If one part of crypto clearly went mainstream in 2025, it was stablecoins, which have reliably become a settlement infrastructure. In Binance Research’s recently published full-year report, the publication offers key takeaways on stablecoins.
It showed that total stablecoin market capitalisation rose nearly 50% to over $305 billion, daily transaction volumes averaged about $3.54 trillion, annual transaction volume reached $33 trillion, compared to Visa’s approximately $16 trillion and regulatory clarity accelerated, led by the U.S. GENIUS Act.
New competition expanded beyond a duopoly with BUIDL, PYUSD, RLUSD, USD1, USDf, and USDtB each crossing $1 billion market cap.
The optimistic narrative is straightforward: stablecoins are increasingly a default medium of exchange inside crypto markets and an increasingly practical rail for cross-border settlement, payments, and fintech applications.
In many cases, stablecoins allow users and businesses to access crypto rails while abstracting the volatility that often deters newcomers.
Across layer-1 networks, 2025 reinforced that transaction counts are not enough. Many networks failed to convert activity into fees, value capture, or sustained token performance. Meanwhile, differentiation increasingly came from recurring monetizable flows such as trading, payments, and institutional settlement.
Ethereum remained dominant by developer activity, DeFi liquidity, and aggregate value, but fee compression from rollup execution weighed on ETH’s relative performance versus BTC.
Solana maintained high usage, expanded stablecoin supply, generated meaningful protocol revenue even after speculative waves faded, and secured U.S. spot ETF approval, improving institutional accessibility.
BNB Chain benefited from strong retail transaction demand and market narratives, supporting large stablecoin settlement flows and RWA deployments. The report also frames BNB as the best-performing major crypto asset in 2025.
Layer-2 networks accounted for more than 90% of Ethereum-related execution in 2025, supported by upgrades that lowered data availability costs. Activity and fees concentrated among a small number of rollups, such as Base and Arbitrum, while many others faded as incentives declined.
Fragmentation across more than 100 rollups and uneven sequencer decentralisation remain constraints, reinforcing another 2026 theme: value capture may move “upstream” to the application layer that owns the user relationship rather than remaining at the blockspace layer.
The report’s 2026 outlook is framed around a more constructive policy environment and a shift toward adoption-led growth.
On the macro side, a “policy triumvirate” could support a reset in risk appetite: monetary easing, fiscal stimulus via cash and tax refunds, and deregulation. When financial conditions ease, risk assets often benefit, and crypto has historically been highly sensitive to global liquidity impulses. The report also notes the potential for a U.S. Strategic BTC Reserve as a policy catalyst.
In terms of product and market structure, the themes are less about a single narrative and more about where durable usage may concentrate.
PayFi: neobanks and wallets converging, with yield-bearing stablecoins supporting new consumer financial apps.
Institutionalisation: on-chain money markets, treasuries, and RWA settlement embedded into workflows.
Value capture: as blockspace becomes cheaper, applications such as wallets, aggregators, DEXs, and prediction markets may capture more value.
Intelligent and agentic finance: AI-driven execution, automated workflows, and trust tooling.
Prediction markets: information pricing as an alternative to opinion-driven narratives.
In other words, 2026 is likely to reward systems that are verifiable, compliant, and built around recurring utility.
In 2025, crypto continued to advance even amid macro headwinds. Bitcoin’s demand increasingly flowed through regulated channels, stablecoins scaled as settlement infrastructure, DeFi matured into a revenue-generating sector, and tokenisation moved closer to production-grade finance.
The 2026 outlook in the Binance Research report builds on those foundations: more institutional integration, more application-layer adoption, and a macro setup that may become less restrictive.
