Stablecoins find product-market fit as $250B a day now in sight and Wall Street knows it

McKinsey says settlement volumes could rival card networks within three years.

Cover art/illustration via CryptoSlate. Image includes combined content which may include AI-generated content.

Stablecoins are finally reaching product market fit in the West. While stablecoins have found considerable usage and impact throughout the developing world, the US, UK, and Europe have lagged behind in terms of true market adoption due to unclear regulations and the strength of the existing digital payments infrastructure, especially in Europe and the UK.

Now, though, in 2025, Congress enacted the GENIUS Act in July, and Stripe and Paradigm introduced Tempo, a payments-focused chain, in early September.

The new law installs the first federal license regime for dollar-pegged tokens, and Stripe’s partner Paradigm describes Tempo as a stablecoin-first network designed for payroll, remittances, marketplace payouts, and machine-to-machine use cases.

Per Latham & Watkins and WilmerHale briefings, GENIUS forces full-reserve backing in cash and short-dated Treasuries, monthly reserve disclosures, and makes licensed payment stablecoins non-securities under federal law, while vesting oversight in bank regulators and the OCC for nonbanks.

The statute bars issuers from paying interest to holders, yet the market is testing a “rewards” construct at distribution venues, creating a policy fault line flagged by WIRED and banking trade groups like the Bank Policy Institute and ABA Banking Journal. There is a superpriority for holders in issuer bankruptcies, a change that protects redemptions but could constrain reorganizations.

McKinsey pegs current real-world stablecoin activity at roughly $20 to $30 billion per day and outlines a path to at least $250 billion within three years as merchant acceptance and B2B payouts scale on low-fee rails.

The same work cites sub-penny, second-finality transfers on Solana as a reference cost-speed benchmark. Visa and Mastercard, meanwhile, have moved settlement deeper into their stacks: Visa added EURC and new chains in July, and Mastercard opened USDC and EURC settlement to acquirers across EEMEA in August.

Stablecoin adoption

A simple S-curve for acceptance and payouts puts the next 12–36 months into focus. Start with U.S. carded purchase volume of about $11.9 trillion in 2024 and total merchant processing fees of $187.2 billion, an average of around 1.57 percent, per the Nilson Report and CSP Daily News.

If 5 percent of that spend migrates to stablecoin checkout at a 10-basis-point all-in cost, annual merchant savings approach $8.8 billion. Under a lighter 2-basis-point network fee, 10 percent migration would free more than $17 billion annually. These figures ignore latency and FX benefits, which matter for cross-border.

On the float side, Treasury market math frames issuer economics under the interest ban. With three-month bill yields near 4 percent, a two-trillion-dollar stablecoin float by 2028, a scenario referenced in Treasury’s TBAC materials and policy coverage, would throw off roughly $80 billion in gross yield on reserves.

Because issuers cannot pay interest directly, that yield funds compliance, operations, and partner incentives, while “rewards” programs at exchanges test how much, if any, gets shared with end users. The net interest margin captured by issuers, therefore, ranges widely, but even a 25 to 50 percent capture implies $20 to $40 billion annually if the float reaches two trillion.

Stablecoin revenue projections

Throughput projections anchor the network side. At $250 billion per day by 2028, annualized settlement volume would exceed $90 trillion.

A 1 to 3 basis-point network take would translate to $9 to $27 billion in yearly L1 or L2 revenue, while 10 basis points would imply about $91 billion, though open-ledger payment fees today cluster near the low single-basis-point range given sub-penny per-transfer costs referenced by McKinsey and Visa’s Solana technical work.

That gap leaves room for value capture to accrue through account abstraction, fraud controls, and compliance services rather than raw transaction fees.

Winners and losers will depend on regulatory fit, fiat coverage, and enterprise integrations. USDC and EURC stand to gain from network and card-scheme settlement hooks that already exist, with PYUSD positioned at the wallet edge for consumer payouts.

Bank-issued tokens could attract B2B settlement where treasury teams want same-day cash accounting with bank guarantees, although cross-border coverage and developer tooling remain hurdles.

Tempo’s pitch targets enterprise payment scale with named design partners across AI, banking, and ecommerce. At the same time, Solana and Base have captured growing shares of transfer volume due to cost and tooling, a trend mirrored in Artemis and Chainalysis datasets.

A near-term constraint is fragmentation, which Chainalysis tracks across hundreds of stablecoins, even as top-down flows concentrate in USDT and USDC. Visa and Mastercard continue building integrations.

The big picture

Macro context points to a larger float even without consumer yield. TBAC’s July briefing modeled stablecoin reserve demand, adding to the front-end Treasury buyer base, and the GENIUS reserve rules lock most assets into cash and sub-93-day bills.

With the stablecoin market cap already surpassing $285 billion according to DeFiLlama and with daily utility expanding via card network settlement and on-chain payroll pilots, the float path to the low trillions by the late 2020s no longer rests only on crypto trading cycles.

The ECB’s call for safeguards on foreign stablecoins highlights that global policy will shape where that float sits and which currencies gain share.

The risks remain clear. The rewards workaround is drawing pushback from bank groups like the BPI and National Law Review contributors and could be curtailed in follow-on legislation, changing user-level incentives.

Superpriority for holders in bankruptcy reduces run risk for users yet may harden issuer resolution costs, raising barriers to entry. Compliance for sanctions and AML will add fixed overhead that favors scaled issuers and networks.

Those constraints reinforce why take-rates modeled above should be treated as ranges that compress as competition increases and why enterprise integrations, not raw throughput, will decide margins. Unintended consequences could box out smaller issuers.

The near-term watchlist is straightforward: Visa and Mastercard production rollouts for stablecoin settlement beyond pilots, the first Tempo-driven merchant and payroll flows, and Treasury’s implementing guidance under GENIUS on licensing, disclosures, and reserve composition.

If the McKinsey throughput path holds, the fee math and float math together explain why stablecoins are now competing directly with cards and bank wires on speed and cost, with $250 billion a day in settlement volume squarely in scope by 2028.

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