Stablecoins are crypto’s killer app—but no one can agree on who will use them - Fortune

Stablecoins have emerged as one of the most tangible successes in digital assets, offering price stability while maintaining the speed and programmability of blockchain-based transfers. There is broad agreement on their utility, but the industry remains split on a more basic question: who will actually be the primary users? This lack of consensus is not just theoretical—it shapes product design, regulatory priorities, and the competitive landscape.

One view sees stablecoins as a consumer tool for payments and remittances, replacing slow, costly cross-border rails. Another envisions them as institutional infrastructure, used by large financial firms for settlement, liquidity management, and treasury operations. A third camp points to protocols and automated markets as the main engines of demand. Each of these paths implies different compliance frameworks, capital requirements, and partnerships.

For market watchers, the resolution will become clearer through regulatory actions—such as the EU's MiCA framework or upcoming U.S. legislation—and through issuer data revealing which use cases are actually growing. Until then, stablecoin growth should be observed as a story of competing adoption theories, not a settled outcome.