which crypto users are utilizing stablecoins at the moment is higher than any decentralized project, and they are going mainstream faster. In other to support that assumption, he shared a Twitter thread with appropriate charts.
Back in 2022, the settlement value using USDT alone was valued at around $7 trillion, as opposed to 2021, where it was around $6 trillion. He also compared USDT’s total settlement value to MasterCard, valued at $2.2 trillion throughout the year. Thus in terms of growth metrics, stablecoins are dominating the space.
In spite of the bear market in the crypto space, stablecoins seemed unaffected, with consistent growth on the part of USDC. the stablecoin saw a consistent increase in volume and active wallets, usurping USDT on the Ethereum chain. The share of stablecoins in Ethereum’s chain is also steadily growing, completely immune to DeFi TVL.
Since these stablecoins are pegged on the US dollar, their transactions in also immune to the price action of BTC or their associated trading pairs. 15% of USDC transactions are wallet-to-wallet, as opposed to the 2% observed in the traditional payment system used for non-financialized transactions.
Stablecoins are the foundation of DeFi currently, and they are even more stable and less speculative than even the US dollar. Most liquidity in decentralized projects is provided through stablecoins, which has helped reduce fx costs in payment and DeFi transactions. With a $7 trillion market volume, stablecoins are saving the unbanked and underbanked individuals $30 billion worth of costs annually.
Retail adoption of stablecoins has also picked up steam. In inflation-ridden locations in the world, a third of the population has already been part of a stablecoin transaction. And teams operating an international workforce have shown the adoption of stablecoins as a means of paying compensation to employees.
Global-level service providers like Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe deem it necessary to invest in a stablecoin payment and settlement solution.
According to Hansen, the transition from traditional digital banking to stablecoin-level services would require upgrading a broad range of functions usually done at the backend. Functions such as AP automation. But this would lead to greater transactions and a rise in the use of B2B payment services.
