Interpreting the new growth logic for stablecoins from Binance’s report: store of value, payment tools, and on-chain finance

Author: Jae, PANews

For a long time, stablecoins have played the role of a “ferry” in the crypto market: they are both a unit of account between volatile assets and a safe haven for funds during bull-to-bear or bear-to-bull transitions, always carrying a faint “transit hub” temporary attribute.

Entering 2026, ingrained perceptions have been rewritten. On July 8, a stablecoin industry report titled “Stablecoins: Transforming The Financial Landscape” released by Binance Research showed that the growth logic of stablecoins is undergoing structural changes.

The report points out that stablecoins are evolving from liquidity tools that serve crypto trading into multifunctional digital financial infrastructure, including value storage, yield generation, payment settlement, and cross-border fund management. The growth logic of stablecoins is also no longer tethered to the bull-and-bear cycle of the crypto market; instead, it is shifting toward broader global financial demand. Stablecoins are starting to take on parts of the roles of traditional commercial banks, payment institutions, and cross-border clearing networks, and are quietly moving into cutting-edge areas such as digital reserves, real-world assets (RWA), agentic payments, and on-chain FX—reshaping the underlying order of global finance.

Awakening of the savings function: stablecoins become “digital dollar accounts”

In the past few years, the market generally viewed stablecoins as “transit assets” in the process of trading crypto. Investors typically hold stablecoins when buying and selling high-volatility assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum, using them as a temporary hedge when market risk rises. As a result, the long-term growth rate of the stablecoin market was widely believed to be highly synchronized with the crypto market’s market conditions.

However, Binance Research’s stablecoin report indicates that this perception is changing. A fundamental shift in user holding behavior: holding stablecoins long-term is becoming a mainstream asset allocation approach.

Binance data shows that among users with asset sizes not less than $10, 30% have allocated more than half of their positions to stablecoins—whereas in 2020, the figure was only 4%. More worth attention is that this proportion continues to rise across multiple bull-and-bear cycles, without any obvious pullback even as the crypto market fluctuates.

This change means an increasing number of users are treating stablecoins as long-term holdings, rather than as a medium for short-term trading.

From a regional distribution perspective, this trend is especially evident in emerging markets. The report states that the “saver proportion” of stablecoins in emerging markets is as high as 36%; even in developed markets with a more mature financial system, the number climbed to 19% in 2026, a historical high. Compared with trading, users hold stablecoins primarily for saving.

If the change in user portfolio structure reflects the strengthening of stablecoins’ savings attribute, then the persistent stablecoin premium worldwide further validates that this demand does not originate from trading convenience, but from an active allocation to dollar credit.

Globally, as many as 87% of fiat currencies exhibit a premium when converted into stablecoins. In high-misery inflation economies where annual inflation is above 10%, users’ average premium for acquiring stablecoins reaches 62%; in high-inflation economies where annual inflation is above 5%, the average premium is 27%; even in emerging markets, the average is still 19%.

If stablecoins were merely a trading medium, users obviously would not keep paying such high conversion costs over the long term. What they are paying for is an exit route protected by strong sovereign credit (the US dollar). When their native currency continues to depreciate, capital flows are restricted, or the barrier to accessing dollar accounts is high, stablecoins are becoming “digital savings accounts” that are not eroded by domestic currency inflation. They are also the lowest-cost and most liquid alternative for residents to hold dollar-denominated assets—turning into a collective, bottom-up risk-hedging consensus.

Of course, this demand has clear macroeconomic drivers, which also makes the growth logic of stablecoins go beyond the development cycle of the crypto market itself.

Equality of earning: dismantling the interest-rate walls of banks

Another important change for stablecoins is that they are beginning to take on part of the traditional banking “deposit” functions.

In the TradFi system, ordinary depositors usually can only receive meager interest—for example, the average annual interest rate on US savings accounts is only 0.38%, while so-called risk-free yields such as US Treasuries are intercepted by layers of intermediaries. If ordinary people want to allocate, they face multiple barriers such as account-opening thresholds, foreign exchange conversion costs, and professional knowledge.

The combination of stablecoins and RWA (real-world assets) is breaking this asymmetry in information and channels. On-chain dollar yields are generally between 2% and 4%, far higher than traditional US banks. In this year’s second quarter, the average annualized yield (APY) of tokenized Treasury products reached 3.42%, about 9 times that of traditional banks.

More importantly, with the rapid development of RWA, users no longer need to open offshore securities accounts or pay high commissions to directly earn underlying Treasury yields through on-chain protocols using stablecoins. This means stablecoins are becoming an important carrier for dollar yields.

Since 2022, Binance Earn has cumulatively distributed $1.2 billion in interest and rewards to stablecoin holders. Statistics show that the funds allocated to the Earn module account for 33% of the platform’s total stablecoin positions, serving more than 14 million users.

Currently, an on-chain yield network with coverage across different risk preferences has formed within the Binance ecosystem:

• RWUSD (real-world asset yield-backed product): RWUSD maintains a rigid 1:1 peg with the stablecoins users subscribe, and its underlying cash flows mainly come from tokenized RWA yields such as short-term tokenized US Treasuries. This quarter (Q2), RWUSD’s average APY is 3.4%;

• BFUSD (Delta-neutral hedged yield product): BFUSD is a margin value-added asset designed specifically for derivatives traders and arbitrageurs. It locks in principal via a Delta-neutral strategy of long ETH spot + short perpetual contracts; the yield comes from Ethereum PoS staking rewards (about 3.2%) and perpetual contract funding fees, with a protection mechanism ensuring “no less than 0%” returns. This quarter (Q2), BFUSD’s average APY is 2.1%.

Outside the Binance ecosystem, the on-chain yield market is also expanding rapidly. For example, products like USDY (tokenized yield-bearing notes issued by Ondo, APY about 3.6%) and USDe (synthetic dollar issued by Ethena, APY about 3.8%) keep emerging. In essence, an on-chain yield network tailored to different risk preferences and multiple layers of differentiation has already taken shape.

At a deeper level, “equality of earning” uses stablecoins to eliminate the spread traditionally captured by banks as intermediaries, making dollar yields reach every ordinary saver more directly.

The head siphon effect: CEX becomes the stablecoin incubation hub

As stablecoins increasingly take on functions like saving and yield management, the competitive logic for CEX (centralized exchanges) has also changed. CEX has become the liquidity hub for stablecoins and is accelerating consolidation toward top platforms.

From early 2025 to now, the total stablecoin reserves of exchanges worldwide have grown 61% to $93 billion. Binance captured most of the incremental growth, with market share rising further from 54% to 57%. It maintains a clear lead: its stablecoin reserves are as high as $53 billion, ahead of the second-place exchange by $42 billion.

Under this monopoly-level liquidity siphon effect, top exchanges have become natural incubators for the next generation of stablecoins.

• U: issued by the DeFi protocol United Stables. As the fastest-growing stablecoin in the first half of 2026, its market cap surged from $5 million at the start of the year to over $1 billion, achieving 180x growth. Binance converted platform traffic into stablecoin usage scenarios through Earn mining incentives and unified trading routes, charting a growth path of “ecosystem incubation.”

• USD1: launched by WLFI (World Liberty Financial), an entity co-founded by the Trump family. Within half a year, circulating supply grew by over $1.4 billion, up 43%, reaching a total scale of about $4.5 billion—ranking it as the world’s fourth-largest stablecoin.

In the future, competition between stablecoins will no longer be just competition for market share, but competition for ecosystem traffic, international cooperation, and the coverage ability of global settlement networks.

Payment network sedimentation and the breakout of non-USD stablecoins: from on-chain circulation to daily settlement

Market cap measures a stablecoin’s circulating scale, while transaction counts and active users measure its “organic penetration rate.” The report shows that stablecoin payments are gradually breaking out of the internal loop of the crypto market and entering real commercial scenarios such as retail consumption, cross-border payments, and merchant settlement.

In the payments dimension, BNB Chain is serving as the network carrier for everyday retail activity. Since 2025, BNB Chain has cumulatively processed more than 5.3 billion stablecoin transactions, taking 24% market share across the network—making it the top public chain. Currently, BNB Chain processes an average of 10 million stablecoin transactions per day. Monthly active addresses (MAU) have surged to 15 million, achieving nearly 30% year-over-year MAU growth. Behind this phenomenon is a structural change in on-chain behavior: funds are no longer just moving between DeFi protocols, but increasingly entering high-frequency everyday consumption scenarios.

The growth of Binance Pay at the merchant side also confirms this trend. As of this year, the number of global partner merchants on Binance Pay has reached 21 million. The total monthly merchant payment volume is up 114% year over year, and stablecoins account for as much as 98% of the total merchant payment volume.

More critical is the change in average transaction size: the median rose from $10 in 2025 to $18, up 80% year over year. From small “test payments” to larger “normalized payments,” it indicates that users are building trust in on-chain network settlement.

Under the dominance of dollar stablecoins, localization exploration by non-USD stablecoins is also brewing under the surface.

Since 2025, the cumulative trading volume of non-USD stablecoins on Binance has exceeded $5 billion, and monthly average trading volume has been maintained at $316 million.

In this difficult breakout, both opportunities and dilemmas coexist:

• EURI: After the MiCA regulatory framework for the EU took effect, the euro stablecoin EURI surged from zero to $51.1 million within five months, becoming the third-largest euro stablecoin. Its highest monthly trading volume at one point reached $800 million, validating strong demand for non-USD stablecoins in compliant regions;

• KGST: a Kyrgyz som-linked stablecoin issued on BNB Chain with a market cap of about $6.2 million. Although it is supported by fully reserved backing provided by local licensed institutions and has shown traction in small cross-border remittances, it has fallen into regulatory difficulties for cross-region circulation because it has not received regulatory recognition from ADGM (Abu Dhabi Global Market).

Non-USD stablecoins fulfill local users’ needs to avoid the risk of dollar exchange rate fluctuations while enjoying the convenience of blockchain transfers. However, regulatory fragmentation remains its biggest ceiling.

Stablecoins never sleep: weekend time arbitrage, Agent micro-payments + on-chain FX

The stablecoin reconfiguration of TradFi is not only about replacing existing businesses like saving and payments; it is also about opening up entirely new scenarios that traditional systems struggle to cover. Today, the explosion of three frontier directions is redefining the boundaries of finance and showcasing stablecoins’ innovation capacity as digital financial infrastructure.

Never closing: the settlement engine worth $76 billion

Traditional banks and exchanges close for 60 hours every weekend. If major macro events or geopolitical games break out over the weekend, traditional investors cannot perform any hedging or risk management operations before the market opens on Monday.

Stablecoins were the first to create a “never-close” capital settlement engine. The report states that the global stablecoins’ average daily transfer volume on every weekend reaches $76 billion, which is 53% of their weekday flow—nearly on par with Visa’s average daily processing volume of $40 billion.

Notably, on weekends, TradFi perpetual contracts contribute an additional processing volume of about $4 billion. This means that “weekend time arbitrage” is no longer a privilege reserved for a few players—it gives capital richer options for trading.

AI Agent micro-payments: machine economics of $0.34

The boom of AI Agents is creating an entirely new non-human payments market. Traditional payment systems cannot be adapted from the ground up to machine economics: AI cannot complete KYC, cannot bear per-transaction fees of a few dollars, and cannot wait for multi-day clearing cycles.

Stablecoins’ native “permissionless, programmable, atomic settlement” makes them the base unit of currency in the silicon-based world. On-chain data for 2026 shows that the median transaction between AI Agents is only $0.34; the median based on Machine Payment Protocols (MPP) is even as low as $0.08.

This kind of high-concurrency micro-transaction cannot work economically under traditional credit-card and wire-transfer architectures, where the transaction fee alone already exceeds the transaction amount. Only stablecoins deployed on high-throughput public chains such as BNB Chain can support the self-sustaining loop of machine-economy networks with near-zero friction cost.

On-chain FX: de-intermediating the traditional FX market

Stablecoins are also reshaping how the global FX market operates. In cross-border trade purchasing and exchange-rate hedging, businesses typically have to pay implicit spreads and high fees to multiple layers of intermediaries.

On-chain FX based on stablecoin AMM (automated market maker) mechanisms is eating into this massive market at an exponential pace. Since the beginning of 2026, on-chain FX trading volume for non-USD stablecoin pairs has surpassed $3 billion, with a monthly average size of $614 million—up 670% versus the same period in 2024. The compound annual growth rate (CAGR) is as high as 177%.

The “synchronized steps” and “atomic settlement” characteristics of on-chain clearing and settlement allow businesses to bid farewell to the high-cost model of preloading large funds into correspondent accounts, greatly releasing capital efficiency in cross-border commerce.

Conclusion: “super apps” taking shape—TradFi asset migration is underway

Judging from the combined Binance Research report, stablecoin development is entering a new stage. When saving, yield, trading, payments, and settlement can all be completed in a closed loop within the stablecoin ecosystem, a “Super App Model” decoupled from traditional banks is beginning to emerge.

Users can denominate their funds in stablecoins for the long term: when idle, they earn over 3% yield on treasury-grade products; when trading, they can seamlessly integrate perpetual contracts operating 24/7; when consuming, they can pay by swiping directly through the payment network without taking on the 3.6% cash-out and FX friction; for cross-border remittances, they can bypass SWIFT’s fixed fee of about $40 per transaction and long waiting times.

In a silent, subtle process, stablecoins are quietly dismantling the functional barriers of traditional commercial banks. Its next destination is not about whether it can be integrated into the TradFi system—instead, it is this: over the next decade, how many TradFi assets and businesses will accelerate migrating onto stablecoin networks.

Although the pace of stablecoin development will still be influenced by regulatory policies, reserve transparency, and the macro environment, this silent reconfiguration has only just begun.