Stablecoins now present what I believe is the first credible opportunity to onboard a billion people into crypto.

If you haven’t checked in on the latest stablecoin data recently, you might be surprised. Stablecoins have done $33 trillion in transaction volume in the last 12 months, consistently hitting new all time highs.

To put that into perspective, that’s close to 20 times the volume of PayPal, close to 3 times the volume of Visa, and quickly approaching the volume of ACH.

It’s incredible to see stablecoins in the mix among these massive global payment networks that have been around for decades.

A result of all this stablecoin growth is $128 billion of U.S. treasuries held by stablecoins. That makes them a top 20 holder of US debt, ahead of entire countries like Saudi Arabia, South Korea, UAE, and Germany. 

And this has all happened in only a decade. Citi bank recently projected that by 2030, stablecoins could reach $3.7 trillion in treasuries making it the largest holder at the top of this list.

Stablecoin supply is at an all-time high, and another great stat is that over 1% of the total US dollar supply is now tokenized as stablecoins.

On the issuer side, it’s a two horse race between USDC and Tether.

On the infrastructure side, Ethereum and Tron continue to dominate. But if you zoom into the recent months, we are seeing some notable growth on chains like Solana, Arbitrum, and Base. 

What makes me most excited about stablecoins is the fact that all this activity seems to be uncorrelated with broader crypto trading volume, which is a sign of organic use and product market fit.

For a long time, stablecoins have been criticized for only being used to settle speculative crypto trades, but this data shows otherwise. If you look closely at the shape of these two graphs, you can see a viral loop with stablecoin activity that’s independent from trading.

This might be my favorite chart to tell the stablecoin story today.

It’s no surprise that stablecoins are just now starting to pick up.

Over the last several years, we’ve made significant progress on blockchain infrastructure. With new high-throughput L1s like Solana, and new Ethereum L2s like Base, we’ve finally been able to make stablecoins a good product for payments.

Stablecoins are now the cheapest way to send a dollar – in less than 1 second for less than 1 cent. And if you compare that to the other options we have in the US, some of which are really clunky and costly, it’s easy to see why stablecoins make sense. 

This is a great example of how infrastructure improvements unlock new applications, and I’m excited to see what else might get unlocked.

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is a data science partner at a16z crypto, where he supports deal flow and portfolio companies. Prior to a16z, he was a Data Scientist at SVB Capital where he developed and managed a proprietary data and analytics platform.

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