Stablecoins

Stablecoins are probably the most boring-looking and most important corner of crypto. They’re how most of the real settlement happens, they’re how most retail rotates risk on and off, and in 2026 they’ve finally become a regulated product class in the US with the GENIUS Act and its subsequent rulemaking at OCC, FDIC, and FinCEN. The combined stablecoin market cap crossed into the hundreds of billions and keeps climbing.

This hub covers the issuers (Circle, Tether, PayPal’s PYUSD, the bank-issued variants starting to ship from JPMorgan, Standard Chartered, and HSBC), the regulatory side (yield on stablecoins, reserve requirements, interoperability rules, the stablecoin-yield fight that keeps almost passing and then stalling), and the market-structure side (how exchanges use stablecoins for settlement, how DeFi uses them for collateral, which chains are winning the stablecoin volume wars).

A few themes we watch closely. The USDC-vs-USDT tension isn’t as simple as “regulated vs. not” anymore, USDT has cleaned up a lot and issues detailed reserve reports; USDC’s regulated status didn’t prevent its 2023 depeg. The yield question matters more than most retail users realize: if stablecoin issuers can legally pay interest, the whole market-cap ranking shifts. Bank-issued stablecoins are a real competitive threat to the existing issuers but they’ll only matter at scale once they work across chains, which most of them still don’t.

For the coins themselves: USDT, USDC, PYUSD. For the underlying regulation, see the Regulation hub.

Latest stablecoin coverage below, newest first.