Stablecoin Market Stalls at $309 Billion, So a Bank Delays Its $2 Trillion Call

Standard Chartered has slowed its stablecoin forecast. The bank now expects the market to reach $2 trillion by 2030, two years later than first projected, because the market stalled this year at roughly $309 billion.

According to a report shared with Cointelegraph, money in stablecoins is not sitting still: transaction activity keeps growing even though supply is barely rising.

Supply is flat while turnover climbs

Geoffrey Kendrick, head of digital assets research at StanChart, explains the gap simply. Few new coins are being issued, but existing ones change hands more often because there are more uses for them. The bank reads this as growing usage without growing market cap.

It is an easy difference to miss. Market cap shows how many coins exist, not how many times they work in a month.

Four separate markets instead of one

The bank advises against counting stablecoins as a single block. In Kendrick's view, each segment has its own leaders and its own competitive dynamics.

• Savings in emerging markets stay with Tether's USDT.
• In developed-market payments, Circle's USDC leads.
• In crypto trading, USDC and Ethena's USDe hold strong positions.
• Transactions between AI agents, still a very small market, are also led by USDC.

The sharpest fight is over payments

Developed markets are where the bank expects the toughest competition. Challengers such as USDG, M^0 and stablecoin networks run by several banks at once are trying to offer an alternative to the existing payment infrastructure.

Kendrick thinks the outcome could be decided by a side detail. It comes down to how issuers and payment networks split the yield earned on the reserves behind each stablecoin. Whoever hands partners more gets the distribution.

What US rules are changing

Since the GENIUS Act passed in 2025, US regulators have proposed rules on issuance, reserve requirements and consumer protection. Some measures spell out the limits of that protection. The FDIC, for example, proposed excluding stablecoin holders from pass-through deposit insurance.

In August the Treasury proposed restricting stablecoin issuance in the US to federally or state-authorized issuers, with licensing requirements due to take effect in January 2027. Around the same time the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) proposed an update that could change how companies show certain stablecoins on their balance sheets. Payments company Tempo says the change should make it easier for businesses to use stablecoins for settlement without extra accounting complications.

The hryvnia, USDT and slower supply growth

For Ukrainians the nearest segment is savings, where USDT dominates. The bank's forecast does not promise sharp changes in that niche: the market grows more slowly, but turnover is not fading. Anyone holding USDT and planning to exchange USDT for hryvnia still has enough liquidity, and the main changes will arrive in developed-market payments, where USDC is currently stronger than the rest.