Sen-J

Introduction: The currency rules that are quietly being rewritten
The Argentine peso has depreciated by 200% in a year, and Argentinians are already using USDT to pay salaries. In 2025, Buenos Aires, a designer received a payment from a client in New York: not a bank transfer, not PayPal, but USDT. The entire transaction was completed on the blockchain, arriving in seconds, with fees of less than a cent. If done through traditional bank cross-border remittance, it would take 3 to 5 business days, with fees ranging from 3% to 5%, plus the burden of peso exchange rate fluctuations.
This scene is playing out in the lives of hundreds of millions worldwide: Turkish freelancers using USDC to avoid the collapse of the lira; Nigerian remittance workers sending income back home through stablecoins, with costs significantly lower than traditional channels (the average global remittance cost is about 6.5%, reaching 8.45% in Sub-Saharan Africa, while platforms like Yellow Card can achieve zero or very low fees in the African corridor); Vietnamese small businesses paying suppliers with stablecoins, reducing settlement time from 5–15 business days to seconds.

The cryptocurrency market is adjusting; why did tokenized US Treasuries defy the trend and reach a new high of $4.2 billion? Behind this question lies a trend: funds have not exited but have flowed from volatile assets to income-generating 'digital dollars'.
Stablecoins are transitioning from a settlement tool to an income-generating asset. Holding USDT and USDC no longer means idle funds, but rather, it can earn interest like a bank deposit, often with a higher yield.
So how do stablecoins achieve the transformation from a settlement tool to an income-generating asset?

The dilemma of traditional cash: holding it means losing money.
In most economies, holding cash equates to bearing opportunity costs and inflation erosion.

33.5 trillion dollars. In 2025, the on-chain settlement volume of stablecoins will reach $33.5 trillion, continuously exceeding the combined scale of Visa and Mastercard. Behind this figure, the settlement infrastructure is already in place, and the payment revolution is the next step. To understand this transformation, it should be examined from three dimensions: How large is the scale of on-chain dollars? Why is traditional cross-border payment being challenged? Where are the real scenarios?

On-chain dollars are now a measurable financial layer.
The scale of stablecoins has grown too large to ignore. By the end of 2025, the total market value of global stablecoins will exceed $300 billion, with USDT (the US dollar stablecoin) alone amounting to approximately $184 billion, marking 27 consecutive months of growth. According to data from institutions such as Artemis and TRM Labs, the on-chain settlement volume of stablecoins in 2025 is estimated to be about $33.5 trillion, surpassing the combined payment scale of Visa and Mastercard. It should be noted that a significant portion of this comes from fund transfers between exchanges, trade settlements, and DeFi, rather than narrow payments (for goods and services). The proportion of stablecoins used in real payment scenarios (remittances, trade, daily consumption) is still small, but the growth rate is fast, making it the main battleground in the future.

95% of revenue depends on interest income, the Federal Reserve is still lowering interest rates, why did Circle's stock price surge by 20%? The answer is not in the profit statement: the market is not pricing the interest differential, but rather the cross-border settlement network and fee rights built around USDC. Whoever controls the standards and settlement rights of the channel between fiat currency and on-chain dollars can collect tolls; what Circle is betting on is this matter.

On February 25, 2026, Circle (NYSE: CRCL) released its financial report for the fourth quarter and the whole year of 2025: Q4 revenue was $770 million, of which about 95% came from reserve interest; annual revenue was $2.7 billion, a year-on-year increase of 64%. At the end of the year, the circulation of USDC was $75.3 billion, and Q4 on-chain transaction volume was $11.9 trillion. After the financial report was released, the stock price initially rose nearly 20% in pre-market trading.

The market value of USDT today exceeds $186 billion, accounting for about 62% of the total market value of stablecoins. The on-chain settlement volume for the entire year of 2025 is approximately $13.3 trillion, making it the largest and most widely used 'on-chain dollar' at present.
From a business model perspective, Tether connects the issuance, redemption, and reserve management of USDT on one end, and large-scale dollar asset allocation and earning interest rate spreads on the other. In 2025, the net profit is expected to exceed $10 billion, with exposure to U.S. Treasuries and related assets of approximately $141 billion, ranking among the top global institutions holding U.S. Treasuries. The reserves also include billions of dollars in physical gold, which has contributed significant paper gains against the backdrop of strong gold price increases in recent years. It serves as both an 'on-chain central bank' providing base currency for the entire industry and a highly profitable dollar asset management bank, with the principal mainly coming from users' almost interest-free liabilities, while most interest income remains on its own books. A rough estimate using traditional banking valuation methods suggests that such profits and asset scale are sufficient to benchmark against a number of leading global financial institutions.

Stablecoins are no longer a supporting role in speculative trading but are a substantial infrastructure in global payments and settlements. The total market capitalization exceeded $310 billion in early 2026, setting a new high; looking back, it grew from about $4.2 billion in early 2020 to $283.7 billion by September 2025, and then to $310 billion, with an expansion rate unimaginable in traditional finance. The magnitude is reflected not only in market value; throughout 2025, stablecoins processed over $33 trillion in transaction volume, comparable to the payment and clearing systems of major sovereign countries.

The current market structure is highly concentrated on leading products. USDT and USDC together account for over 90% of the total market capitalization, with USDT leading absolutely with a market value of approximately $187 billion and nearly 60% share, while USDC ranks second with about $74 billion. However, the trust logic behind the two is entirely different. Beyond that, Ethena's USDe (synthetic dollar), the rebranded Sky (USDS/former DAI), and PayPal USD (PYUSD) each occupy a place in the derivatives collateral, crypto collateral, and payment ecosystem tracks respectively.

In the past decades, the voices proclaiming that 'the US dollar is finished' have intermittently surged into public discourse: from the resurgence of memories of Bretton Woods, to the ferment of global de-dollarization sentiment, and then to the psychological impact brought by fiscal deficits and inflation data. It seems that as long as there is another major crisis, the dollar will 'collapse overnight'. However, another equally true fact is: every time there is global liquidity tightening or a significant asset pullback, US Treasury bonds and dollar assets remain the first safe haven that global institutions rush back to. In other words, the dollar is not going to disappear tomorrow, but it is slowly sliding onto a track leading to systemic breakdown.

The story of dollar hegemony used to be found in SWIFT messages, oil contracts, and the tracks of warships. Today, it has gained an additional track: a string of code that flows on the blockchain 24/7.
The U.S. dollar, as the global reserve currency, has always relied on existing settlement networks, oil pricing, and military political deterrence. Stablecoins have not invented a new currency; they have merely transformed dollar-denominated debt into digital certificates that flow on-chain 24 hours a day. Cash and the numbers in bank accounts have become on-chain assets that anyone can hold and transfer—thus, for the first time, the dollar has achieved nearly borderless circulation without going through traditional commercial banks or adhering to sovereign boundaries. Rather than saying that hegemony has been weakened, it is more accurate to say that an additional track has been created for the dollar, completing a digital upgrade.

Introduction: The Abstraction of Currency Value and the Foundation of Trust
In today's monetary system, a dollar bill that costs less than 10 cents to produce, or a piece of stablecoin code recorded on the blockchain, can both buy real goods and services not because of the 'amount of metal it contains,' but rather due to the entire trust structure built around credit. To understand stablecoins, especially those backed by the dollar, one must unpack the value basis of the dollar as a global reserve currency.
From a longer historical perspective, the things humans have used as 'money' have increasingly moved towards abstraction: initially, they were items of inherent utility (shells, grains), then scarce metals (gold coins, silver coins), and today, we have a fiat currency system entirely supported by credit. With each step forward, the physical properties of 'money' recede, replaced by institutions, consensus, and agreements. The dollar is the representative of this journey, no longer backed by physical commodities like gold, but maintained through social consensus, geopolitical arrangements, and a legal framework.

The Bitcoin white paper published in 2009 described 'peer-to-peer electronic cash.' Many people, reading this sentence for the first time, instinctively connect it with real-life scenarios like 'salary,' 'grocery shopping,' and 'contract settlement.'
More than a decade has passed, and what we see is more like another picture: Bitcoin resembles a speculative asset, with its fluctuations resembling an emotional curve; what truly supports the daily trading, lending, market-making, and settlement in the crypto world, however, is stablecoins—something that appears more 'mundane' and even more like traditional finance.
Behind this, the principles of currency operation are at work.

The recent surge in gold prices in January 2026 is hard to summarize with old phrases like 'another major bull market.' On January 13, London spot gold reached approximately $4,636 per ounce, setting a new historical high. This isn't due to a sudden boom in a mining stock, nor a short-term bubble caused by a hot ETF—it's more like a global monetary system health check-up: fiat currencies are systematically losing value, while gold is being forced back to its original, never-escaped role as the ultimate currency.
4,500 USD is more of a coordinate than a target price. It reflects a prolonged trajectory of fiat currency depreciation, and represents a concentrated pricing of a series of changes, including sovereign debt, the weaponization of sanctions, realignment of reserve assets, and the rise of on-chain finance. Gold hasn't become a 'higher-grade asset'; rather, the entire credit-based monetary system is losing credibility.

Introduction: The Paradox of Monetary Value
A green piece of paper, costing less than 10 cents to produce, can exchange for goods and services worldwide. This is the paradox of the modern monetary system.
When discussing stablecoins, we must first answer a more fundamental question: Why can a piece of paper become a global reserve currency? Why is the dollar accepted worldwide, even though it has no intrinsic commodity value?
To understand why stablecoins have value, we must first understand why the US dollar has value. Because stablecoins—especially dollar-pegged stablecoins—are essentially replicating and extending the credit mechanism of the US dollar on the blockchain. Understanding the foundation of the dollar's value is not only crucial for grasping the modern monetary system, but also the starting point for comprehending the value logic of stablecoins.

When gold, US dollars, stablecoins, and Bitcoin are placed together, it can be observed that they stand at different nodes on the same evolutionary path. The starting point of this path is the scarcity of the physical world, undergoing the abstraction of national credit, and the endpoint points to algorithms and community consensus. So, what roles do these forms play on the long chain of human currency evolution? What kind of ultimate outcome will they push us toward?

The ultimate law of currency evolution is the decentralization of consensus.
The essence of currency is consensus, and consensus is becoming decentralized.
Currency is essentially not some physical entity or government decree, but a consensus mechanism that human society collectively accepts to reduce transaction costs, establish trust, and convey value. The paper money, bank cards, and digital currency in our phones that we use every day are all agreements that 'everyone is willing to accept.'

In the past two years, many RWA projects have emerged, but those that can truly scale and dare to be 'embraced positively' by institutional balance sheets are actually few. The constraints often do not lie at the technical level but in the most expensive and ambiguous institutional links, such as custody, settlement finality, and legal traceability.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) recently launched a complete set of RWA guiding frameworks, attempting to dismantle this 'institutional black box' and rewrite unpredictable legal risks into predictable and manageable compliance costs.
Around this framework, I will sequentially sort out its policy background and regulatory path, as well as how several core documents are concretely implemented, and further discuss what it means for different participants such as issuers, custodians, and institutional investors, and where the ceiling of this path might be under global regulatory and capital rule constraints.

Currency is the underlying protocol of human societal operation; it is not only a medium of exchange but also the deepest power mechanism within social organization. History has proven time and again: the right to issue currency is the most covert and powerful authority in human history; whoever holds it can first access purchasing power and thereby influence economic order and even the political landscape.
Whoever controls the currency controls the future; a new competition has begun. Blockchain is not about eliminating currency, but about democratizing the right to issue currency—allowing algorithms to replace some functions of central banks, enabling private institutions to challenge state issuance, and letting communities replace elites in governance. It is not just an evolution of technology, but a redefinition of power: from the natural scarcity of the golden era to the state monopoly of the fiat currency era, and now to the algorithmic autonomy of the blockchain era, monetary power is returning from extreme centralization to distributed networks.

The core advantage of blockchain technology lies in its decentralized and publicly transparent ledger mechanism, which ensures that the system can maintain a high level of auditability and transaction integrity without trusting third-party intermediaries. However, the design of transparency also has its limitations, as it inherently sacrifices users' financial privacy. On public blockchains, every transaction, every address's balance, and historical records are permanently recorded and visible to everyone.
For individuals, a lack of privacy means that consumption habits, sources of income, investment portfolios, and even social networks can be analyzed on-chain. In the real world, complete exposure of financial information can lead to competitive disadvantages in business and pose security risks such as targeted ransomware against high-net-worth individuals. The pursuit of privacy is not merely to evade regulation but stems from an essential need for control over financial information, which is key to safeguarding personal property and business secrets.

Introduction: The historic moment of digital gold and its macro background
Gold, as the most ancient means of value storage in human history, has welcomed a new strategic window period due to the turbulence in the global financial system. The chain upgrade of geopolitical risks, the credit overdraft of sovereign debt, and the trend of 'de-dollarization' have led central banks worldwide to view gold as a policy tool once again. Over the past nine quarters, central banks have continuously net bought gold, pushing it from a traditional 'safe-haven asset' to 'active reserves.' This series of actions points to the same signal: the reconstruction of the next monetary order is already secretly being arranged.

Gold is regarded as the 'most standardized safe-haven asset', but once cross-border allocation occurs, it can be dragged into a high-cost maze by different vault standards, lengthy logistics, and repetitive inspections. Taking the example of transporting London gold bars to Shanghai: it must undergo professional security transport, high insurance costs, customs procedures, several days to weeks of transit time, and also bear the costs of market price differences and re-inspection upon arrival. Naturally, gold bars with 99.99% purity can be exchanged globally, however, the trading link is tightly bound by physical movement and regulatory barriers, and standardization remains on paper.
The efficiency of modern finance lies in the assets being interchangeable, divisible, unified in rules, and transparent in information. Gold, during the gold standard era, had achieved institutionalized standards through the central bank network, but after the decoupling in 1971, the unified framework collapsed, and gold again became an ordinary commodity constrained by physical and regulatory limits.

In 2025, the net gold purchases by global central banks exceeded one thousand tons for three consecutive years, with gold prices rising over 50%. At the same time, Bitcoin's market value also surpassed $2.3 trillion, exceeding that of silver and Saudi Aramco. Two assets from different eras are repeatedly compared in the same market.
Gold has been the consensus of value for humanity for five thousand years, recognized as the ultimate asset by recorded history and modern central banks. On the other hand, there is cryptocurrency, which has only been around for 16 years, relying on code and algorithms to reshape the trust structure.
They are all vying for the same role: a non-sovereign store of value.