Standard Chartered Pushes $2 Trillion Stablecoin Target to 2030
TREE NEWS reports: Standard Chartered has pushed back its forecast for the stablecoin market to reach $2 trillion, moving the milestone from 2028 to 2030. Geoffrey Kendrick, the bank’s global head of digital asset research, attributed the delay to a supply plateau rather than a structural breakdown in demand.
Stablecoin supply has hovered between $300 billion and $320 billion over the past 12 months and currently sits near $309 billion. Kendrick characterized the stagnation as cyclical, not structural — a distinction that matters for how investors should read the data.
Supply Flat, Usage Exploding
The more striking signal lies beneath the supply figures. On-chain transfer volumes have climbed sharply even as outstanding tokens stayed flat. Average monthly on-chain transfers approached $10 trillion in 2026, up from roughly $4 trillion in 2025, with May alone setting an all-time high of $19 trillion.
Velocity — the rate at which each token changes hands — has doubled from about 15x in 2025 to roughly 30x. That divergence suggests stablecoins are increasingly functioning as transaction rails rather than passive stores of dollar value.
- USDC: Velocity jumped from 45x to 80x, driven by payments and AI-agent-to-agent transactions.
- USDT: Velocity held near 7x, reflecting its role in emerging-market dollar savings.
Why the Two Largest Stablecoins Are Diverging
The velocity gap between USDC and USDT tells a story about two different products sharing one label. USDC is behaving like working capital — money that moves constantly to settle payments and machine-to-machine transactions. USDT is behaving like a savings account for users who lack reliable access to dollar banking.
This matters for the $2 trillion question. If growth comes from payment flows, the market can expand on transaction volume without proportional supply growth. If growth requires new savings demand, supply must rise — and that is where momentum has stalled.
Competition and the Regulatory Clock
Kendrick flagged developed-market payments and traditional-finance replacement as the most contested arena. Potential challengers include OUSD, stablecoin infrastructure provider M^0, and the multi-bank shared stablecoin network A+.
Regulation remains the biggest swing factor. The U.S. GENIUS Act is expected to take effect in January 2027, and how effectively its framework spreads globally will largely determine whether the 2030 target holds — or slips again.
Forward Outlook
For now, the stablecoin story is less about how many dollars are tokenized and more about how fast those dollars travel. A market that doubles its velocity while holding supply steady is not stagnant — it is maturing into infrastructure. Whether that maturation converts into a $2 trillion float by 2030 depends on payment adoption, bank-issued alternatives, and the reach of U.S. stablecoin rules beyond American borders.
