Following the recent passage of legislation in the U.S., payment stablecoins seem to be on the brink of wider-scale adoption and explosive growth in market capitalization. In this post, we contend that the driving factor is not their proximity to digital cash instruments, but rather how they are transferred—via global, open-access, peer-to-peer systems, or “permissionless blockchains,” for short. Stablecoin market capitalization has recently exceeded $260 billion and total transfer value reached $27.6 trillion in 2024, surpassing the combined value processed by Visa and Mastercard. On the surface, this appears to ... (full story)