Miners' New Role: Boosting Bitcoin Payments with Transaction Volume
Bitcoin has largely been viewed as an investment asset over the past decade, but its creators envisioned it as electronic cash. The market gave it a different job, and now stablecoins have become the industry's practical payment rail.
The split between Bitcoin's volatility, confirmation times, and tax complexity made it difficult for everyday spending. Stablecoins offered a familiar unit of account that could move quickly across digital rails.
Visa said its stablecoin settlement pilot now supports nine blockchains and had reached a $7 billion annualized settlement run rate as of March 2026. This doesn't mean stablecoins have solved every payments problem, but it shows which part of crypto is being absorbed most quickly into commercial finance.
The question for Bitcoin now is whether miners can evolve from passive validators into active participants in Bitcoin's payment economy.