Business

Stablecoins have hit the mainstream. The total market capitalisation of these digital assets, which are pegged one-to-one to fiat currency, mostly US dollars, has exceeded $310bn, or R5.2tn, a tenfold increase in just five years. In the last 12 months, global payments giant Visa says that excluding bots and high-frequency trading, transaction volume topped $12tn. In contrast, Visa’s payments volume was $14.tn in 2025. The two largest stablecoins – USD Coin (USDC) and Tether (USDT), account for the vast majority, around 90%, of this activity.

Like other cryptocurrencies, stablecoins operate on blockchains – decentralised, real-time, programmable and distributed ledgers – but the two largest hold traditional financial assets, primarily in cash and US Treasury bills, or bonds, in custody to back each token. This means for each Tether token, for example, there is $1 of hard asset backing it. As a result, these coins typically trade at $ , or very close to that figure, around $0.9999.