The State of Stables, Q2-2026

Stablecoins are rapidly becoming core financial infrastructure, reshaping how payments, commerce, and digital value move across the internet. The conversation is no longer just about faster settlement. It is about distribution, compliance, and how programmable money integrates into global commerce.

In the second edition of The State of Stables, Justin Friedman, Andrew Van Aken, and Dennis Sem break down the biggest trends shaping the stablecoin ecosystem in Q2 2026. The discussion explores reports of Mastercard pursuing a potential acquisition of BVNK, what it signals for stablecoin infrastructure, and why traditional payment companies are increasingly moving on-chain.

They unpack the latest market data, including stablecoin supply surpassing $310B, the continued dominance of Ethereum and Tron, and growing momentum around tokenized treasuries, RLUSD, USDG, and USYC.

The episode dives into the rise of agentic finance, from Stripe and Tempo’s machine payments protocol to X402 entering the Linux Foundation, and examines the growing questions around AI-driven payments, liability, and customer ownership in digital commerce.

Access the report at: https://content.stablecon.com/state-of-stables-report?utm_source=StablePulse&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=StateOfStablesQ2

Transcript

Intro

Justin Friedman 0:00

Passage of the stable coin legislation drafted by the Senate, dubbed the Genius Act. Because analysts say a wave of competition can complicate things. A note to our listeners: this episode will feature several charts and interesting visual aids that you'll want to dig into. So if you're not watching this on a video platform, consider switching over, or else just download our report and then you'll be able to dive into the data yourself. Welcome to another edition of the Stable Pulse. I'm your host, Justin Friedman, head of policy at Stablecon. Joining me today is my colleague, Dennis Oususem, Chief Operating Officer of StableCon, along with our friend Andrew Van Aken, a data scientist and the stablecoin lead at Artemis Analytics. Stablecon partners with Artemis to bring you a quarterly report, The State of Stables, where we unpack the data and trends that characterize the fast-moving emergence of stablecoins, profiling the entrepreneurs behind the tech, the new products, platforms, and solutions they bring to life, and the way stablecoins are changing the world around us. Dennis, before we get started, tell us about Stablecon.

Dennis Sem 1:13

Well, firstly, very excited to be here. This report has uh taken a lot of work and very excited to get this out into the world. Um, Stablecon is the world's largest stablecoin focused conference. Um we sit at the intersection of digital finance, economic policy, and global commerce. Uh we empower the financial community through world-class events, impactful thought leadership, and strategic collaboration. Stablecon is dedicated to reinventing the global movement of value by connecting the brightest minds in fintech and crypto, advancing critical regulatory conversations, and driving the adoption of stablecoin infrastructure.

Justin Friedman 1:54

Beautiful. Andrew, what is Artemis Analytics?

Andrew Van Aken 1:59

Well, thank you for having me today, everyone. Uh Artemis is a research and investing platform for our digital finance, organizing data and analytics for fintech, tokens, stablecoins, and now even equities. Our mission is really to empower anyone to make any sort of uh equity token face decision off of fundamentals. And we offer data in APIs, terminals, Excel, really just trying to meet investors where they are in terms of data and data consumption. And Justin, what do you do at StableCon?

Justin Friedman 2:30

I cover the evolution of regulation, which sometimes enables and sometimes discourages the progress of these new solutions and technologies. All right, friends, let's take a look at the state of stables for the second quarter of 2026.

Agentic Finance Market Map

Andrew Van Aken 2:47

Let's do it. And we have a beautiful purple background here for the state of stables.

Justin Friedman 2:51

Let's begin with the quarterly zeitgeist. Signal is hard to miss. Stripe and Tempo have launched their machine payments protocol. Coinbase moved X402 into the Linux Foundation with broad support from companies such as Google, Stripe, Visa, MasterCard, and Amazon Web Services. Visa and MasterCard have launched Agente Commerce initiatives, and a whole new crop of startups is building wallets, policies, identity, marketplaces, and machine native payment flows. The change is happening because agent capabilities have crossed a practical threshold. In this report, we'll get into what this change is for fintech, for commerce, and we will map the agentic finance marketplace. Andrew, show us that slide.

Andrew Van Aken 3:52

Oh, can you guys see our wonderful uh market map of all things agentic finance?

Justin Friedman 3:58

I sure can. So here we look at the different segments of agentic finance. That is the payment infrastructure, protocols and standards, execution and coordination, market and commerce, intelligence and observability, identity and policy, and trading and capital. This map organizes the emerging agentic marketplace by control point. These are the places where agents need standards, access, permissions, coordination, or visibility before they can safely transact. All right.

MasterCard Move For BVNK

Justin Friedman 4:35

Dennis, I'm gonna call you up to talk to us about the deal of the quarter. Very exciting transaction.

Dennis Sem 4:43

Yes. Um, it's a record-breaking transaction. And so our deal of the quarter this time around is MasterCard's proposed acquisition of BVNK for up to $1.8 billion, including performance-based earnouts. And I think that this as is like one of the clearest signals yet that stablecoins have moved from crypto experimentation into mainstream financial infrastructure. What makes this particularly interesting is that MasterCard isn't actually just acquiring any auditor. It's acquiring what we would call an orchestrator, the layer that enables businesses to move between stablecoins and fiat relatively seamlessly across different payment rails and across different blockchain networks. EVNK processes billions in annual volume across over 130 countries with customers including Deal and WorldPay. They've also built significant regulatory coverage, including Mika licensing in Europe and direct CIFA access, which is encouraged which is like now increasingly becoming table stakes for enterprise adoption. The broader takeaway here is that incumbents are increasingly believing that stable coins matter, but more importantly, they believe only the infrastructure matters. MasterCard processes over $9 trillion for transactions annually, and even if a small percentage of payments migrate across to the blockchain base rails over the next decade, they don't want these to be routed via someone else's system.

Andrew Van Aken 6:18

So Dennis, do you think what does Visa do here? Or what what do the other payment providers do? Do you think they continue to just bolt on acquisitions? Or how how do you see how do you see this uh this deal playing affecting others downstream?

Dennis Sem 6:30

I think uh these are obviously uh are innovating very quickly in the space and they have to continually look to do things in-house, but I think this will be the start of a few more MA transactions because I think the innovation while happening quickly internally, I think it's gonna have to be more in order for them to catch up and they can't be seen to be left behind in this space. And I think this is the catalyst for doing more. Because I know the Zero Hash obviously entered conversations with um MasterCard a while back, but that fell through. Um I can just see this being the catalyst for more transactions um in the space.

Andrew Van Aken 7:06

Just on a policy side, do you think companies are waiting for things like I mean, we already have Genius, but do you think they're they're waiting for clarity to pass to suss out what's going next? Or do you think they have enough uh they do you think they have enough regulatory clarity to start making big moves?

Justin Friedman 7:21

I think they have enough. The as we talked about on our last episode, Andrew, the Genius Act is an enabler that basically sends a signal to the marketplace, this is real, this is legitimate, this is happening. And the regulators are hard at work writing the rules to actually implement that. In the meantime, they are uh evaluating licensing applications from new players, trying to get national trust bank charters from the federal financial regulators. And so this is all happening. Those charters themselves suddenly become very, very valuable. And for companies that have already gone through the rigor of the licensing process or getting a charter, they're desirable acquisition targets for mainstream players in financial services that are looking for a fast track to hold in this marketplace.

Andrew Van Aken 8:11

Okay. Well, stablecoin summer continues to brew on, and uh we'll expect healthy acquisitions uh all throughout the summer then. Great. Uh so Dennis.

Justin Friedman 8:22

The BVNK deal uh leads us to our next topic, which is a profile that you wrote on the three founders. We'd love to hear what it took to build BVNK, this exciting business that MasterGuard has now acquired.

Dennis Sem 8:36

Yeah, so I think well, we usually do uh a CEO profile, but I thought it'd be interesting to focus on the founding team behind BVNK because this story says something really important about what it actually takes to build a durable stablecoin infrastructure business. The core premise behind this write-up is that most businesses tend to solve for one piece of the puzzle very well, whether that be technical infrastructure or institutional trust and compliance or commercial distribution. Very few have managed to do all three, but that's what BBK has managed to do. I think in particular, if you look at the three pillars, you can see that Jesse focused on the commercial distribution and the enterprise great stuff. Donald was focused more on the technical aspect of things, and then Chris focused more on the institutional relationships, the compliance, and the customer bank and trust aspect. And so that's like obviously the transaction is huge, which is obviously interesting, but I think it also validates something really particular about the way the stablecoin infrastructure is going. What stood out to uttermost about this BVNK transaction is how deliberately the founding team appears to have been structured around these three core pillars. Jesse focused on the commercial distribution and the enterprise growth. Donald focused on building the technical architecture required for enterprise grade reliability, and Chris focused on the institutional relationships, compliance, and customer trust. The proposed MasterCard acquisition is interesting not just because of the size, but because of what it validates. It suggests that the market is increasingly believing that the winners in stablecoin infrastructure won't just be the best technology companies, they'll be the companies able to bridge crypto infrastructure with enterprise and institutional finance at scale. Thank you, Dennis.

Justin Friedman 10:34

We really look forward to your profiles. And uh friends, if you follow Dennis on LinkedIn, you'll be treated by lots of CEO and founder and executive profiles that Dennis puts out on a regular basis.

Dennis Sem 10:48

Thank you very much. Uh this is gonna be an epic report and looking forward to sharing

Supply Breaks The 310B Ceiling

Dennis Sem 10:53

more. We're gonna just jump right into data.

Andrew Van Aken 10:55

We're gonna hard hit and just look at some data. And we finally have broken out of the $310 stablecoin mark. Um, you can see actually for the last five months or so, um, stablecoin supply was actually quite flat across almost all different networks. And really the reason for this was back in October we had a pretty significant liquidation, um, which means the whole people lost a lot of money on hyperliquid. And that caused stablecoin supply on Ave, on Athena to start trickling down. And we had this trend where um supply was just um flat. Um while crypto prices actually uh even did a lot worse, down um you know 30, 40%. Stablecoins remained relatively flat. And this month we saw a slight increase in supply, indicating that stable coins uh could be back. We we could be back on an upswing. And I think what's most interesting is that we see these same trends really uh continue. So, for example, Tron, Ethereum lead stablecoin supply by blockchains. You can see other chains like BNB and Solana have um slightly less supply. Um, but then when you go to look at stable coins by the number of issuers, um you can see once again, Circle uh in the blue and tether in the green um really continuing to be a duopoly. They have about 85% of all market share. Uh and actually, what's interesting, what's interesting to note is that a lot of these companies are starting to get into um tokenized treasuries, if you will. And so Circle actually has the largest tokenized treasury product on the market. Well, it's still small at about uh $3 billion of supply and whatnot. Um, that we think is going to be a key driver of stablecoin growth in the next uh six to 12 months, especially by year end. So keep your eyes open for all things tokenized treasuries.

New Stablecoins Cross 1B

Andrew Van Aken 12:56

Justin, question.

Justin Friedman 12:58

Andrew, several emerging stable coins have successfully crossed the billion dollar mark for the first time, including, yeah. So uh tell us about what's what's coming down the pike and and what maybe our listeners haven't uh given a lot of attention to yet.

Andrew Van Aken 13:16

Yeah, that's that's a good question. So a couple of things we want to highlight. First is Ripple, and they launched their RLUSD stablecoin uh about a year ago and has seen pretty consistent upgrowth in uh in the past year, crossing over the $1.5 billion supply mark. Um, I think their strategy is really focused on more of the institutional players. Um, makes sense giving their pretty astonishing track record of acquisitions, um, and really going for that core audience of you know very sophisticated users of stable coins. On the flip side, you have um USDG, which is being marketed by um a consortium of players, including um Kraken, OKX, um, a lot of different exchanges. And the play here really is on the retail side. So if you look at flows of USDG, it actually almost cost $3 billion in supply. And the reason for that is that a lot of money is being deposited on exchanges like Kraken and OKX, where you know more of these retail users can uh to earn yield, actually. And so we've seen some slight shifting from you know other stable coins to USDG on these platforms with these kind of yield conscious consumers. And so it's kind of interesting to see these different dynamics of um stable coin adoption by by type of user. And finally, we have USYC. Um, so that's uh so that's Circles product that was originally brought to market by HashNote. Uh currently around the $3 billion mark, like like I said earlier, a lot of stablecoin uh tokenized treasuries that are becoming like stablecoins. Really, the audience here is for these um institutional type use cases. And um, it'll be interesting to see how all these how all these user bases uh collide, if you will. Another question,

Why Chains Tell Different Stories

Andrew Van Aken 15:12

Justin. Yes.

Justin Friedman 15:13

Andrew, can we go back to the slide on stable coin circulation supply by chain? And I wonder, could you explain to me what are the distinctions in looking at stable coins by chain versus issuer? And what do the trends that you're seeing tell us about directions in the marketplace?

Andrew Van Aken 15:38

Yeah, so Ethereum is really becoming this home for lower transactions, but almost like very important stable coins. And what I mean by that is Ethereum block times, as we know, uh, can are about 15 seconds. Transactions are not that um cheap compared to other chains. I would not want to pay for something and then 15 seconds later have it authorized. So what why stable coins are being issued there is because many different companies have a lot of faith in the Ethereum network itself. It's been its runtime, its uptime has been, you know, near 100% for the last few years. It is very reliable, distributed. You know, people can argue about distribution all they want. Um, but really these these companies like BlackRock, um, Circle have become really comfortable issuing stable coins that are you know very important, may move less in terms of um in terms of you know for payments and whatnot. But that's what we're kind of seeing here, where people are issuing more of like the tokenized assets, if you will. On the flip side, you have something like Tron, which has been around for um almost as long as Ethereum. Use cases very much in the payments. So a little bit of faster block time, fees can be uh slightly less than Ethereum from time to time. But these are really people using it for um making payments to each other, maybe using it as a store of value. We don't tend to see a lot of um tokenized treasury funds on Tron or corporate uh bonds or you know, tokenized issuances. And that's not a knock-on-tron. It's just more of they've picked their audience, of they're going to focus on you know more emerging markets, um, eastern-based countries that are using blockchains. And then you sort of have this very uh intense competition in between of Binance chain, Solana, base. Uh, all these blockchains have very fast settlement times uh measured within the seconds. Their transaction costs are very cheap and are starting to find a very different use variety of use cases. So Solana has a lot of uh tokenized trading of different types of assets. Um Binance Chain has some payments activity. Polygon has been buying payments companies. And so you you're starting to see like all these chains really like pick lanes in terms of what they want to do with stable coins um based on the characteristics of their blockchain. And so while you know they're they're now they're all they're trending up, I I would say that they're very different use cases in terms of in terms of what they actually do.

Justin Friedman 18:23

That's super interesting. Thanks for that.

Fiat Crypto And Commodity Stablecoins

Justin Friedman 18:26

Moving ahead, let's look at the different categories of stable coins that we're seeing. There's so much talk about payment stable coins, which are going to be largely fiat backed and are a way in and out of the traditional financial system. But there's so much trading going on uh between crypto assets, and stable coins provide that bridge. So talk to us about the major stable coins categories that we're seeing emerge out of.

Andrew Van Aken 18:59

Stable coins, like I said earlier, have different use cases on different change by stablecoin and how they're constructed. And yes, like you said, payment stable coins, um which we'll be considering possibly fiat backed. And that gets even more confusing because under Genius, not all fiat-backed stable coins would be genius compliant, but it goes to the same idea that fiat backed stable coins for every stable coin that is issued. There shouldn't be one fiat-backed stablecoin sitting somewhere in a bank, in a vault, in a desk, somewhere that backs up that stable coin. And so these stable coins primarily are USD uh backed, about uh over 99% of all uh fiat-backed stable coins are in USD. Um primarily used for those types of payments use cases, um, store value, et cetera. The crypto backed stable coins, these are stable coins in which you are using crypto assets to essentially create a loan to take out stable coins. And so famously MakerDow and DAI are a subset of that, where the user often pledges some sort of um underlying collateral, such as Ethereum, um Bitcoin, to then take out uh stable coins against that collateral. And so while the market is more the actual total market cap dollar amount, is is much more heavily weighted to fiat back stable coins. We've seen sort of this huge increase in experimentation of crypto back stable coins, of different startups trying to do uh different types of yield on crypto assets, on using them as collateral. And so these stable coins are not genius compliant, they're mostly used outside of the US, but it is worth noting that you know we have seen an increase of companies looking to experiment with these types of stable coins, and and they're certainly not stopping uh in the face of genius. Um, and then finally we have you know these more asset back, commodity-backed stable coins. Um, these are stable coins that try to derive their value from you know holding real estate or gold or oil. Um a lot more complicated than our fiat back stable coins and oftentimes you know subject to volatility. But I think we even we even see some algorithmic coins sticking around, despite you know, the Terra Luna fiasco of years ago. So I think what I'm trying to say is that you have these two tales of fiat backed stable coins, very boring, one-to-one ratio, and then this whole other realm of you know very exotic, if you will, stable coins trying to be stable from many different types of collateral.

Justin Friedman 21:47

We are seeing a notable uptick in those commodity backed and asset backed stablecoin projects, which have really emerged from a rounding error into something that you can actually measure and you see. Represented amongst these categories by this quarter, second quarter 2026.

Andrew Van Aken 22:06

Yeah. Well, it a lot of a lot of people are now experimenting with gold, oil. We've seen the amount of gold that's been tokenized. Uh, I think I believe 3x since two years ago. We're now sitting at about a million troy ounces of gold that are sitting on the blockchain. And so yeah, people are people are getting into creative. They're they're certainly looking for ways to to be stable in a in a in a hectic world, if you will. So um it's it's a it's a good point. And then finally, we have uh we have data on agentic stablecoin payments.

Early Read On Agentic Payments

Justin Friedman 22:39

Uh, the topic of the current report, the topic of the month.

Andrew Van Aken 22:44

We couldn't have left out the data of the current topic. So I'll preface and say it's still a little early. And so we're looking at here is a chart of stablecoin, agentic transfers um since 2026. We're looking at uh we're looking at a weekly view of this. And from the beginning of the year, we are still up about 100%. We started the year at about 150,000 uh agentic stablecoin transactions per week. We're sitting at uh about 300,000 now. We did peak at about 600,000 uh during the the second week of the year. But I think there's two important things here. First is right now it's it's it's mostly dominated by X402 on the base uh chain. And while Stripe's machine payments protocol and tempo, um it's only been around uh, I believe a month or a month and a half since it launched. Um we are we are seeing the significant amount of of traction on X402. Uh and all these, and most of these payments actually are in USDC. Um so it's interesting to see that USDC is sort of taking an early lead in the Gentec. We we definitely need to see in order the question of like, hey, is when is this really gonna take off? And like when is this really gonna hit massive scale? I think we need to see a lot more supply side, if you will, of vendors, APIs, people to actually sell agents things. Uh, because right now we we we see that the number of um sellers, if you will, has been has been increasing, but not as a rate that you would want to see, you know, huge escape velocity. And so I think in order for this to really take off, to see you know, millions of transactions a day, we we really need to see like this kind of like wow, Eureka use case, if you will, of stablecoin payments. But it's still pretty early. We've only been at this for about six six months or so now. And so I don't think it's really anyone's guess as to you know when this will take off and and over what platform and what what stable coin.

Justin Friedman 24:50

Andrew, I see an unusual spike there. Um just a few weeks into the year where agentec stable coin payments increased by gosh, it looks like over 50% just for one week and then drop back down to their previous level. What happened there?

Andrew Van Aken 25:08

Yeah, so I think all these different APIs buyers are trying to launch and and to and to gain traction. And so I I don't remember what specifically what this was, but what we'll see it from time to time is that this, you know, potentially new, exciting API will come on board. A lot of agents will try it, maybe they won't be happy, and then they'll turn off it right away. Um, and so I I think what we really need to see this, you know. I don't know if agents have loyalty or if agents, you know, have uh high engagement factors, if you will. But I think what we really need to see is these APIs emerge that are really sticky and are really being used for um, you know, very uh useful things because I think a lot of people now are in the experimentation phase where they'll point their agent at an API, they'll do something interesting, maybe it won't be exactly what they wanted, they'll go to another API. Um, so we really need to see these, you know, really sticky use cases in order for this to really take off, I think.

Justin Friedman 26:08

Do you think that the regulatory clarity brought by the Genius Act that we've talked so much about has created um a uh an on-ramp for agentic payments that we're just gonna see increasing? Is that what has been the big unlock, or is there something else going on?

Andrew Van Aken 26:29

Well, I'll turn it back to you. Do you think we need to see, you know, like robot, the robot law to regulate agenti commerce, or is that is it just entirely too early to even think about something like that?

Liability And Competition In AI Checkout

Justin Friedman 26:39

Well, I'm so glad you asked because at the end of our report, we do have my usual policy corner, which this time is entitled The Machine at Checkout. So look, since September 2025, OpenAI's instant checkout feature has been processing purchases on behalf of a few of Chat GPT's nearly 1 billion weekly users. It searches, it selects, and completes transactions through a stripe-powered token without exposing the buyer's payment credentials to the agent. Visa announced in December that it had completed hundreds of agent-initiated transactions in live production through its own intelligent commerce platform and has a hundred partners now building on that infrastructure. Course, MasterCard, Google, and PayPal, and others in the payments ecosystem are seeking out their own competing solutions. So this race is underway, but the framework to govern it just doesn't really exist yet. Today's rules for payments do not contemplate a customer delegated AI agent acting outside the scope of its instructions or making a purchase that a human would obviously recognize as erroneous. The liability question is the one that will not resolve itself. When the cost of failure is real, agentic software will stop competing on raw automation, which compute scaling is already commoditized and start competing on underwriting capacity. Meanwhile, agentic commerce raises structural issues for the marketplace. Everyone proclaims that they're building neutral and interoperable infrastructure, but each protocol is designed by a platform with a stake in the outcome. In an agentic economy, the prevailing protocol will be the determinant of who owns the customer relationship. What is missing here, I think, is urgency around making rules that apply to this new world order. Traditional payments regulation has been a hodgepodge of laws and regulations and industry standards. And we're just at the very beginning of figuring out how to adapt those to an agentic world.

Andrew Van Aken 28:50

Justin, what's the one thing that polymers makers should get right when considering robot law?

Justin Friedman 28:57

So the competitive issue is going to be big. For e-commerce players, they may not have the capability or the capacity to integrate with all the different protocols out there, which means that they may be driving traffic to just the largest or most accessible platform. And keep in mind that, you know, agents do not just facilitate the preferences of their users. They filter, rank, and select among the options based on logic that may not be fully transparent. What if that logic is shaped by incentives or constraints that run counter to the client's interests? Imagine an agent embedded within a platform that routes purchases through preferred partners. An agent that optimizes for the lowest price might systematically exclude merchants who cannot meet a price boundary, even when the merchant offers nonprice benefits, such as a loyalty program. So, how will this skew purchase patterns? These are the kinds of competitive forces that regulators need to think about. And we can't necessarily turn to payments regulators for this because they don't have experience in e-commerce. So this is a bigger policy issue that our lawmakers and policymakers are going to need to address at a macro level.

Andrew Van Aken 30:15

Well, I look forward to diving in a little further, Justin. Thank you for the overview.

Justin Friedman 30:21

Andrew, this was fun as always. Always a pleasure. Always a pleasure.

Report Links And Live Events

Justin Friedman 30:26

So, friends, you can find the State of Stables online at content.stablecon.com. Please subscribe to the Stable Pulse for more episodes like this on your favorite podcast platform. And we hope to see you live and in person at Stablecon in Amsterdam, May 19th and 20th, and in Washington, D.C. September 9th, 10th, and 11th.