Could stable coin rates overtake Visa this quarter?
Stablecoins could eventually overtake payment giant Visa in total payouts this quarter, according to research firm Sakra.
The head of Visa Crypto, however, disagrees.
In a blog post, Sacra co-founder Jan-Eric Asplend argued that the company's firm Stacracoins' “high yield-market fit for cross-border money movement” could surpass Visa's total payment volume of more than $4 trillion.
“Stablecoins win comfortably, allowing cross-border payments to be completed any day of the week (rather than weekdays), faster (within 6 to 9 minutes) and less expensive ($0.0037 vs. $12).” Asplend argued.
“Every major bank today is working behind the scenes using stablecoins to run their payment lines,” he said.
Visa's head of crypto, Coy Sheffield, argues that there is “a lot of noise” around stablecoin data and on-chain transactions related to bots and automated programs that “don't look like settlements in the traditional way.”
The recently launched Visa Dashboard claims that 90% of stablecoin transactions in the last 30 days were not made by real users.
April saw around $2.2 trillion in total stablecoin transactions. However, less than 10%, or $149 billion, was classified as genuine by the credit company, with the rest broken down by bot activity and automated transactions by entities such as central exchanges.
Visa has partnered with Allium Labs to develop a stable coin trading metric for a dashboard revealed in late April.
“This adjusted measure aims to eliminate distortions that may arise from inorganic activity and other artificial inflation,” the company said on its dashboard.
The dashboard applies two filters to the stablecoin data: a unidirectional volume filter that only counts the largest amount of stablecoins transferred in a single transaction, and an inorganic user filter that aims to remove bot activity and automated transactions from large entities such as centralized exchanges.
The dashboard, however, the total monthly stablecoin transaction volume, spurious or otherwise, has almost doubled since the beginning of 2024, most of which is Tether (USDT) and Circle USD coin (USDC).
Related: Visa, MasterCard could be key drivers for crypto in coming year.
Meanwhile, other payment giants are getting in on the action. PayPal launched the PYUSD stablecoin in 2023 and Stripe said it will allow merchants using the platform to accept the stablecoin for online transactions in April.
Also in April, Ripple announced plans to launch a USD-backed stablecoin to compete with market leaders.
The current stable coin market capitalization is around $161 billion and the daily trading volume is $37 billion, according to CoinGecko.
Cointelegraph reached out to Visa and leading Stalkcoin issuer Tether for further comment and did not immediately receive a response.
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