The Real Appeal of Stablecoins in 2026: Reach, Not Just Stability

The market that kept growing

The global stablecoin market cap crossed US$321 billion in late April 2026, reaching a new all-time high on inflows of more than US$1 billion in a single week. 1

 That figure represents more than 50 per cent growth in twelve months – growth that occurred during a period when the broader cryptocurrency market fell more than 20 per cent in the first quarter of 2026 alone. 3

Another indicator of growth is velocity. Andreessen Horowitz crypto partner Robert Hackett and researcher Jeremy Zhang published their analysis in late April 2026: stablecoin velocity, the ratio of adjusted monthly transfer volume to circulating supply, has doubled from 2.6 times in early 2024 to 6 times by early 2026. 5 

The Federal Reserve’s own economists documented the shift in an April 2026 FEDS Note: stablecoin market cap grew more than 50 per cent during 2025, with the GENIUS Act – signed into law by President Trump on 18 July 2025 – cited as a material catalyst for institutional confidence. 1 The asset class has acquired something that was missing for its first decade: regulatory legitimacy in the world’s most important financial jurisdiction.

What reach actually means

Stability was the necessary condition for stablecoin adoption. It is not a sufficient condition. The history of financial infrastructure is a history of reach: the reason SWIFT processes trillions of dollars a day is not that it stores value securely – it is that it connects 11,500 member institutions across every time zone, and every one of those institutions speaks the same messaging language. 

Stablecoins infrastructure has improved rapidly in the last 18 months. The sector has boosted its reach by shifting from stablecoin systems that focused on a single network on a single chain to one where stablecoins are connected as a value layer accessible from anywhere the financial system already operates.

In 2025, three developments answered that question simultaneously.

Chainlink CCIP and the SWIFT production go-live. Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol processed US$7.77 billion in cross-chain transfer volume during 2025, a 1,972 per cent increase year-on-year, across 60 blockchain networks. 7 

In November 2025, after several years of joint piloting, SWIFT put its CCIP integration into production. Any of the approximately 11,500 member banks on the SWIFT network can now attach a blockchain wallet address to an ISO 20022 payment message and route tokenised asset settlement through their existing terminals – without new software, new licences, or new counterparty relationships. 9 

At Sibos 2025, 24 of the world’s largest financial market infrastructure providers and banks – including DTCC, Euroclear, UBS, BNY Mellon, BNP Paribas, ANZ, Citi, and DBS – extended the integration into the corporate actions lifecycle. Coinbase selected CCIP as its sole bridge for US$7 billion in Coinbase Wrapped Assets in December 2025. 11

Circle CCTP V2 and the canonical cross-chain USDC standard. Circle’s Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol reached canonical status in its second version, having processed a cumulative volume of more than US$110 billion and 5.3 million transfers across 17 chains since launch on 14 November 2025th,.Version 2 introduced ‘Fast Transfer’ – sub-finality settlement allowing USDC to move between chains before full blockchain confirmation – and Hooks, which allow arbitrary on-chain logic to execute automatically at the destination chain on transfer completion. CCTP V1 will phase out from 31 July 2026. The practical effect is a single canonical USDC that moves between chains with the same semantic properties regardless of which network it lands on.

Card network integration. Visa and Stripe-owned Bridge launched stablecoin-funded Visa debit cards across 18 countries in 2025 and is scaling to more than 100 countries by the end of 2026. Mastercard and MoonPay made stablecoin card settlement available across approximately 150 million merchant locations. Visa’s stablecoin settlement programme reached a US$4.5 billion annualised run rate by January 2026. The effect is that a stablecoin wallet in any jurisdiction with a Visa acceptance network is now a spending wallet – no on/off-ramp required.

The cost differential that motivates all of this is well documented. The Federal Reserve’s March 2026 cross-border payments note puts stablecoin per-transaction cost at US$0.01 to US$1.00 with sub-minute settlement, against US$25 to US$50 per SWIFT wire transfer with one-to-five-day settlement. That is a cost reduction of between 100 and 1,000 times on most international corridors.

The institutional response to these developments has been rapid. Citigroup chief executive Jane Fraser confirmed in mid-2025 that Citi Token Services was already processing billions in transaction volume using stablecoins, with plans to expand into financing and liquidity management. JPMorgan’s Kinexys Digital Payments handles more than US$1 billion in daily transactions on JPM Coin. 

The EY-Parthenon 2026 survey of 350 corporates and financial institutions found that 13 per cent were already using stablecoins in operations, with 65 per cent expecting to do so in the next six to twelve months, and 77 per cent citing cross-border payments as the primary use case. 20 Fireblocks’ 2025 banking survey found approximately 90 per cent of institutions using, piloting, or planning stablecoin activity. 

Bank for International Settlements board member Pablo Hernandez de Cos, in an April 2026 speech, noted that non-USD stablecoin supply remains below 1 per cent of total stablecoin market capitalisation, that the USDT – the dominant stablecoin – does not comply with the stablecoin laws of major jurisdictions, and that ‘stablecoinisation appears distant’ from the perspective of displacing domestic banking systems. 16 It does, however, appear that a moat is being built for stablecoin infrastructure and regulation, which should allow many stablecoins to expand their utility 

Stablecoins, even in a regulated environment, will likely not attempt to displace banks. It requires providing a faster, cheaper, always-on settlement layer alongside them. On that narrower claim, the evidence is already in the data.

 Stablecoins go local

For most of the history of stablecoins, ‘non-USD’ was a negligible category. USDT and USDC together accounted for upwards of 95 per cent of total supply, and their dominance was self-reinforcing: the largest trading pairs were USD-denominated, the deepest liquidity was USD-denominated, and the network effects compounded in favour of the dollar.

That structural pattern is beginning to change – not because the dollar’s dominance is under threat, but because regulatory clarity in major jurisdictions has created the conditions for local issuers to build on the same global rails. 

Andreessen Horowitz’s April 2026 analysis of the data found that intra-country stablecoin payments rose from approximately 50 per cent to approximately 75 per cent of total stablecoin payment volume over the two years to early 2026. 5 The cross-border share is falling in proportion even as cross-border volumes keep rising. Local use cases are growing faster than international ones.

Three regional stories illustrate the mechanism. The European Union’s Markets in Crypto Assets regulation took full effect in December 2024, mandating that euro-denominated stablecoins be issued by MiCA-licensed entities with 100 per cent reserve backing. Several major exchanges delisted Tether’s USDT under MiCA pressure. The result, documented by payments processor Decta, was a structural flight to compliant alternatives: euro stablecoin market capitalisation doubled in the year after MiCA, reversing a 48 per cent decline in the preceding period. 13 

Circle’s EURC grew from approximately 17 per cent to approximately 41 per cent of the euro stablecoin segment; monthly euro stablecoin transaction volume grew roughly nine times from US$383 million to US$3.83 billion. TRM Labs’ Q1 2026 Adoption Index measured euro stablecoin retail volume at US$777 million per month in March 2026, a twelve-fold increase in fifteen months.

In Brazil, Transfero’s BRLA grew from near-zero transaction volume in early 2023 to approximately US$400 million per month by early 2026, driven primarily by integration with Brazil’s instant payment network PIX. The PIX integration allowed BRLA to sit inside the existing domestic payment infrastructure while providing on-chain settlement finality and cross-chain portability – the defining feature of the local-currency stablecoin model: national money, global rails.

In Singapore, the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Single-Currency Stablecoin framework attracted six to eight active core operators by early 2026, with StraitsX’s XSGD achieving a Coinbase listing in October 2025. TRM Labs’ data showed SGD-pegged stablecoins accounting for approximately 70 per cent of Southeast Asian non-USD stablecoin transactions in Q2 2025.

The European Central Bank’s November 2025 Financial Stability Review provides the necessary qualification: euro stablecoins represent approximately 0.5 per cent of total stablecoin supply, and USD-pegged tokens continue to dominate global volumes. 15 The non-USD story is a directional thesis grounded in regulatory incentives and demonstrated velocity – not a current market reality. The point is that the infrastructure to run local-currency stablecoins now exists, and the regulatory frameworks to require it in major jurisdictions have arrived.

Why compliance made local stablecoins necessary

The irony of the past two years is that the regulatory actions most feared by the stablecoin market, MiCA, the GENIUS Act, and Hong Kong’s Stablecoin Ordinance,  have been among the most powerful catalysts for non-USD stablecoin growth. Regulations that require local licensing create local issuers. Local issuers create local use cases. Local use cases drive local velocity.

MiCA has already proved the hypothesis. The regulation that most worried euro stablecoin issuers in 2023 doubled their market capitalisation in 2025. The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority Consultation Paper 25/14 and the Bank of England’s systemic stablecoin proposals, both published in late 2025, are following the same template: define the regime, create the incentive to comply, and watch local issuance follow.

NZDS and the Pacific corridor

New Zealand’s dollar is the tenth-most-traded currency globally by daily foreign exchange volume. It is the primary currency for New Zealand’s approximately NZ$50 billion in annual goods exports, its NZ$30 billion-plus services economy, and the financial flows connecting New Zealand with a Pacific neighbourhood of fourteen countries and territories. A digital NZD that moves on the same rails as USDC and EURC is not a speculative proposition – it is the logical digital expression of an existing monetary system.

Techemynt’s NZDS is New Zealand’s first and only dollar-backed stablecoin, issued since 2021 as a 1:1 NZD-backed token on the Centre FiatToken framework – the same codebase that underpins USDC. 24 The Ethereum contract (address 0xda446fad08277b4d2591536f204e018f32b6831c) is live and is issued under Financial Service Provider registration FSP773214. 25 NZDS currently trades on Stabull Finance, a non-USD-focused decentralised exchange whose oracle-anchored AMM pairs it with EURC, XSGD, EURS, BRLA, and other local-currency tokens – placing it within the same emerging ecosystem of local-currency stablecoins described in Section 3.

The Pacific remittance corridor is the clearest structural use case. World Bank data from Q1 2024 puts the average cost of remitting from Australia or New Zealand to Samoa, Vanuatu, and Tonga at 8.7 to 11.2 per cent – against a global average of 6.4 per cent and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal target of 3 per cent. 23 

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand’s own Pacific Remittances Project, conducted jointly with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, identifies the withdrawal of correspondent banking services from Pacific corridors driven by compliance cost under AML/CFT frameworks – as the binding constraint. 2

Stablecoin rails address this constraint structurally: a 1:1 NZD-backed token issued by an NZ-registered, AML/CFT-compliant financial service provider, settling cross-chain via protocols that handle compliance at the infrastructure layer, can deliver Pacific remittances at a fraction of the legacy cost without requiring the recipient-country banking infrastructure that correspondent de-risking has progressively dismantled.

The broader Techemynt product suite amplifies the use case. GoldNZ, SilverNZ, and NZDS together provide New Zealand exporters, importers, and treasury managers with a complete on-chain NZD toolkit – local currency liquidity, gold-denominated value storage, and silver exposure, all within a single regulated New Zealand compliance framework and all deployable as DeFi collateral or programmable settlement assets. The intersection of Techemynt’s product range with the CCIP and CCTP-V2 infrastructure described in Section 2 means that a New Zealand business settling an export invoice from Auckland can, in principle, deliver NZD-denominated payment to a counterparty’s wallet address anywhere on any of 60 connected chains in minutes, with programmable conditions attached, at a cost measured in cents rather than tens of dollars and days.

The convergence

The stablecoin market in 2026 looks nothing like the stablecoin market of 2021. The asset class has acquired reach: 60 chains bridged by production-grade cross-chain protocols, 11,500 banks addressable via SWIFT’s CCIP integration, card networks distributing stablecoin spending to 100 countries, and regulatory frameworks in the US, EU, UK, Singapore, and Hong Kong that have defined what compliant issuance looks like and incentivised local players to deliver it.

Local-currency stablecoins are an evolving story.  MiCA was first written in Europe. PIX integration wrote it in Brazil. MAS SCS framework is being written in Singapore. The NZD’s digital iteration – compliant, attested, live on global rails, positioned for a Pacific corridor where legacy cost is still three to four times the global target is a part of the same structural story.