How Stable is challenging traditional payment networks with USDT as its engine.

Infrastructure gaps in the stablecoin flood

If the crypto industry spent the past decade largely searching for an outlet for its ideology, then starting in 2025, stablecoins quietly crossed industry boundaries, becoming one of the most vibrant digital financial instruments in the real world. They appeared in salary settlements for freelancers in Latin America, in cross-border procurement within Southeast Asian supply chains, in street transactions between Turkey and Argentina, and on the financial statements of numerous global internet companies. The annualized settlement volume of stablecoins reached $26 trillion that year—a figure that can no longer be explained by the "crypto narrative"; it is essentially squeezing into the traditional financial system comprised of SWIFT, Visa, and national banks.

But this "dollar in the real sense" has never had a road built for it. It shuttles on Ethereum, bearing high gas costs that it shouldn't have to bear; it flows on Tron, relying on a complex technical system burdened by history; it runs on public chains that don't truly understand the meaning of "settlement," and these chains were designed more for speculative cycles than for payment infrastructure.

The birth of Stable.xyz was inevitable against this backdrop. It attempts to answer a question that has been neglected for far too long: since hundreds of millions of people worldwide already regard USDT as the US dollar of the internet age, why isn't there a blockchain that makes it the main player? Why isn't there a stablecoin ecosystem like Visa, built for "certainty"?

The significance of Stable.xyz lies in the fact that, for the first time, it aligns the infrastructure of stablecoins with their usage patterns, rather than passively residing on general-purpose blockchains. Its aim is not to prove its own superiority, but to address the long-standing structural gaps in the entire industry.

When USDT becomes fuel, the logic of payment networks begins to change.

Stable.xyz's first decision, and its most revolutionary choice, was to make USDT the gas of the chain. This design almost defied the traditions of the crypto industry, but it perfectly aligned with the intuition of the payments industry.

On traditional public blockchains, you need a stablecoin to complete a payment and another token to move it. One asset represents value, and the other represents authority—this is an inevitable product of the smart contract era, but it has never been the standard practice for payment networks. Stable.xyz combines these two into one. You use USDT to pay, and you also use USDT to drive the network. This experience is so simple that its importance is almost overlooked.

For a cross-border trading company, this means settlement costs can finally be budgeted in US dollars, without worrying about the price of ETH or other tokens fluctuating with market sentiment. For an internet platform that wants to receive and pay in stablecoins, it no longer needs to maintain multi-currency assets in the background, nor explain why payments require additional "fee tokens." For a developer, this chain no longer requires users to understand the complexities of blockchain, but returns to the most basic experience: you're using money.

The deeper significance lies in the fact that when USDT becomes network fuel, it is no longer an "asset" but a "system." For the first time, stablecoins possess their own operating system. It drives every transaction like electricity, rather than being consumed or priced like a commodity. A tool that has long been suspended in mid-air in the blockchain world has, for the first time, become a true financial infrastructure.

Payment scenarios never wait, and Stable.xyz removes "waiting" from the system.

Many public blockchains like to showcase their performance data, some emphasizing TPS, some parallel processing, and some outlining future scaling plans. But in the payment industry, performance is never just a number; it's an attitude: it can't be slow, it can't be wrong, and it can't be uncertain.

Stable.xyz's sub-second finality is built upon this simple yet often overlooked principle. It's not about being faster than anyone else, but about addressing the fact that payment scenarios don't allow for slowness. Customers at POS machines won't wait three seconds for confirmation, cross-border logistics payments cannot tolerate delays, and if upstream or downstream payments in a supply chain are suspended, it can cause an entire chain to stall. In these scenarios, "the blockchain hasn't confirmed yet" is neither a reason nor an excuse.

What Stable.xyz aims to do is completely eliminate "waiting" from the process. Once a transaction is issued, it must be considered complete immediately. This isn't optimization; it's the bottom line for payments. In the traditional financial system, this bottom line is supported by clearinghouses, bank card networks, and the banking system. In Stable.xyz's model, it's supported by the protocol itself. This design philosophy is completely different from the public blockchain's pursuit of "scalability." It pursues something closer to the essence of payments—time cannot tolerate any noise.

It is precisely this certainty that makes the difference between Stable.xyz and traditional public chains very clear. One chain is built for liquidity, transactions, and smart contracts; the other is built for fund flows, business stability, and real-time payments. They appear to use the same technology, but they represent two different financial models.

The challenge to traditional payment networks is not the blockchain, but the epoch-making nature of stablecoins.

Many people see Stable.xyz as a competitor to Ethereum or Solana. However, if we broaden our perspective, we'll find that its real competitors are traditional global payment networks like SWIFT, Visa, and Mastercard. These networks are built upon decades of financial rules and national borders, possessing massive governance systems, but also carrying undeniable burdens.

High costs, lengthy settlement cycles, opaque fee structures, and severe regional inequalities in cross-border payments have become even more glaring as the internet economy accelerates globalization. Stablecoins are offering a "gentle but decisive" replacement for these systems in an extremely pragmatic way, bridging borders, avoiding friction, reducing costs, and improving efficiency.

Stable.xyz's mission is not to become a substitute for traditional networks, but to provide a deserved home for the rapidly expanding stablecoin economy. It is a response to the growing use cases for stablecoins and to the aging of traditional financial infrastructure.

While its technical architecture is important, even more crucial is its understanding that the future of stablecoins will not be determined by a single blockchain, but by a new settlement logic. When the US dollar needs a highway on the internet, it shouldn't be forced onto a path built for smart contracts. Stable.xyz is prototyping for this very need.

At some point in the future, we may well see a new financial landscape: traditional banks will continue to operate, card organizations will continue to serve consumers, while stablecoins will support global trade, cross-border labor, internet companies, and digital finance on a parallel track. Stable.xyz is not about overthrowing the old system, but about building a new system that can run parallel to, or even complement, the old system.

This is the real and deepest challenge to traditional payment networks.