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

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Original text: Sanqing, Foresight News

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

On one side are the two recent Stable deposit plans. The first phase was filled instantly by large holders in a short time; the second phase was oversubscribed, with a total deposit scale exceeding 2.6 billion USD and the number of participating wallets surpassing 26,000. It is evident that with a sufficiently clear narrative and sufficiently certain assets, liquidity can migrate in a very short period of time.

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

From interest rate spreads to track taxes, 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 exceed $300 billion, with USDT and USDC together controlling nearly 90% of the market share. With the passage of the GENIUS Act in the United States and the implementation of MiCA in the European Union, regulation has finally provided a clear framework after many years of delay, directly elevating stablecoins from “grey area assets” to the stage of “compliance cornerstones.”

The rapid expansion of the issuer's profit statement follows. Circle reached a revenue of $658 million in the second quarter of 2025 in a high-interest-rate environment, mainly from reserve interest. Moreover, Circle had already turned a profit in 2023, but the interest margin business itself remains fertile yet cannot expand infinitely. As the dollar enters a rate-cutting cycle, the interest margin income from issuing stablecoins decreases, and the competition among issuers naturally shifts from the “issuance side” to the “channel side.”

Plasma is defined as “a chain built for stablecoins,” rather than “a chain with stablecoins.” The underlying logic is that by only being an appendage to chains like Ethereum and Tron, the issuers of stablecoins will never be able to control the clearing rights and the entry point for value distribution.

For this reason, Tether supports Plasma and Stable, Circle has launched Arc, and Stripe and Paradigm have incubated Tempo. The three parties almost reached the same conclusion at the same time: to enter the trillion-dollar stablecoin era, vertical integration must be achieved. From token issuance to settlement systems, moving from earning interest spreads to collecting “track taxes.”

In this transformation, Layer 1 is no longer just a “faster chain”, but a prototype of the new generation dollar settlement network.

Plasma: Retail Entry and USDT Rail

Plasma's starting point is a blank space that retail investors could not previously reach. Tether itself has not issued tokens, and all past imaginations about its business could only be reflected on other assets in the secondary market. The emergence of Plasma is narratively 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 dollar to receive 10,000 XPL,” Plasma pushes distribution and narrative to the extreme through a meticulously designed TGE.

In addition, Plasma aims to bring stablecoin payments back to the scene with consumer-end products. Its target markets are not first-tier financial centers, but regions like Turkey, Syria, Brazil, and Argentina, where there is a strong demand for US dollars and local financial infrastructure has long been dysfunctional. In these places, stablecoins have become the de facto “shadow dollar.” 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: A settlement engine for institutions and B2B channels

Unlike Plasma's high profile, Stable has always operated quietly. But when its two phases of pre-deposits exceeded 2.6 billion dollars, the market finally saw through its strategic layout.

Stable has aimed at institutional and B2B settlement scenarios since its design inception. USDT is not only an on-chain asset but also network fuel—Gas is priced in “gasUSDT” and settlement is achieved through account abstraction. What users see is always just a balance number.

Through the USDT0 mechanism, Stable provides a gas-free peer-to-peer transfer experience, significantly reducing friction in small payments. For enterprise users, Stable even allows locking in transaction priority and fee caps through subscription or contract forms, with all costs priced in USDT and available for prior calculation. This “deterministic settlement” is difficult for traditional blockchain systems to offer.

Ecologically, Stable focuses on B2B ecosystem expansion. It has received strategic investment from PayPal Ventures and plans to bring PYUSD on-chain. Stable does not seek to compete with others in stablecoin issuance but hopes to become “the home for all stablecoins.” Outside the emerging markets rooted in Tether, it acts like a network that paves the 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 Channel

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

Arc is the compliant version delivered by Circle. USDC serves as the native gas asset, is EVM compatible, and has a built-in foreign exchange engine and institutional-grade privacy layer. It aims to provide a settlement layer that can directly connect to the dollar liquidity pool for banks, market makers, and asset management firms within a regulatory framework. Transactions are no longer simple “on-chain transfers,” but real-time settlements deeply integrated with traditional capital markets and foreign exchange markets, with settlement risks rewritten by smart contracts and oracle data. The role Arc plays here is more like the infrastructure of “on-chain Wall Street.”

Tempo initially chose the path of a consortium blockchain, incubated by Stripe and Paradigm, bringing in Ethereum core developer Dankrad Feist, and entering this battlefield with a stablecoin-neutral stance. Tempo focuses on payments without tying to a single stablecoin, while simultaneously supporting multiple USD stablecoins as gas and payment mediums. For developers and merchants who do not wish to be tied to a specific 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 sectors such as Visa, OpenAI, Deutsche Bank, and Standard Chartered serve as initial partners, shifting the focus of Tempo's consortium blockchain from “chain” to “alliance.”

Unlike Circle and Tether's “closed vertical integration,” Tempo is more like AWS in the era of cloud services. It does not attempt to monopolize the assets themselves but hopes to become a unified infrastructure that carries the assets, which holds unique value in a regulatory context. It can alleviate concerns over the concentration brought by the “stablecoin dual oligopoly” to some extent, leaving room for a multipolar landscape.

The Crack of Order

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

Concentration risk. Whether it's Plasma deeply bound to USDT or Arc closely tied to USDC, both technical and regulatory risks are highly coupled with the issuer. The more important the chain, the higher the cost of a single point of failure.

Fragmentation of liquidity. While different issuers building their own chains can bring innovation, it may lead to multi-chain disintegration in the long run. If cross-chain interoperability mechanisms cannot achieve SWIFT-level stability, the bridging process may become a systemic vulnerability.

Governance becomes centralized. As stablecoin chains move towards “high performance and high compliance”, they are more likely to sacrifice decentralization in governance. Institutions prefer accountable entities, while regulators favor limited participants—this makes stablecoin chains prone to sliding into a “quasi-centralized clearing network dressed in blockchain clothing.”

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

The New Era of the Dollar

Stablecoins are quietly undergoing a profound transformation. They used to be just a “chip” in the crypto market, serving functions such as a measure of value, a means of storage, and a medium of circulation within the crypto world. Now, they are beginning to act like tracks, redirecting the flow of real-world funds back onto the blockchain. Issuers are no longer content to play the role of a “shadow” to the dollar; they want to actively take on the role of building a clearing network and payment infrastructure.

Perhaps years later, looking back. All the debates surrounding stablecoins and public chains like Stable, Plasma, Arc, and Tempo today will be simplified into one sentence: “That was a period when the dollar rewrote its own history on the blockchain.” In this period of history, some came for the interest rate differential, some for the technology, and some for a 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.