A research company called Sacra says stablecoins will be bigger than Visa for payments this quarter, but Visa’s crypto boss disagrees.
According to research firm Sacra, stablecoins will likely surpass Visa as the most popular form of payment this quarter.
But Visa’s head of crypto doesn’t think so.
Stablecoins are an excellent tool for international money transfers, according to a blog post by Jan-Erik Asplund of Sacra. They might reach $4 trillion and beat Visa in payments.
Asplund said:
“Stablecoins win on convenience, enabling cross-border payments to be completed any day of the week (rather than business days only), speed (in minutes rather than 6 to 9 hours), and cost ($0.0037 vs. $12).”
He continued:
“Today every major bank is working on using stablecoins to run their payment rails behind the scenes.”
Cuy Sheffield, director of Visa’s crypto, disagrees. He claims that the stablecoin data is quite confusing. Bots and programs on-chain transactions don’t resemble traditional settlements.
According to Visa’s new dashboard, up to 90% of stablecoin transactions over the last 30 days were not made by real users.
New Method for Tracking Growing Stablecoin Transactions
In April, stablecoin transactions reached a total of $2.2 trillion. Visa only regarded $149 billion, less than 10%, as authentic.
The rest came from automatic transactions conducted by sites like exchanges and bots.
Visa and Allium Labs collaborated to develop a new method for tracking stablecoin transactions on the dashboard. This update became available around the end of April.
The company says this on its dashboard:
“This adjusted metric aims to remove potential distortions that can arise from inorganic activity and other artificial inflationary practices.”
For stablecoin data, the dashboard employs two filters. One counts the largest amount in a single transaction. The other eliminates transactions that are bot-generated or generated by large entities like exchanges.
According to the dashboard, as of the beginning of 2024, the total monthly stablecoin transactions, had almost doubled. The majority of this rise can be attributed to Circle’s USD Coin (USDC) and Tether (USDT).
Larger payment companies are also joining. In 2023, PayPal launched its PYUSD stablecoin. In April, Stripe declared that it would permit businesses to accept satelcoin as a payment method for online transactions.
Ripple announced in April that they were developing a stablecoin backed by the US dollar to compete with the leading participant in the industry.
As per CoinGecko, the stablecoin market has a $37 billion daily trade volume. It is worth more than $161 billion.
Cointelegraph contacted Tether and Visa for further remarks but didn’t get a quick reply.
