Stablecoins Are Seeing Adoption as a Cross-Border Settlement Mechanism: Bernstein

• Stablecoins are being adopted for cross-border settlements, Bernstein said.

• There have been signs of early adoption by payment firms such as Paypal and Visa, the broker said.

• Stablecoin supply is growing, the report noted.

The stablecoin market is growing and these cryptocurrencies are being adopted for cross-border settlements with payments firms, fintech companies and consumer platforms among the early users, broker Bernstein said in a research report on Tuesday.

Bernstein notes that stablecoin supply currently stands at $150 billion, with tether (USDT) and USD Coin (USDC) dominating the market with shares of 75% and 22% respectively. A stablecoin is a type of cryptocurrency that’s usually pegged to the U.S. dollar, though some other currencies and assets such as gold are also used.

“Stablecoin value settled on the blockchain indicates strong adoption of digital dollar with the crypto trading ecosystem as well as a cross-border payments currency,” analysts Gautam Chhugani and Mahika Sapra wrote, noting that “Q1 2024 annualized value transferred stands at $6.8 trillion, equivalent to 2022 high of ~$7 trillion.”

The authors said there have been signs of stablecoin adoption by payments firms such as Paypal (PYPL) and Visa (V) and consumer fintech platforms such as Grab (GRAB) in Singapore and Mercado Libre (MELI) in Latin America.

Solana is leading the field in blockchain payments, but has scalability issues, the report said. “The big change this cycle has been the dominant market share of Solana (43% highest share) in value of stablecoins transferred versus prior cycle market leader Ethereum,”

Solana is conducting pilots with

Visa

and

Shopify

, but it’s unclear whether the blockchain can break into more mainstream consumer and business-to-business payments, which would require a massive jump in scalability, the note said.

“Scalability requirements for consumer payments would require 15-20 fold growth from here (Solana ~700 TPS versus 10K+ for payment networks), and general purpose blockchains are yet to cross that chasm,” the report added.

Read more: Stablecoin USDC Is Making a Comeback: Coinbase