Stablecoins: The Critical Question of Profit Distribution
Latin American markets demonstrate crucial use cases amid monetary instability as middlemen accumulate substantial returns. Long-term viability requires distributing earnings back to the actual users fueling transaction volume.
Opinion by: Jeff Handler, co-founder at OpenTrade.
The technological challenges have been resolved. Digital dollar systems are operational and moving value globally. As we move through 2026, the singular remaining question centers on determining which parties will ultimately capture and benefit from the revenue streams.
The year 2025 did not mark stablecoins achieving "mainstream status" in the manner cryptocurrency advocates had predicted. There was no killer application topping app store rankings, no singular watershed moment when digital dollars suddenly made sense to everyday consumers. Rather, through deliberate and careful implementation, these digital currencies silently and effectively transformed into operating capital, embedding themselves seamlessly within global financial infrastructure.
Today, much like other sophisticated technological systems, stablecoins have evolved into transparent, unnoticed infrastructure.
This development marks the beginning of a fresh chapter—one focused not on promoting adoption, but on extracting value from transaction flows.
The velocity imperative
Looking back, the cryptocurrency sector has predominantly fixated on metrics that ultimately don't matter. Traditional thinking emphasized total market capitalization and competitive positioning, with tribal-minded backers debating which projects would be "Ethereum Killers" and which tokens were destined to go "only up". Since no cryptocurrency is guaranteed perpetual price appreciation, overall market cap represents little more than a superficial measurement for dormant holdings. Transaction velocity offers considerably more valuable insights when evaluating promising infrastructure technologies.
Blockchain analytics indicate that aggregate stablecoin transaction volume throughout 2025 surpassed $33tn, representing a 72% increase compared to 2024. Given that total supply remained in the low hundreds of billions range, this disparity reveals that identical dollar units were being cycled repeatedly through settlements, payment processing, treasury operations, and various other applications, moving among wallets, trading platforms, and payment networks, entirely on demand. Transaction throughput outstripped supply expansion, as stablecoins finally separated from their previous role primarily serving spot market trading.
Subsequently, as circulation speed eclipsed market size, the Quantity Theory of Money gained practical relevance. This economic principle posits that currency circulating at high velocity diminishes the total supply requirements necessary to sustain a particular magnitude of commercial activity. Put simply, the combined volume and circulation rate of stablecoins reached adequate thresholds for them to be recognized as validated and essential technology. This reality became particularly evident throughout Latin America.
LatAm is the ideal utility blueprint
When examining practical applications, the US and Europe currently treat stablecoins primarily as yield-generating vehicles or trading settlement mechanisms (for the time being at least), with market participants either holding them or allocating them to generate returns or facilitate movement across different assets. Conversely, in Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela, these instruments function as critical protection against runaway inflation, domestic currency instability, and broader economic chaos.
Throughout Latin America, domestic currencies must circulate rapidly to maintain their value. This creates optimal conditions for stablecoin adoption, with Argentines utilizing them for 61.8% of total on-chain transactions, narrowly exceeding Brazil's 59.8% adoption rate.
From a macroeconomic perspective, financial products exhibiting tangible utility (rather than speculative appreciation potential) stand the greatest likelihood of evolving into foundational infrastructure. Consequently, Latin America should not be viewed as an anomaly, but rather as the initial region recognizing that stablecoins could preserve wealth in ways domestic currencies simply cannot. It requires minimal imagination to envision comparable economic conditions across other continents generating even broader stablecoin adoption patterns.
The ongoing battle for rent extraction
End users who successfully circumvent volatile overnight foreign exchange fluctuations are far from the only beneficiaries in this ecosystem. Significant institutional players are already collecting substantial "rent" from stablecoin circulation, forming a hierarchical pyramid structure of issuers, trading platforms, and custody providers all silently accumulating their portions.
Stablecoin issuers generate revenue through sophisticated reserve asset management and partnership distribution agreements. Tether, the company behind USDT stablecoins, has achieved the distinction of becoming the world's second most profitable company measured on a per-employee basis. Their earnings derive from managing the reserve float.
Trading platforms occupy the subsequent tier, collecting transaction fees from settlement operations and internal transaction routing systems. Following them, conventional banking institutions and digital banking services have adopted stablecoins to facilitate tokenized deposit products or blockchain-based settlement capabilities, creating supplementary income sources.
Positioned at the foundation of this pyramid are regulatory authorities, who while not directly profiting from stablecoins themselves, ultimately determine who does. Through licensing requirements and compliance mandates, they indirectly dictate which entities actually profit from enabling stablecoin transfers and the specific conditions governing those profits.
Returning once more to Latin America, this geographical region offers a clear view of the rent extraction competition currently unfolding. Emerging on-ramp and off-ramp services, stablecoin-compatible wallet providers, and cryptocurrency trading venues are all vying for market share to capture fee margins. These service providers don't require overall market expansion. They merely need to accelerate velocity to ensure profitability for all stakeholders.
However, for velocity to achieve long-term sustainability, economic incentives must be properly structured. Rather than permitting yields to flow upward exclusively to intermediaries, the industry must redirect its focus toward returning profits directly to end users. The individuals actually generating this commercial activity are the parties who genuinely deserve a portion of the financial rewards.
Infrastructure is the endgame
Once stablecoins achieve ubiquitous global adoption, reaching the point where people no longer discuss them as "emerging technology," they will have successfully transformed into invisible infrastructure.
If stablecoins haven't reached that status yet, they certainly must be approaching it. The year 2025 demonstrated stablecoins' capacity to process tens of trillions in value transfers, emerging as preferred settlement instruments and securing widespread market validation along the way. With their transaction velocity now firmly established, the critical question becomes which entities will capture and control this infrastructure moving forward.
The experimental phase has concluded. The actual business operations can now genuinely commence.
Opinion by: Jeff Handler, co-founder at OpenTrade.