Infrastructure War: Circle, Stripe, and Tether Build Their Own Blockchains for Stablecoins
The stablecoin market is entering a fundamentally new phase. Digital dollars are no longer just tokens seeking the cheapest blockchain. Issuers have realized: controlling the asset is not enough; you also need to own the network through which it moves. We are witnessing the formation of three competing infrastructure projects, each vying to become the settlement layer of the future.
Market Scale and Current Distribution
According to my data, the total supply of stablecoins has already reached $309 billion, with 99% of them denominated in US dollars. The average daily transfer volume is a colossal $209 billion. The network processes 63.8 million transactions per day with 4.4 million active addresses. However, the key point is that stablecoins are still far from their payment mission. About 49% are used for trading, 26% simply sit on exchanges, 17% are utilized in DeFi, and only a negligible share goes to direct payments.
Why Issuers Want Their Own Networks
Each major blockchain was originally created for its own purpose: Ethereum for universal settlements, Solana for high throughput, Base for the mass consumer economy. TRON became the largest platform for USDT precisely due to its low cost and wide integration. But the key conclusion I have drawn from analyzing the current situation is this: the assets themselves have already reached scale, but the payment layer around them has not.
This is precisely why issuers and payment companies are asking themselves: why perpetually rent someone else's network? They want trillions of dollars to move on-chain, with users not having to think about gas, bridges, or validators.
Three Contenders for Infrastructure Dominance
The first project is Arc. Through it, Circle is trying to turn USDC from an asset into an operating system. The key innovation: the stablecoin is used to pay for gas, and the network itself is EVM-compatible and connected to Circle's existing infrastructure.
The second participant is Tempo. Stripe and Paradigm are looking at the same opportunity from the payments side: fees are paid directly in stablecoins, and Tempo itself already enables working with them within Stripe Treasury in over 100 countries.
The third pairing is Tether and Plasma. Tether has the deepest dollar liquidity in crypto, and Plasma is building a network around USDT and USDT0 for payments, savings, and lending on a unified liquidity base.
However, the battle is not just among this trio. Giants of traditional finance—Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Coinbase, and BlackRock—also want their share of the market, seeing stablecoins as the industry's main product.
My Expert Assessment
At this point, Plasma has the strongest defense: liquidity and products are already in place. Arc, with its institutional connections, still needs to prove real demand, not just generate headlines. Meanwhile, spawning unnecessary networks is wrong. Three participants are already enough, and a new wave of "zombie chains" would only fragment liquidity. The battle for a market worth $2–4 trillion by 2030 will be truly fascinating to watch, and it is these three projects that will determine who becomes the new settlement standard of the crypto economy.