“Follow the money.” — Deep Throat, All the President’s Men
While much of the crypto market has spent the year repricing risk, one part of the digital asset stack has kept compounding in importance.
Stablecoins have continued to grow, with total supply sitting over $300 billion in late March according to CoinMarketCap, even as broader crypto sentiment has been, well… less stable. That matters because stablecoins are no longer just a convenience for traders. They’re increasingly the cash rail for on-chain markets, cross-border payments, digital settlement, and, over time, tokenized financial products.
That shift is easy to miss if you’re still looking at digital assets primarily through the lens of price action. Price volatility still dominates headlines, but stablecoin adoption is telling a different story, one centred less on narrative and more on utility.
In other words, while investors have been focused on the parts of crypto that move the most, one of the most important developments in the space has come from the assets designed not to move at all.
Stablecoins: From Niche Trading Tool to Key Financial Infrastructure
Stablecoins have grown from a niche trading tool into a meaningful piece of financial infrastructure. Their scale now reflects more than exchange liquidity; they’re being used across settlement, treasury movement, payments, collateral movement, and a growing number of card-linked and enterprise workflows. Visa said in December that its stablecoin settlement volume had reached a $3.5 billion annualized run rate, and in March, it expanded its work on stablecoin-linked cards to more countries.
A caveat worth noting: not all of that headline volume reflects real-world payments. McKinsey and Artemis Analytics recently estimated that once you strip out trading activity, exchange reshuffling, internal fund movements, and automated DeFi loops, actual stablecoin payments volume sits at roughly $390 billion on an annualized basis. That’s still a small fraction of global payments, but the number is growing quickly, and the gap between gross volume and real payments says less about failure than about how early the market still is.
That doesn’t mean stablecoins have already “won” payments. It does mean they have moved well beyond the experimental stage. Anyone who still sees them mainly as a parking lot between volatile crypto trades is looking at the market through a 2021 rear-view mirror.
Regulation Is Becoming a Catalyst for Stablecoin Adoption
A major reason for that maturation is regulatory clarity. In the United States, the GENIUS Act was signed into law in 2025, creating a federal framework for payment stablecoins. Regulators are now writing the implementing rules, with final regulations expected by mid-2026 and enforcement likely beginning by early 2027. The market is moving from uncertainty toward a more formal operating regime.
That matters because regulation changes the addressable market. Stablecoins backed by cash and short-term government securities, operating under a clearer legal framework, are much easier for institutions to evaluate than the earlier generation of loosely governed digital dollars. The next phase of growth is less likely to be driven by ideology and more likely to be driven by operational usefulness. That means faster settlement cycles, programmable payment flows, always-on treasury movement, and the ability to embed compliance directly into the transaction layer. Taken together, these features look less like crypto innovation and more like upgrades to existing financial plumbing.
Just as important, the regulatory debate itself is revealing something bigger: stablecoins are now significant enough to matter to the traditional financial system. When policymakers and banks are negotiating how yield, reserves, and distribution should work, they’re no longer debating whether stablecoins are relevant; they’re debating how they will be absorbed into the plumbing of finance. Even imperfect regulation can be constructive if it signals that stablecoins are moving from the edge of the system toward the core.
Why This Matters for Portfolios
For allocators, the stablecoin story is more about understanding where infrastructure value is being created rather than whether one token will outperform another. Payment processors, custody providers, compliance layers, tokenization platforms, market structure providers, and the blockchains capturing settlement activity all stand to benefit if stablecoins continue to move from crypto-native utility into mainstream financial plumbing.
That’s the more interesting lens for 2026. Stablecoins are increasingly a bridge between traditional finance and on-chain markets. If that bridge continues to strengthen, then the opportunity may not just sit with issuers themselves, but with the businesses and networks that enable issuance, movement, custody, reporting, compliance, and integration. That’s what makes this a market structure story, not just a token story.
The Canadian Chapter: Enter CADD
While most of the global stablecoin market remains overwhelmingly U.S. dollar-denominated, a more homegrown narrative is beginning to emerge. Tetra Digital Group has said its Canadian-dollar stablecoin, CADD, completed a proof of concept in late 2025, including a transfer between Wealthsimple and National Bank of Canada. It’s been described as the first time a Canadian dollar stablecoin moved between two financial institutions, including a major bank. Purpose Unlimited Inc. is also one of the initial investors in the CADD initiative.
The proof of concept matters because Canada has been largely absent from the stablecoin conversation, despite having obvious use cases in cross-border settlement, domestic digital payments, institutional treasury movement, and tokenized products. A regulated, domestically backed Canadian-dollar stablecoin would not just be symbolically important. It would give Canadian firms a native digital cash rail at a time when stablecoins are becoming a more serious part of financial infrastructure.
Purpose’s involvement reflects a broader point: stablecoins have expanded beyond the crypto sphere. Now they’re a market structure story and, over time, they may become a product story, too.
Final Thoughts
We’ve seen this pattern before with major financial technologies. First comes skepticism, then a period where adoption advances quietly beneath the noise, and then, suddenly, the rails are already built.
Stablecoins feel like they’re in that middle chapter now.
There are still risks, of course. Concentration remains high, regulation is still evolving, and not every stablecoin project will earn durable trust. But the direction of travel is becoming harder to ignore. The stablecoin market is growing, the rules are becoming clearer, and the use cases are becoming more practical.
Sometimes, the most important story in digital assets is not about volatility. It’s about the infrastructure that keeps working while everything else is swinging around it.
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