The summer of 2025 may be remembered as the moment stablecoins moved from speculative sidelines to the centre of financial innovation. Despite the term ‘stablecoin’ first appearing in 2013, and early launches like BitUSD and Tether following soon after,
this season marked the closest the industry has come to creating a truly less volatile cryptocurrency.
With news of the
GENIUS Act passing and becoming the first federal regulatory system for stablecoins in the world, major companies such as Amazon and Walmart exploring launching their
own stablecoins, and USDC issuer Circle recently
going public, what will the stablecoin summer mean for the end of 2025 and beyond?
The summer stablecoins became the main character
While stablecoins are gaining traction, questions remain around privacy, interoperability, and the potential for centralisation in systems designed to be decentralised.
With Ripple announcing they were rolling out an enterprise-grade, USD-denominated
stablecoin offering support for instant payments, fiat to cryptocurrency conversion and tokenisation of real-world assets at the end of 2024, the industry were primed for a year of diving deep into the regulatory, financial, and operational aspects of stablecoins.
This momentum carried into early 2025, where a compliance-first approach began bridging the fiat and stablecoin worlds.
Bridging the fiat and stablecoin worlds and investment was
driven into organisations like Cedar Money that leverage blockchain to take on legacy Swift and correspondent banking network rails. An important
story in March 2025 was Ripple and Warwick Business School’s Gillmore Centre’s probe into the risks of stablecoin de-pegging and the impact on financial market stability.
Stablecoin depegging occurs when its value significantly diverges from the asset it’s meant to track, like a fiat currency, often due to market conditions or other factors. When Terra USD depegged in May 2022 and soon after, sister token Luna collapsed,
the cryptocurrency market lost $0.5 trillion in a week, according to the
Corporate Finance Institute. This event is the perfect example of what can happen when a stablecoin fails to maintain its peg and more research must be conducted into this.
Stablecoin platform Circle also
revealed they were collaborating with Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank, Société Générale and Santander to build a cross-border payment network to rival Swift. Powered by smart contract infrastructure and modular APIs as well as leveraging USDC, EURC, and
other regulated stablecoins, the Circle Payments Network (CPN) is being built to enable seamless 24/7 connectivity to domestic real-time payment systems worldwide.
Around the same time, PayPal attempted to
encourage uptake of its stablecoin by offering US users an annual rewards rate of 3.7% on their holdings. PayPal and Venmo users are now able to earn the rewards on their PYUSD balances. The rewards can be used immediately to send to other users, fund international
transfers, exchange for fiat, or make purchases at millions of merchants with PayPal Checkout.
In addition to the rewards programme, PayPal struck a deal that will see Coinbase waive fees on transactions connected to the stablecoin. The PayPal integration means that merchants on PayPal's network can settle directly in PYUSD instead of traditional
financial rails.
In May 2025, US big banks JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo also held discussions on potentially launching a stablecoin that will improve transaction speeds whilst managing competition from encroaching crypto firms. This move followed
US regulatory action towards stablecoin regulation, with the Senate pushing for the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for Stablecoin Act (GENIUS Act).
The summer finance got its digital dollar crush
On the same day that JP Morgan announced plans to release a so-called deposit token on Coinbase’s public blockchain Base, built on top of the Ethereum network with each token meant to serve as a digital representation of a commercial bank deposit, the US
Senate voted in favour for the GENIUS Act.
But before we get into that, at this time,
Visa analysis showed that stablecoin adoption was exploding, with $27 trillion in total transaction volume globally across 1.25 billion transactions in 2024. Visa said the new initiative will help reduce settlement costs, enhance liquidity management, and
support 365-day settlements, including weekends and holidays.
To date, over $225 million in stablecoin volume has been settled through Visa across participating clients. Visa has since stepped up its investment in the market,
taking a stake in stablecoin infrastructure platform BVNK and
undertaking a partnership with Stripe-owned Bridge to help bring stablecoin-linked cards to more people in more places.
On the other hand, the Bank for International Settlement, argued that while they may be the current darling of the financial services world, but stablecoins fall short as a form of sound money and at best may “eventually play a subsidiary role in the hinterland
of the financial system.”
The BIS continued to say that while offering some promise on tokenisation, they are fundamentally flawed because they “do not stack up well against the three desirable characteristics of sound monetary arrangements and thus cannot be the mainstay of the
future monetary system.” These characteristics are the ability to deliver singleness of money (acceptance for payment at par), elasticity (timely discharge of obligations, preventing gridlock) and integrity (safeguarding against financial crime).
Therefore, “besides acting as a gateway to the crypto ecosystem, their future role is unclear.” Without regulation they could be actively damaging, posing a risk to financial stability and monetary sovereignty.
That is exactly what the US did. In July 2025, US President Trump
signed the GENIUS Act into law, becoming the first major national cryptocurrency legislation to be passed by US lawmakers, setting up a regulation for this type of cryptocurrency that is perceived as reliable, or stable.
While House Financial Services Committee Chairman French Hill
celebrates the passage 308 to 122 and states that this was a "historic turning point, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, the leading Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, shared that the bill lacks the provisions needed to "maintain the longstanding
separation of banking and commerce, protect consumers, preserve our national security, promote financial stability, and importantly, fails to address glaring conflicts of interest raised by the actions of President Trump and his Administration."
Following the US, Japanese fintech company JPYC Inc
announced they would start issuing the country's first stablecoin as early as this autumn. The Tokyo-based firm was approved by the Financial Services Agency as a funds transfer service provider on Monday, with qualified approval to issue stablecoins. The
company expects its stablecoin to be used for individual international money transfers and corporate payments.
The stablecoin, which will be called 'JPYC', will be fully convertible to the yen and backed by domestic savings and Japanese government bonds. JPYC sets the upper limit of issuance at 1 million yen's worth of stablecoin per client per business day. There is
no limit on the amount that can be transferred or held. Transfer and issuance fees are free.
As the dust settles on the stablecoin summer of 2025, the financial services industry finds itself at a crossroads—where innovation meets regulation, and experimentation begins to scale. With global players stepping into the arena and governments laying
down the first real frameworks, stablecoins are no longer fringe instruments but central to the future of digital finance. Whether they become the backbone of a new monetary system or remain a bridge between old and new, one thing is clear: the conversation
has only just begun.