Who Benefits From Stablecoins? Tracing Fee Models and Beneficiaries

Stablecoins have quietly evolved from experimental tech to the backbone of daily settlement and liquidity flows across the global financial web. By 2025, trillions of dollars moved through digital dollars with speed and reliability that many market participants had not anticipated. As 2026 unfolds, the central question for investors, traders and builders is no longer whether stablecoins work, but who will capture the value created by their velocity.

Despite a lack of a single dominating consumer app or a watershed moment of mainstream adoption, intentional design and real-world utility propelled stablecoins into critical infrastructure. The lesson so far: the network effects and the quality of the rails matter more than any one platform or use case, and the payoff tends to accrue to those who optimize movement and interoperability rather than those who promise outsized speculative gains.

Key takeaways

• Stablecoin on-chain activity surged in 2025, with total movement exceeding $33 trillion—an increase of about 72% from 2024, underscoring that velocity has become the defining metric for these assets.
• Latin America emerged as a practical adoption frontier, where stablecoins serve as far more than a hedge—Argentine users accounted for roughly 61.8% of on-chain activity in the region’s ecosystem, with Brazil close behind at about 59.8%.
• Infrastructure economics are shifting: revenue from reserve management, distribution networks, exchanges, and on‑ramp/off‑ramp services is increasingly concentrated at the level of intermediaries and settlement rails, not just speculative traders.
• Velocity-driven utility is reshaping incentives: rather than focusing on market capitalization, the industry is examining how earnings and flows can be redirected to users and real economy use cases.
• Regulatory and governance questions remain central: licensing, custody, and settlement frameworks will influence who profits from stablecoin activity and under what conditions.

From promise to settlement infrastructure

In retrospect, the crypto industry spent much of the past few years chasing headline metrics—market caps, “Ethereum killer” debates, and aspirational price narratives. But the value of stablecoins lies in their utility as flexible, programmable money that can settle value rapidly across borders and rails. As velocity overtook mere accumulation, stablecoins began functioning as working capital—embedded in treasuries, payments, and cross‑border settlements—without requiring a dramatic consumer breakthrough to exist meaningfully in daily commerce.

On-chain data paints a clear picture: 2025 marked a tipping point where the sheer volume of stablecoin movement outpaced growth in total market capitalization. With hundreds of billions of dollars circulating as reserves and liabilities, the system demonstrates a maturity that policy makers and financial incumbents are watching closely. This shift aligns with the broader idea that money that circulates quickly reduces the need for vast supply to sustain activity, a nod to the Quantity Theory of Money as applied in a digital era.

Latin America as the operational blueprint

While Western markets often frame stablecoins as yield vehicles or settlement tools, Latin America showcases how these instruments can translate into practical resilience against inflation and currency volatility. The region’s usage patterns reveal a working reality: stablecoins are used to preserve purchasing power and facilitate everyday transactions where local currencies may falter.

In Argentina, for example, Argentines leverage stablecoins to shield assets from dramatic local currency swings, with adoption levels indicating a meaningful share of on-chain activity. Brazil trails closely, reflecting a broader continental trend toward using tokenized dollars to navigate macroeconomic stress. This establishes Latin America not as an exception but as a possible blueprint for other regions facing similar currency dynamics and inflationary pressures.

As international regulators and industry groups observe, the Latin American experience underscores a practical utility that goes beyond speculative trading. It hints at a future where stablecoins become an ordinary part of financial infrastructure—an outcome that could extend to other regions with similar macroeconomic environments if the right on-ramps, custody standards, and user experiences are in place.

The rent extraction ladder and the race for velocity

The architecture that supports stablecoins is, in effect, a pyramid of participants who benefit from the flows: issuers, exchanges, custodians, liquidity providers, and traditional banks or neobanks that integrate on-chain settlements. The economic value tied to these flows is being captured at multiple levels of this stack.

Issuers—led by the major stablecoin providers—derive revenue from reserve management and the interest earned on their cash‑like holdings, often referred to as the float. Industry analysis points to scenarios where flagship issuers have achieved high process efficiency and profitability per employee as they scale reserve operations and distribute liquidity across networks.

Between issuers and users stand exchanges and on-/off-ramp providers, which earn fees from settlement, routing, and liquidity provisioning. These entities are increasingly central to the velocity narrative, where faster, cheaper, and more reliable settlement rails translate into higher transaction throughput and a more capable payments layer for real‑world use cases.

On the banking side, traditional and neo‑banking partners have begun integrating stablecoin rails to enable tokenized deposits and on‑chain settlement services. This integration creates additional revenue streams and deepens the financial ecosystem surrounding stablecoins, potentially normalizing them as a standard part of financial plumbing rather than a speculative niche.

Regulators, while not direct profiteers, play a decisive role by determining licensing regimes, custody standards, and compliance requirements. Their choices influence who can participate, how quickly capital can move, and under what safeguards. In this sense, the policy environment shapes the distribution of rents within the stablecoin economy and can either accelerate or constrain velocity-driven growth.

Latin America, again, illustrates the battleground over velocity and margins. New wallets, on‑ramps, and exchange ecosystems are contending to capture fee margins tied to stablecoin movement. The overarching objective for many participants is not merely to grow market share but to ensure that the velocity of funds translates into broadly shared value for users and the wider economy.

Infrastructure at scale: what comes next

As stablecoins transition from promising technology to widely used infrastructure, their prominence will hinge on two intertwined factors: continued, reliable utility and governance that aligns incentives with user welfare. The endgame—an internet of value where stablecoins function seamlessly across borders, industries, and use cases—depends on how effectively the ecosystem can sustain velocity while delivering tangible benefits to everyday users.

Recent macro observations suggest that stablecoins handled tens of trillions in value flows in 2025, validating their role as settlement and treasury tools even before widespread consumer adoption. With their velocity established, the next year may reveal who is best positioned to govern and monetize this infrastructure without compromising user control and access.

The broader implication for investors and builders is clear: the opportunity is less about chasing the next speculative surge and more about engineering robust, scalable rails that lower frictions for real-world finance. The stability and speed of these rails can redefine how capital moves in and across emerging markets, while regulators caution that structure and risk management must evolve in tandem with adoption.

Opinion by: Jeff Handler, co-founder at OpenTrade.

For readers watching the evolution of digital money, the trajectory suggests that the “what” of stablecoins is already settled: they work as a settlement and liquidity layer. The remaining questions center on the governance of who profits, how profits are aligned with users, and which jurisdictions best foster velocity without compromising safety and transparency.