As regulatory frameworks for stablecoins gradually take effect over the past year, stablecoins have evolved into core infrastructure for the crypto financial system and even cross-border payment networks. They are acting as "digital dollars," serving both the trading needs of individual investors and the explorations of traditional institutions in clearing, capital flow, and compliance pilots.

1. The Current State of the Stablecoin Market

As of September 2025, the total circulating supply of stablecoins has reached $2.87 trillion. The market landscape shows clear oligopolistic characteristics: USDT, issued by Tether, holds approximately 59.6% market share with a market capitalization exceeding $1.709 trillion; USDC, launched by Circle, ranks second with a 25% share and a market cap of $742 billion. Together, these two giants account for nearly 85% of the market. Simultaneously, emerging stablecoins like USDe, USDS, USD1, and USDf are rapidly rising and joining the mainstream ranks.

With the rapid expansion of stablecoins, the underlying public blockchains have become the biggest beneficiaries. In the past month alone, on-chain stablecoin transaction volume approached 626 million transfers. Ethereum, Tron, Solana, and BNB Chain dominate this activity. Taking Tron as an example, its on-chain stablecoin transfers reached about 69.8 million, with an average transaction fee between $0.14 and $0.25. This translates to estimated monthly fee revenue solely from stablecoins between $9.7 million and $17.4 million. However, this revenue does not go to the stablecoin issuers but is entirely captured by the public chains.

Long dependent on networks like Ethereum, Tron, and Solana for issuance and circulation, which provide the transaction environment and security, the value distribution of this attachment model has become increasingly prominent as transaction volumes and application scenarios expand. The fees generated by each stablecoin transfer are captured by the underlying network, while issuers see almost no direct share of the profits. For instance, Tron's annual revenue from stablecoin transaction fees alone could reach hundreds of millions of dollars, yet the issuer's收益 is zero.

This asymmetric value distribution is prompting stablecoin issuers to accelerate their exploration of proprietary blockchain strategies. Circle launched the Arc blockchain in 2025, emphasizing compliance and payment optimization; Tether successively released two dedicated stablecoin chains, Plasma and Stable, aiming to recapture value flowing to Ethereum and Tron into its own ecosystem; Converge, promoted by the Ethena team, has also entered the testnet phase, promoting a new stablecoin ecosystem featuring "DeFi and compliance in parallel." With the implementation of these projects, the stablecoin industry is entering a new phase of "token-chain dual-drive," redefining the landscape of value capture and ecosystem building.

2. Why Stablecoin Issuers Are Building Their Own Chains

The collective move by stablecoin issuers to build chains centers on shifting from value attachment to value capture. By enhancing chain performance and strengthening compliance to provide users with a chain dedicated to their stablecoin, they aim to expand revenue streams and open new business models. The motivations can be summarized into four levels:

1. Shaking Off Dependence and Enhancing Value Capture

For issuers like Tether and Circle, more users and frequent transactions mean higher revenue for external chains, while their own incremental gains are nearly zero. This imbalance in value capture has become a constraint on stablecoin expansion. By building their own chains, issuers gain full control over the underlying architecture, allowing them not only to optimize the stablecoin transaction experience but also to ensure that fees and ecosystem benefits from every transaction flow into their own systems.

2. Optimizing User Experience and Lowering Barriers

In the current model, users need to hold tokens like ETH or TRX to pay for Gas, which is inconvenient. Dedicated chains can enable the stablecoin itself to be used as Gas, allowing users to complete transfers and payments without holding additional tokens.

3. Enhancing Compliance Capabilities for Seamless Institutional Integration

Compliance has become imperative for industry development. Proprietary chains can embed regulatory nodes, blacklists, and audit functions to meet AML/KYC requirements, lowering the entry barrier for institutions and banks, and improving policy friendliness.

4. Expanding Business Models and Ecosystems

Previously, stablecoin profitability relied mainly on reserve interest income. After issuing a chain, revenue can be diversified through transaction fees, ecosystem applications, and developer networks. For example, Arc emphasizes cross-currency settlement, Stable and Plasma focus on payment networks, and Converge explores a DeFi + compliance path.

3. Current Issuer-Specific Stablecoin Chains

Tether's Dual-Chain Strategy: Plasma and Stable

As the world's largest stablecoin issuer, Tether launched both the Plasma and Stable projects in 2025, aiming to further build its own stablecoin chain ecosystem through a dual approach. Stable targets institutions and cross-border settlement, while Plasma focuses on retail users and small payments.

Plasma is a Bitcoin sidechain specifically built for stablecoin payments, backed by $24 million in funding from Tether's parent company Bitfinex and Framework. Its governance token, XPL, is already in pre-listing trading on major exchanges with a market cap of approximately $6.5 billion, and is expected to launch officially on September 25. Its biggest highlight is zero-fee USDT transfers, and multiple rounds of USDT staking events sold out quickly, indicating significant market interest. Plasma's uniqueness lies in using the Bitcoin mainnet as the final settlement layer, inheriting UTXO security, while being EVM-compatible for seamless smart contract migration. Additionally, Plasma supports native privacy features, allowing users to hide addresses and amounts, and enables permissionless bridging of BTC for low-slippage swaps and BTC-collateralized stablecoin lending.

Stable is a payment-focused Layer 1 blockchain built specifically for USDT, supported by Bitfinex and USDT0, with Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino serving as an advisor. Its core positioning is to integrate USDT more naturally into global payments, cross-border settlement, and institutional clearing scenarios. Stable's standout feature is native USDT for Gas; users don't need to hold the platform's native token to initiate transactions, and peer-to-peer transfers are completely Gas-free, significantly lowering the usage barrier. The network uses the StableBFT consensus mechanism, achieving block confirmation in 0.7 seconds. Future plans include introducing parallel processing and DAG architecture to support tens of thousands of TPS, catering to both small payments and institutional clearing. Enterprises can access guaranteed block space and use Confidential Transfer for compliant private transactions. Stable is EVM-compatible and provides SDKs and APIs for easy application migration; wallet integration supports bank card binding, social login, and human-readable addresses, optimizing the Web2 experience. Its strategy is to attract users with zero Gas fees and a simplified experience, using free transfers as an entry point, then gradually expanding into cross-border payments, corporate treasury, DeFi micro-payments, and merchant acquisition, ultimately building a core USDT payment network to achieve a dominant hub position through network effects.

The Most Compliant Stablecoin Chain: Arc

Arc is a Layer 1 blockchain launched by Circle, designed for stablecoin payments and Real-World Asset (RWA) tokenization. Its core features include using USDC as the native Gas token and full EVM compatibility, while also offering a specially designed Paymaster channel, allowing businesses to pay Gas fees with other stablecoins or tokenized fiat, flexibly supporting diverse payment needs.

Arc's greatest advantage stems from Circle's deep roots in traditional finance, granting it inherent compliance strengths. This enables businesses operating on the chain to function within a regulated, risk-controlled environment that meets legal requirements. To cater to institutional needs, Arc has designed a suite of exclusive financial tools, including the ability to tokenize traditional assets like real estate and equity, and solutions for building enterprise-grade digital payment systems. This not only lowers the barrier for traditional businesses to enter the blockchain space but also provides a secure and efficient financial infrastructure for institutions requiring compliance assurances.

The DeFi + Stablecoin Chain: Converge

Converge is an RWA-focused stablecoin chain jointly developed by Ethena Labs and Securitize. It focuses on establishing a settlement chain that meets the compliance needs of financial institutions while fully leveraging the decentralized advantages of DeFi. Its core design highlights include:

* High Performance: Collaborating with Arbitrum and Celestia to push performance limits, aiming for sub-second block times, thereby reducing cross-chain asset wear costs.

* High Compliance: Using USDe and USDtb (a stablecoin backed by the BUIDL fund) for transaction fees, ensuring high compliance standards.

* High Security: Introducing Securitize's regulatory tech modules and a unique Validator Network (CVN). Network security is bolstered by staking Ethena's ENA token. The CVN uses a permissioned validator model (PoS) combined with KYC/KYB mechanisms to ensure validators meet compliance requirements. This design specifically targets institutional users, addressing their risk management and compliance needs.

4. Future Developments

In the long term, the collective launch of proprietary chains by stablecoin issuers will undoubtedly challenge the dominance of established chains like Ethereum and Tron. Leveraging native stablecoin design, these new chains exhibit unique advantages in their mechanisms: such as zero-fee transactions, using stablecoins directly for gas, and customized clearing/channel solutions for institutional users. This highly vertical architecture not only lowers the barrier for user migration but also significantly improves capital flow efficiency. The recent popularity of Plasma's staking events is a typical signal, indicating rapidly gathering market interest in these new chains. More importantly, stablecoin issuers inherently possess strong compliance and security frameworks; this "built-in credit" background and design will greatly enhance their acceptance among traditional financial institutions, potentially driving further inflows of institutional capital.

However, practically speaking, proprietary chains are unlikely to completely replace established chains like Ethereum and Tron in the short term. A more plausible scenario is complementary specialization: stablecoin chains focusing more on deterministic settlement and large-scale payment flows, providing stable, efficient infrastructure; while ETH, SOL, etc., remain core platforms for innovative applications, complex financial instruments, and open ecosystems. The ecosystem diversity of veteran chains like Ethereum is currently too vast to be easily disrupted. The most significant potential shift might involve TRON, whose stablecoin share heavily relies on USDT. If Tether's Stable chain matures gradually, TRON's core competitive advantage could be weakened. Overall, the emergence of stablecoin-native chains marks the crypto market's entry into a new stage of "stablecoin-chain dual-drive." This trend could reshape global payment and clearing systems and potentially force traditional finance to reposition itself. The coming years may well become a critical inflection point in the evolution of global financial infrastructure.

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