Who is rewriting the dollar? The real battlefield of stablecoin public chains

Original: Sanqing, Foresight News

In the second half of 2025, the concept of stablecoin public chains, which once seemed somewhat abstract, was illuminated by two extremely specific numbers.

On one side are the two recent deposit plans from Stable. The first phase was quickly filled by large investors; the second phase was oversubscribed, with total deposits exceeding $2.6 billion and the number of participating wallets surpassing 26,000. This shows that with a sufficiently clear narrative and a sufficiently certain asset, liquidity can migrate in a very short time.

On the other side is Plasma, which was the first to issue tokens and open its mainnet. Although its DeFi TVL has declined, it still ranks eighth among all public chains with approximately $2.676 billion, surpassing SUI, Aptos, OP, and other heterogeneous chains and L2 "big brothers," and is regarded as one of the "strongest projects" in this round. Its founder, Paul Faecks, at just 26 years old, sits at the helm of this chain, pushing Plasma into the spotlight overnight with a market cap in the tens of billions and a highly "strategic" airdrop plan.

From Interest Rate Spread to Track Tax: Why Must Stablecoins Build Their Own Public Chains?

In the past decade, the narrative of stablecoins has evolved from "medium of exchange" to "digital dollar." According to data from RWA.xyz, the total issuance of stablecoins is about to surpass $300 billion, with USDT and USDC together holding nearly 90% of the market share. With the U.S. passing the GENIUS Act and the EU implementing MiCA, regulation has finally provided a clear framework after many years, directly elevating stablecoins from "gray area assets" to the stage of "compliance cornerstone."

What follows is a rapid expansion of the issuers' profit margins. Circle, in a high-interest environment, achieved $658 million in revenue in the second quarter of 2025, mainly from reserve interest. Circle had already turned a profit in 2023, but the interest rate spread business itself remains fertile yet cannot expand indefinitely. As the dollar enters a rate-cutting cycle, the interest income from issuing stablecoins decreases, and the competition among issuers naturally shifts from the "issuance end" to the "channel end."

Plasma is defined as "a chain built for stablecoins," rather than "a chain with stablecoins." The underlying logic here is that if stablecoin issuers only serve as appendages to chains like Ethereum and Tron, they will never be able to control the clearing rights and value distribution entry points.

For this reason, Tether supports Plasma and Stable, Circle launches Arc, and Stripe and Paradigm incubate Tempo. The three parties almost simultaneously reached the same conclusion: to enter the trillion-dollar stablecoin era, vertical integration must be completed. From token issuance to settlement systems, moving from earning interest spreads to collecting "track taxes."

In this transition, Layer 1 is no longer just "a faster chain," but the prototype of a new generation of dollar clearing networks.

Plasma: Retail Entry and USDT Rails

Plasma's starting point is a blank space that retail investors could not previously access. Tether itself has not issued tokens; all past imaginations about its business could only be reflected in other secondary market assets. The emergence of Plasma is seen as "an important path for retail investors to gain exposure to Tether." XPL naturally becomes the container for expectations, and with extreme airdrop activities like "deposit $1 to get $10,000 XPL," Plasma pushes both distribution and narrative to the extreme through a meticulously designed TGE.

Additionally, Plasma attempts to bring stablecoin payments back to the scene itself with consumer-facing products. Its target market is not first-tier financial centers, but regions like Turkey, Syria, Brazil, and Argentina, where there is a strong demand for dollars and local financial infrastructure has long been dysfunctional. In these places, stablecoins have become the de facto "shadow dollars." Plasma can truly transform USDT into a foundational tool for everyday finance without sacrificing user experience, through a simpler wallet experience, seamless privacy protection, and near-zero transfer fees.

Stable: Settlement Engine for Institutions and B2B Channels

In contrast to Plasma's high profile, Stable has always operated quietly. But when its total pre-deposit amount surpassed $2.6 billion, the market finally saw its strategic layout.

From its inception, Stable has targeted institutional and B2B settlement scenarios. USDT is not only an on-chain asset but also network fuel—Gas is priced in "gasUSDT," enabling settlement through account abstraction. Users always see just a balance number.

Through the USDT0 mechanism, Stable provides a gas-free peer-to-peer transfer experience, significantly reducing friction for small payments. For corporate users, Stable even allows locking transaction priority and fee caps through subscriptions or contracts, with all costs priced in USDT and calculable in advance. This "certain settlement" is difficult to provide in traditional blockchain systems.

Ecologically, Stable focuses on B2B ecosystem expansion. It has received strategic investment from PayPal Ventures and plans to introduce PYUSD on-chain. Stable does not attempt to compete with others for stablecoin issuance but hopes to become "the home for all stablecoins." Outside of Tether's emerging markets, it acts like a highway for existing liquidity, transforming cross-border settlements that originally relied on SWIFT into on-chain channels with second-level confirmations.

Arc and Tempo: Compliance Order and Neutral Channels

Beyond Tether's dual-line advancement, Circle and Stripe have provided distinctly different answers.

Arc is Circle's compliant version. USDC, as a native gas asset, is EVM-compatible, with built-in foreign exchange engines and institutional-level privacy layers. It attempts to provide a settlement layer that can directly connect to dollar liquidity pools for banks, market makers, and asset management institutions within the regulatory framework. Transactions are no longer simple "on-chain transfers," but real-time settlements deeply coupled with traditional capital and foreign exchange markets, where settlement risks are rewritten with smart contracts and oracle data. Arc plays a role more like the infrastructure of "on-chain Wall Street."

Tempo, in its early development, chose the path of a consortium chain, incubated by Stripe and Paradigm, and brought in Ethereum core developer Dankrad Feist, entering the fray with a neutral stance on stablecoins. Tempo focuses on payments without binding to a single stablecoin and supports multiple dollar stablecoins as gas and payment mediums. For developers and merchants unwilling to be tied to a single issuer, Tempo provides a more open foundational layer. While other chains compete on "performance" and "TVL," Tempo competes on who can bring the most real-world participants into the same ledger. Giants from traditional fields like Visa, OpenAI, Deutsche Bank, and Standard Chartered serve as initial partners, shifting Tempo's consortium chain focus from "chain" to "alliance."

Unlike Circle and Tether's "closed vertical integration," Tempo resembles AWS in the era of cloud services. It does not attempt to monopolize the assets themselves but hopes to become a unified infrastructure for carrying assets, a model that also holds unique value in a regulatory context. It can alleviate concerns about concentration brought by the "stablecoin duopoly" to some extent, leaving room for a multipolar landscape.

Cracks in Order

The four chains will usher in a new era for stablecoins, but they also sow the seeds of the next round of competition.

Concentration risk. Whether Plasma is deeply bound to USDT or Arc tightly linked to USDC, technical and regulatory risks are highly coupled with issuers. The more important the chain, the higher the cost of a single point of failure.

Liquidity fragmentation. While different issuers building their own chains can bring innovation, it may lead to multi-chain fragmentation in the long run. If cross-chain interoperability mechanisms cannot achieve SWIFT-level stability, bridging processes may become systemic weak points.

Governance centralization. The more stablecoin chains move toward "high performance, high compliance," the more likely they are to sacrifice decentralization in governance. Institutions prefer accountable entities, and regulators prefer limited participants—this makes stablecoin chains prone to sliding into "quasi-centralized clearing networks disguised as blockchain."

Many key questions remain unanswered: are these stablecoin public chains building decentralized financial infrastructure, or are they replicating centralized cycles in a decentralized world?

A New Era for the Dollar

Stablecoins are undergoing a silent yet far-reaching transformation. Once, they were merely a "chip" in the crypto market, serving as a measure of value, a means of storage, and a medium of circulation in the crypto world. Now, they are beginning to act like rails, redirecting real-world capital flows back onto the chain. Issuers are no longer content to play the role of the dollar's "shadow," but want to actively take on the role of building clearing networks and payment infrastructure.

Perhaps years from now, when looking back, all the debates surrounding stablecoin public chains like Stable, Plasma, Arc, and Tempo will be simplified into one sentence: "That was a period when the dollar rewrote its own history on the chain." In this history, some came for the interest spreads, some for the technology, and some for the new financial order. The tracks are not yet fully laid, the carriages are not yet filled with passengers, but the train has already started. The real question is no longer whether this train will depart, but who will hold the steering wheel and what kind of world it will ultimately head towards.

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