Bloomberg：超过90%的稳定币交易并非来自真实用户

Visa's findings challenge stablecoin supporters' views

Visa and Allium Labs have developed a dashboard to isolate transactions made by humans, and remove those initiated by bots and large traders. In April, Visa said only $149 billion of the roughly $22 trillion in transactions was accounted for by "organic payment activity." Visa Inc. has said that such crypto tokens may not yet be a widely used payment method.

Visa's findings challenge stablecoin supporters' views that digital tokens pegged to assets such as the dollar could upend the $150 trillion payments industry. PayPal Inc. and Stripe Inc. are among the fintech giants moving into stablecoins, with Stripe co-founder John Collison endorsing the tokens for their "technical improvements" in April.

"This shows that the development of stablecoins as a payment tool is still in a very early stage," said Pranav Sood, managing director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa operations at payment platform Airwallex, about the data. "That's not to say they don't have long-term potential, because I think they do. But the focus for the short and medium term is making sure that the existing stage works better."

Tracking the "real" value of cryptocurrency activity using blockchain data has long been a challenge. Data provider Glassnode estimated that during the peak of the bull market in 2021, the record $3 trillion market capitalization allocated to digital tokens actually accounted for about $875 billion in circulated value.

For stablecoins, transactions could often be double-counted, depending on the platform to which users transfer funds. Cuy Sheffield, head of cryptocurrency at Visa, said, for example, converting $100 of Circle Internet Financial Ltd.'s USDC to PayPal's PYUSD on decentralized exchange Uniswap would result in $200 worth of stablecoins traded on-chain.

Robots dominate stablecoin trading 

Less than 10% of stablecoin transactions come from genuine payment activity.

Visa processed more than $120 trillion in transactions last year, and if stablecoins become widely accepted as a form of payment, the company could suffer losses. Bernstein analysts predicted last year that the total value of stablecoins in circulation could reach $28 trillion by 2028. That would be an almost 18-fold increase from current combined circulation. As transactions using such tokens are immediate and virtually cost-free, many in the crypto industry see them as ideal for disrupting the payments industry.

PayPal introduced the PYUSD stablecoin last year in a bid to offer an instant and low-cost solution for transfers across its wider payment infrastructure. Stripe said on April 25 that it was allowing merchants using its platform to accept stablecoin payments for online transactions.

Still, Sood said Airwallex found demand for stablecoin based payment solutions to be lukewarm among its clients as many still considered the technology to be too user-unfriendly.

"It is a major hurdle to overcome," he said. "It's important to remember that in the US, people still use checks for 40% to 60% of business payments, which gives you a sense of where the market really is when it comes to adopting technology."