Stablecoins and the New Payments Landscape - Coinbase Institutional Trading Insights

There’s currently a drive to modernize and improve existing global payments infrastructure, which promises to expand users’ access to faster and cheaper forms of payment. Stablecoins are increasingly being used to construct robust payment systems on crypto rails, facilitating remittance payments and streamlining cross-border transactions. The stablecoin market settled more than $10.8T worth of transactions in 2023 – or US$2.3T if we exclude “inorganic” activity, like bots or automated transactions. Volumes on that adjusted basis are growing by 17% YoY, which means stablecoins are quickly catching up to today’s largest incumbent payment networks. Although incumbents enjoy some important advantages such as liquidity and network effects, rising competition has reduced the average cost of remittance payments by more than a third over the last 15 years, according to The World Bank. Nevertheless, the average cost of sending $200 is still 6.35% of the transfer amount globally or an aggregate

saved by

• Eddie Sun