Outside of the arena of speculation, stablecoins play an essential role in the cryptocurrency market by providing a reliable medium of exchange, a store of value, and a bridge between TradFi and crypto. As a critical liquidity provider, stablecoins underpin much of the activity within decentralized finance (DeFi), centralized exchanges (CEXs), and cross-border payments.
The stablecoin market has matured significantly throughout the world, overtaking BTC as a preferred asset for everyday transactions, as we see below.
Regions like Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa are embracing stablecoins as a hedge against local monetary instability, offering a more reliable means of transacting and preserving value. In these regions, retail adoption of stablecoins is largely driven by their practicality for low-cost remittances, secure savings in regions with volatile currencies, and accessibility to DeFi services like lending and staking.
While stablecoins are gaining traction among institutions, much of their growth is fueled by transfers under $1 million — our benchmark for non-institutional activit. Below, we examined the growth of retail and professional-sized stablecoin transfers from July 2023 to June 2024, compared to the same period of the previous year.
Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa are the fastest growing regions for retail and professional-sized stablecoin transfers, with year-over-year (YoY) growth exceeding 40%. Eastern Asia and Eastern Europe follow closely, with 32% and 29% YoY growth respectively. Meanwhile, markets like North America and Western Europe have seen meaningful, but slower growth of retail stablecoin activity, likely due to robust native financial infrastructure, although institutional investors in these regions increasingly adopt stablecoins for liquidity management, settlements, and entry into cryptocurrency. Notably, Western Europe is home to the second-largest merchant service market globally, with the UK leading the region’s growth at 58.4% YoY. Stablecoins dominate these services, consistently representing 60-80% of the market share each quarter, as we see below.