At a dinner party earlier this week, a friend said, "I don’t get the fuss about stablecoins. You’ve been able to send Bitcoin since 2010. How is this different?"

I pulled out my phone, sent 0.01 USDC to another guest, and seconds later it showed up in his wallet.  

"That was USDC, the stablecoin issued by Circle, sent on Base, the Layer 2 run by Coinbase. It cost me less than a cent," I said.

"Cool trick," my first friend replied. "But how much actual usage is stuff like this, people sending small amounts of money back and forth?"

Another cool trick: anyone can verify that usage. I will do it for you in a moment.

But first let's teleport halfway around the world and 20 years back in time, to one of the more formative experiences of my time as an American living abroad.

I moved to Tanzania immediately after graduating college.

This was 2004, the heyday of the internet café. For younger readers, internet cafés were places where you would pay by the minute to rent a desktop computer with a 56 kbps internet connection.

I was at an internet cafe composing an email to my mother, asking her to send me $400 via snail mail, hidden in the pages of a reference book.

Here's a screenshot:

It worked. Two weeks later, I had 400 USD (cash) plus some batteries for my mp3 player and soap for my sensitive skin. It probably cost about $30 in postage.

Fast-forward four years: I was still in East Africa. ATMs were more widespread, but you could only withdraw local currency.

The Bitcoin whitepaper appeared. I remember trying to download it at a hotel in Rwanda and the electricity went out. I didn't get around to actually reading it until several years later, but crypto's potential was immediately obvious to me.

Crypto's potential is still not obvious to most people in the US.

Most Americans have never been paid in anything but dollars. They carry multiple credit cards and have Venmo, PayPal, and Cash App on their phones. They are, therefore, the least likely population on Earth to need stablecoins.

Yet stablecoins are exploding globally, precisely because billions of people don’t live inside a seamless USD banking system.

So, how much demand is there to send small-value USD transfers online? Let's go back to answering the question from my dinner party.

I ran a 20-line SQL query on Base’s blockchain data and plotted a heatmap (see my code here).

Circle launched USDC on Base in August 2023. Since then:

• ~300 million small-ticket transactions under $500 have been posted

• $18 billion has moved peer-to-peer in the form of small-ticket transactions

For comparison, credit-card networks charge 1.5 - 3% per swipe. At a 2% fee, $18 billion would cost users $360 million in fees. International wires are even worse, especially into countries with less sophisticated banking sectors. Sending cash via snail mail might even be cheaper in some cases.

On Base those same transfers cost < $0.01 each. The total network fees for processing 300 million transactions: roughly $3 million. That’s a 99% savings, settled instantly, 24/7, anywhere.

When someone in Tanzania can get paid in minutes—without a 10% remittance haircut or a three-day wait—the impact is tangible. When a Turkish family can park savings in digital dollars during a currency crisis, that’s life-changing.

This is what the heatmap below shows: each pixel is a block, shaded by sub-$500 transfer volume of USDC on Base, starting from August 2023 and going up to the present (June 2025). This is just a single coin on a single network but the adoption arc is unmistakeable.