Stablecoin Giants Fuel Blockchain War with $1 Billion Bet

The stablecoin sector is witnessing an intense infrastructure war as Stripe, Circle, and Tether are building their own dedicated blockchains to move digital dollars.

According to CoinMarketCap, these three companies have already surpassed $1 billion in fundraising efforts and internal allocations combined. This development marks a significant turning point as it will no longer be dependent on Ethereum and Tron for stablecoin transfers.

Circle has introduced Arc, an open Layer-1 blockchain designed for USDC as its main token, offering less-than-a-second finality for business settlement. Meanwhile, Tether is supporting Plasma, a Bitcoin-anchored chain that aims to scale up free fee transfers of USDT in emerging markets.

Established players are paying a lot of rent to general-purpose chains while experiencing negative miner extractable value, congestion, and liquidity fragmentation. With their proprietary chain, a player can earn sequencing fees, implement various compliance controls, and leverage an interoperability advantage as GENIUS Act and MiCA set out their expectations for issuing and settlement under regulation.