Stablecoins Smash Product-Market Fit: Wall Street Awakens as $250B Daily Volume Looms

Digital dollars hit escape velocity—traditional finance finally notices the rocket ship it ignored.

The Infrastructure That Quietly Won

While speculators chased shiny objects, stablecoins built the plumbing. They didn’t just find a niche; they became the backbone of crypto’s entire economy. Moving value globally now happens in seconds, not days—and the old guard can’t look away anymore.

Wall Street’s ‘Aha’ Moment

Banks once dismissed crypto as a casino. Now they see a $250B-a-day settlement layer operating right under their noses. Suddenly, every major player wants a piece of the action—better late than never, I suppose.

Regulators Scramble, Markets Adapt

Politicians fret about stability while traders create it through pure demand. The irony? The most ‘boring’ coins became the most revolutionary. They cut out middlemen, bypass borders, and actually work—unlike half the legacy finance tech still running on COBOL.

Let’s be real: if traditional finance could innovate this fast, we’d still be using fax machines for wire transfers. Sometimes disruption doesn’t ask for permission.

Stablecoin adoption

A simple S-curve for acceptance and payouts puts the next 12–36 months into focus. Start with U.S. carded purchase volume of about $11.9 trillion in 2024 and total merchant processing fees of $187.2 billion, an average of around 1.57 percent, per the Nilson Report and CSP Daily News.

If 5 percent of that spend migrates to stablecoin checkout at a 10-basis-point all-in cost, annual merchant savings approach $8.8 billion. Under a lighter 2-basis-point network fee, 10 percent migration WOULD free more than $17 billion annually. These figures ignore latency and FX benefits, which matter for cross-border.

On the float side, Treasury market math frames issuer economics under the interest ban. With three-month bill yields NEAR 4 percent, a two-trillion-dollar stablecoin float by 2028, a scenario referenced in Treasury’s TBAC materials and policy coverage, would throw off roughly $80 billion in gross yield on reserves.

Because issuers cannot pay interest directly, that yield funds compliance, operations, and partner incentives, while “rewards” programs at exchanges test how much, if any, gets shared with end users. The net interest margin captured by issuers, therefore, ranges widely, but even a 25 to 50 percent capture implies $20 to $40 billion annually if the float reaches two trillion.

Stablecoin revenue projections

Throughput projections anchor the network side. At $250 billion per day by 2028, annualized settlement volume would exceed $90 trillion.

A 1 to 3 basis-point network take would translate to $9 to $27 billion in yearly L1 or L2 revenue, while 10 basis points would imply about $91 billion, though open-ledger payment fees today cluster near the low single-basis-point range given sub-penny per-transfer costs referenced by McKinsey and Visa’s Solana technical work.

That gap leaves room for value capture to accrue through account abstraction, fraud controls, and compliance services rather than raw transaction fees.

Winners and losers will depend on regulatory fit, fiat coverage, and enterprise integrations. USDC and EURC stand to gain from network and card-scheme settlement hooks that already exist, with PYUSD positioned at the wallet edge for consumer payouts.

Bank-issued tokens could attract B2B settlement where treasury teams want same-day cash accounting with bank guarantees, although cross-border coverage and developer tooling remain hurdles.

Tempo’s pitch targets enterprise payment scale with named design partners across AI, banking, and ecommerce. At the same time, Solana and Base have captured growing shares of transfer volume due to cost and tooling, a trend mirrored in Artemis and Chainalysis datasets.

A near-term constraint is fragmentation, which Chainalysis tracks across hundreds of stablecoins, even as top-down flows concentrate in USDT and USDC. Visa and Mastercard continue building integrations.

The big picture

Macro context points to a larger float even without consumer yield. TBAC’s July briefing modeled stablecoin reserve demand, adding to the front-end Treasury buyer base, and the GENIUS reserve rules lock most assets into cash and sub-93-day bills.

With the stablecoin market cap already surpassing $285 billion according to DeFiLlama and with daily utility expanding via card network settlement and on-chain payroll pilots, the float path to the low trillions by the late 2020s no longer rests only on crypto trading cycles.

The ECB’s call for safeguards on foreign stablecoins highlights that global policy will shape where that float sits and which currencies gain share.

The risks remain clear. The rewards workaround is drawing pushback from bank groups like the BPI and National Law Review contributors and could be curtailed in follow-on legislation, changing user-level incentives.

Superpriority for holders in bankruptcy reduces run risk for users yet may harden issuer resolution costs, raising barriers to entry. Compliance for sanctions and AML will add fixed overhead that favors scaled issuers and networks.

Those constraints reinforce why take-rates modeled above should be treated as ranges that compress as competition increases and why enterprise integrations, not raw throughput, will decide margins. Unintended consequences could box out smaller issuers.

The near-term watchlist is straightforward: Visa and Mastercard production rollouts for stablecoin settlement beyond pilots, the first Tempo-driven merchant and payroll flows, and Treasury’s implementing guidance under GENIUS on licensing, disclosures, and reserve composition.

If the McKinsey throughput path holds, the fee math and float math together explain why stablecoins are now competing directly with cards and bank wires on speed and cost, with $250 billion a day in settlement volume squarely in scope by 2028.