Stablecoins Are Becoming Local Payment Rails稳定币正在变成本地支付轨道

The Setup

Stablecoins have spent years being explained as exchange plumbing, dollar savings accounts, or cross-border remittance rails. The useful point in a16z crypto’s latest chart essay is that this framing is now too narrow. Stablecoins are still global by design, but the data increasingly says they are becoming local payment infrastructure.

Regulation is one accelerant. In the U.S., the GENIUS Act gave stablecoin issuers a federal framework; adjusted volume was already rising before the law, but a16z says it reached roughly $4.5T in Q1 2026 after clarity improved. In Europe, MiCA forced exchanges to rethink USDT access and created a more durable baseline for non-USD stablecoins, now around $15–25B per month.

Key Takeaways

• The use case is moving from holding to spending. Consumer-to-business stablecoin transactions more than doubled, growing 128% year over year to 284.6M transactions in 2025. That is still smaller than peer-to-peer by count, but it is the more important signal for commerce.
• Velocity is rising. Stablecoin velocity, measured as adjusted monthly transfer volume relative to circulating supply, has roughly doubled since early 2024 from 2.6x to 6x. Existing supply is doing more work, which looks more like a payments network than a passive treasury asset.
• The payments layer is already meaningful. After stripping out trading, treasury, and exchange mechanics, a16z estimates $350–550B in payments between different parties last year.
• Local beats cross-border in the surprising place. Cross-border share is falling, while intra-country transactions have grown from about half of payment volume in early 2024 to nearly three-quarters by early 2026.

Why It Matters

For Rex, the investable frame is that stablecoins may not be just a dollar-export product. The emerging opportunity is a stack of local onchain payments: card programs, merchant acquiring, wallet UX, FX, compliance, payroll, and country-specific fiat-backed assets. Brazil’s BRLA example matters because it shows a non-USD stablecoin can grow when it plugs into a real domestic rail like PIX.

The takeaway is not “stablecoins replace banks tomorrow.” It is that the product surface is changing. The winning companies may look less like crypto exchanges and more like payment processors, local fintechs, and compliance-heavy infrastructure providers with crypto settlement underneath.

What to watch:

• Whether merchant and card-program volume keeps growing faster than exchange-linked activity.
• Which countries develop useful non-USD stablecoins around local payment networks.
• Whether U.S. and EU regulation increases institutional supply without killing open access.
• Whether stablecoin infrastructure companies capture economics, or banks and card networks absorb the flow.