From Issuance to Revenue: Uncovering the Hidden Gold Mine in the Stablecoin Trillion-Dollar Market

Beyond the monopoly of Tether and Circle, the real opportunities in stablecoins lie in the settlement and revenue layers.

Written by: @ryanyoon_eth, Tiger Research
Compiled by: AididiaoJP, Foresight News

Market attention largely remains focused on the issuance side of stablecoins, but the bigger opportunities actually lie beyond issuance. This article systematically outlines the five stages of the stablecoin value chain—on-ramp, transfer, payment, and revenue generation—highlighting the core opportunities.

Key Points

• Outside the issuance market dominated by Tether and Circle, this report delves into the actual business structures formed in the five stages of the value chain (issuance, on-ramp, transfer, payment, revenue).
• The mainstream strategy is not to "rebuild the system from scratch," but rather to layer the efficiency of stablecoins (instant settlement, low-cost remittances) on top of existing traditional financial infrastructures. Only the revenue generation stage requires independent expertise that traditional finance finds hard to penetrate.
• As interest income from the issuance side diminishes due to rate cuts and competition intensifies, market value is rapidly shifting towards the "underlying settlement layer." Stablecoins are not replacing traditional finance but are showing a trend of deep vertical integration with regulated financial systems.

It’s time to recognize the complete value chain of stablecoins

Previous discussions about stablecoins have been highly concentrated on the issuance phase. The performance of leading issuers like Tether and Circle, along with regulatory trends in various countries, are often viewed as core market indicators, but this is merely the starting point of the value chain.

The complete value chain of stablecoins refers to the entire "flow" path of tokens within the economic system after issuance, specifically divided into five stages: issuance → on-ramp → transfer → payment → revenue generation.

Examining the industry from the perspective of the value chain reveals that while the issuance side is monopolized by a few players, there are many more competitors downstream, providing broader market opportunities.

From Issuance to Revenue: Tracking the Flow Path of $1,000

Taking Ryan's bank account with $1,000 as an example, observing how it flows within the stablecoin ecosystem clarifies the sequence of the five stages.

• Issuance: Leading issuers mint stablecoins backed by assets such as U.S. Treasury bonds, providing ample liquidity to the market.
• On-ramp: Ryan exchanges $1,000 for stablecoins through an on-ramp service, which processes the request and deposits the tokens into his wallet. The asset now leaves the fiat system and transforms into on-chain liquidity.
• Transfer: Ryan sends $500 to his family in Mexico for living expenses. The transfer infrastructure processes it instantly, and the recipient exchanges it for local currency.
• Payment: Ryan uses the remaining $200 to check out at a supermarket, where the payment infrastructure completes the instant settlement.
• Revenue: The last remaining $300 in his wallet is not idle but is deposited into a revenue-generating protocol vault, managed as an interest-bearing asset.

Through this process, Ryan's $1,000 transitions from fiat to stablecoin and evolves into a cross-border payment tool and asset management tool. Each layer through which the funds flow corresponds precisely to the value chain of the stablecoin industry.

Issuance

The issuance market is a typical scale economy market, with entry barriers built on trust and liquidity. The first-mover advantages of Tether and Circle have created an oligopoly, and newcomers must move beyond the "reserve interest" model to find differentiated paths.

**Industry Structure**

Stablecoin issuance is the process of minting and redeeming tokens backed by reserves (primarily U.S. Treasury bonds), locking in the value of the coins. The current total market capitalization is approximately $300 billion, with dollar-pegged assets accounting for 99.99%. Tether and Circle together hold about 83% market share, with deep liquidity and high transaction convenience and trust creating a solid scale economy effect.

As the industry matures, the functions originally monopolized by a single issuer are being specialized and split. On the surface, there is one issuer, but internally, four functions (licensing/regulatory qualifications, reserve management and custody, token minting and redemption, distribution) are allocated to different entities, thus transferring a significant amount of operational responsibilities.

For example, Circle delegates a considerable portion of distribution to Coinbase; Tether entrusts a large part of its reserves to the custodian Cantor Fitzgerald.

Types of Business Models

• Reserve Interest Model: Main income comes from reserve management returns, suitable for leading issuers with large liquidity pools (Tether, Circle).
• Payment Fee Model: Income comes from fees generated when tokens are used for payment settlements, with profitability depending on transaction turnover speed rather than market cap (StraitsX).
• Issuance-as-a-Service: Instead of directly issuing coins, it rents out infrastructure and licenses, charging a spread, relying on network effects rather than scale expansion (m0, Paxos, Stablecoin).
• Regional Model: Entering regulatory gray areas or non-dollar currency markets early to lock in exclusive liquidity (KrwqCash, JPYC).

**Case Study: Circle**

Institutional clients deposit dollars into Circle Mint (its on-ramp/off-ramp platform), and Circle mints USDC at a 1:1 ratio. Circle's main income comes from the interest on these deposits, so it does not charge additional minting fees at issuance, with the core goal being to maximize the scale of non-interest-bearing floating funds. Deposits are held in a money market fund (Circle Reserve Fund) managed by BlackRock and registered with the SEC, primarily investing in short-term U.S. Treasury bonds.

Circle allocates this portion of interest income through agreements with distribution channels. According to the cooperation agreement signed with Coinbase in August 2023:

• USDC on Coinbase platform: Coinbase receives 100% of the corresponding reserve interest.
• USDC on Circle's own platform: Circle retains 100%.
• USDC circulating outside the platform (including third-party exchanges, personal/institutional wallets, DeFi): The two parties share it 50/50.

This is a deliberately designed strategy: by carefully arranging incentives both inside and outside the platform, Circle shares part of the issuance income with core distribution partners in exchange for maximizing the distribution base and ecosystem share of USDC.

**Key Insights**

Stablecoin issuance is a scale economy market where first-mover advantages and liquidity scale determine success or failure, making it extremely challenging for newcomers to directly engage in issuance. New entrants should focus more on the functional disaggregation of the value chain rather than fixating on issuance itself.

A more effective strategy is to establish irreplaceable expertise in specific areas such as licensing, asset custody, settlement infrastructure, or distribution channels, becoming middleware that other players cannot easily replace. The essence of future competition lies not in who issues the most stablecoins, but in who can capture value and occupy strategic positions throughout the complete chain of stablecoin flow and consumption.

### **On-ramp**

On-ramp income comes from fees and spreads corresponding to transaction volumes. The fees perceived by consumers vary significantly due to differences in payment methods: bank transfers are about 2-4%, credit cards about 4-7%, but the actual net take rate for service providers is around 3% (based on Banxa data). The exchange function itself is hard to differentiate, and competition is so fierce that aggregators have emerged, specifically routing transactions to the lowest-cost options.

**Industry Structure**

This layer consists of on-ramp services (fiat to token exchange) and wallet/custody services (holding assets), which are closely linked. On-ramp income is tied to transaction volumes, with profit margins varying significantly by payment method. However, the exchange function itself is severely homogenized, with many service providers offering highly similar products, and the net take rate is converging around 3%.

**Types of Business Models**

• Consumer-facing On-ramp: Directly providing exchanges to end users, charging fees and spreads. Differentiation is difficult, and competitiveness depends on licensing coverage, payment network breadth, and reputation (conversion rate) (MoonPay, Ramp, Banxa).
• B2B White Label: Embedding on-ramp channels into wallets and applications, sharing about 1% fee with partners per transaction. It gains distribution without needing a consumer brand, and after deep integration with large partners, conversion costs become a moat (Transak).
• Aggregator: Routing transactions across multiple on-ramp services to find the optimal path, charging a brokerage fee. The more on-ramp services, the greater the value, but it is also limited by the dependency on the partner network (Meld).

**Case Study: MoonPay**

MoonPay is a non-custodial on-ramp platform where users buy coins with fiat that go directly to their wallets. Its main income comes from transaction fees and spreads: bank transfers about 1%, credit cards about 4.5%, and minimum fees for small transactions are $3.99. The public fee structure is divided into three tiers, reflecting how MoonPay allocates income and builds distribution.

Its revenue structure consists of two channels: direct traffic and transactions embedded through partners. Especially the model of embedding solutions into over 500 wallets and applications allows partners to set their own pricing, becoming the core driver for MoonPay to efficiently achieve large-scale distribution while sharing revenue with partners.

**Key Insights**

The revenue from pure deposit services is facing serious profit pressure due to commoditization and price wars. To establish a sustainable business, it is essential to transform the one-time fee structure into stable recurring income.

As a result, consumer-facing deposit service providers are expanding downstream in the value chain, entering the issuance and settlement infrastructure. MoonPay's acquisition of Iron and its foray into brand issuance services is an example, although the financial results of this recurring revenue strategy have yet to be validated.

The "embedded" strategy has produced two distinctly different outcomes: some service providers have established independent competitiveness, becoming a moat that can stand alone (Transak, Turnkey); others have been acquired by larger payment and custody companies (Privy acquired by Stripe, Dynamic acquired by Fireblocks).

It is currently difficult to determine which outcome will become mainstream, but the pivotal position of deposit and wallet layers in the industry is already quite clear.

Transfer

The transfer layer is responsible for the movement of stablecoins, including personal and business transfers, as well as salary payments for the global workforce.

This segment has garnered significant attention because it showcases the cost advantages of stablecoins in the most concrete and quantifiable form. The average cost of traditional cross-border transfers exceeds 6%, which can be significantly reduced by using stablecoins.

Industry Structure

Fees and foreign exchange spreads are generated at both ends (USD to tokens, tokens to local currency), while the on-chain movement of tokens is almost free.

Therefore, revenue is not concentrated on the transfer itself, but rather on the exchanges at both ends and the licenses required for legally processing transfers. Obtaining a money transmission license (MTL) in various U.S. states takes 12-24 months, making leasing the license itself as infrastructure (compliance as infrastructure) a strong revenue model.

Types of Business Models

• Cross-border B2B infrastructure: Coordinates cross-border payments and settlements between businesses, typically charging a transfer fee (about 5-10 basis points) plus foreign exchange spreads (ranging from dozens of basis points to about 1% depending on corridors and scale). Some also issue their own stablecoins to capture additional reserve interest (Stablecoin, BVNK, Conduit).
• Payroll payments: Focuses on wage disbursement while managing customer relationships on both the worker and employer sides. In addition to a SaaS subscription fee (fixed monthly fee per contractor, with a payout of about 25 basis points), it also adds interest income from floating funds (pending wages) (Rise Earn, Toku).
• Consumer-level transfers: Focuses on person-to-person cross-border transfers, using stablecoins to reduce backend costs and expanding profits through lower fixed fees compared to traditional providers (Felix).

Case Study: Rise

Rise is a stablecoin payroll platform that allows companies to pay wages in fiat (USD) or USDC. Workers can choose from over 90 local currencies and stablecoins for payment, with more than half of the $1.5 billion processed recently withdrawn in stablecoins. However, the true target of Rise's charges is not token transfers, but the management of employment relationships: automated KYC/AML, generating country-specific contracts, issuing tax documents, and charging recurring fees for these services.

Rise's revenue is divided into three layers based on payroll fund flows:

• Subscription and transaction fees: Employers can choose a fixed subscription of $50 per contractor per month or pay 3% of the amount, plus a $2.5 transfer fee. Payroll is inherently recurring, making this a source of recurring revenue.
• Legal liability assumption (EOR/AOR): High-end service where Rise itself becomes the legal contracting party, assuming the risk of misclassification of workers. Employer of Record (EOR) services cost $399 per worker per month. The eightfold price difference from simple payment processing comes from compliance responsibilities rather than the transfer function itself.
• Floating fund management (Rise Earn): Rise invests the reserved funds before payroll disbursement and the USDC balances received by workers but not yet withdrawn into the Aave lending pool on Arbitrum. It does not charge custody fees but takes a 1% commission from the interest generated, charged at the time of withdrawal (launching in March 2026).

Since payroll is a cash flow that occurs monthly, the platform naturally accumulates balances both before payroll disbursement and after workers receive but do not withdraw funds. Rise's three-layer structure monetizes this characteristic: in an environment where on-chain transfers are almost free, it intentionally expands the charging points from employment relationships (subscription) to legal liabilities (EOR), and then to idle funds (earnings).

Key Insights

Winners in the transfer market will not be just the service providers that move tokens the cheapest, but those that can control exchanges at both ends and licenses (Mural Pay, Yellow Card), master substantial customer relationships through payroll (Rise), and layer on revenue income (Rise Earn).

Cross-border infrastructure provider BVNK was ultimately acquired by card organization Mastercard for up to $1.8 billion, indicating that the underlying settlement infrastructure of the transfer and payment layers will eventually converge.

Payment

Payment is the core layer of the value chain, where stablecoins complete the settlement of goods and services. Merchant payments and card services are currently the mainstay, but relative to market expectations, the economic reality remains immature. The retail turnover rate of on-chain stablecoins is only about one-twentieth of the M1 money supply, as users recharge and consume intermittently, rather than closely linking payroll with daily expenses as in traditional finance.

Industry Structure

Exchange fees (the fees charged by card networks and issuers for each transaction) are the core of payment revenue, increasing with payment volume. However, low turnover rates lead to weak profitability for individual cards, and revenue must be split among card networks, issuers, and payment gateways. The real profit pool is not in consumer-facing card brands but in the underlying issuance and settlement infrastructure.

Most consumer card service providers do not have their own issuance rights and rely on this infrastructure, with their revenue structure primarily limited to spreads.

Types of Business Models

• Payment infrastructure: Coordinates merchant payments and settlements. In addition to payment fees, it also captures reserve interest by issuing its own stablecoins. Stripe's Bridge Open Issuance distributes the Circle-style reserve income structure to businesses, making it one of the most profitable businesses at this layer (Stripe, BVNK).
• Card issuance infrastructure: Supports backend for businesses issuing cards. As a principal member of major networks like Visa, it shares exchange fees and generates revenue through project management and foreign exchange spreads. The core differentiation lies in T+0 on-chain settlement based on USDC, which can reduce collateral requirements by up to 60%, significantly enhancing capital efficiency (Rain, Reap).
• Consumer cards and neobanks: Provide cards and accounts to end users. Revenue includes exchange fee sharing, foreign exchange spreads, membership subscription fees, or deposit management profits. Since they are not issuers, they find it difficult to directly obtain reserve interest, relying mostly on issuance infrastructures like Rain or Reap (Cypher, KAST).
• Card networks: Payment authorization and settlement networks. Exchange fees belong to issuers, while card networks benefit from transaction volume growth through network fees. Card networks are introducing stablecoin settlement as a backend layer, strengthening ties with partner banks (Visa, Mastercard).

Case Study: Rain

Rain is a B2B backend infrastructure that helps wallets, exchanges, and neobanks issue their own branded consumer cards. Partners integrate card projects through a single API, with Rain acting as a principal member of Visa and Mastercard, handling network sponsorship, compliance, issuance, and operations on their behalf.

When users swipe cards supported by Rain, the processing flow is as follows:

• Authorization (real-time): Authorized on Visa or Mastercard networks just like regular cards, providing a completely consistent experience for merchants and consumers, with stablecoins invisible at the surface.
• Balance deduction and ledger management: Real-time conversion and deduction of the authorized amount from the user's on-chain balance, with Rain managing the entire project's ledger.
• Network settlement (daily): Rain settles entirely with USDC with the card network. Not restricted by bank cutoff times, settlements can occur every day of the year (including weekends and holidays), and funds are not held up for days during weekends and holidays.
• Fund recovery and working capital: Under a credit structure, user repayments occur later than settlements, requiring issuers to advance funds. Rain tokenizes card receivables as collateral for on-chain loans, raising settlement funds in advance, with cumulative lending and repayments exceeding $175 million. As a result, collateral requirements are up to 60% lower than traditional issuers.

In short, when consumers use cards supported by Rain, the entire process from authorization and settlement to fund allocation is completed behind the scenes by Rain.

Key Insights

The core of payment revenue is not the visible card payment fees, but the reserve interest associated with the issuer's position and the capital efficiency gained through T+0 settlement. Most consumer card brands are merely front-end customer touchpoints layered on top of this infrastructure.

Major card networks have directly acquired cross-border payment infrastructures like BVNK, and Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and Google are also advancing the joint stablecoin alliance Open USD. This can be interpreted as a vertical integration strategy: internalizing the platform to secure exclusive reserve interest income.

Earnings

Earnings are the endpoint of the value chain and the most complex layer of the business structure. Issuers cannot directly pass interest to holders, ultimately flowing back to users here, as lending operations evolve into a complete asset management industry.

Industry Structure

Early on-chain lending pooled all assets into a large pool, where any asset default could impact the entire system. This structural limitation has been addressed by isolated (or modularized) models: separating collateral and loan terms by market, clearly distinguishing immutable lending agreement infrastructure from the earnings management layer operated by risk curators.

This structural separation has given rise to a true on-chain asset management industry. Risk curators charge up to 50% performance fees and up to 5% annual management fees on the managed treasury, with the top four players controlling about 65% of the curated total value locked (TVL), forming an oligopoly.

On top of this earnings infrastructure lies the financial product layer that end users actually consume, including tokenized U.S. Treasury bonds and private credit RWA products, interest-bearing synthetic dollars, and re-staking, among others.

Types of Business Models

• Lending Infrastructure: Capture a portion of the interest rate spread (Reserve Factor) or extract protocol revenue from interest generated by proprietary stablecoins (such as Aave's GHO). Another model represented by Morpho shuts down proprietary protocol fees, transferring value to downstream curators and token ecosystems to drive network growth (Aave, Morpho).
• Risk Curators: Design asset allocation and risk models on top of lending protocols, charging treasury management fees. Steakhouse manages approximately $1.7 billion in assets with a team of fewer than 20 people, extracting about 5% in interest. It is a typical example of on-chain asset management, with a cost structure far more efficient than traditional financial institutions (Steakhouse, Gauntlet).
• RWA Yield Vaults: Issue and distribute tokenized U.S. Treasury bonds or money market funds, charging an annual management fee of about 0.15%-0.5%. BlackRock's BUIDL serves as the underlying asset, Ondo Finance repackages it for the DeFi ecosystem, while Plume Nest distributes it through a Layer 1 specifically designed for RWA.
• Yield Generation and Synthetic USD: Generate returns through delta-neutral basis trading or managing net interest margin (NIM), then pay these returns to token holders in the form of interest. This can be divided into two categories: those relying on crypto-native derivatives and those relying on stable government bond collateral (Ethena, Sky).
• Re-staking: Allow staked assets to flow again (re-stake) to capture additional returns. Some service providers further vertically integrate, extending from charging DeFi treasury management fees to directly connecting to consumer card payments (ether.fi).

Case Study: Steakhouse

Steakhouse is a risk curator, essentially on-chain asset management. It does not build its own lending protocol but operates on existing infrastructures like Morpho, taking on a role similar to a junior advisor: selecting collateral assets, designing risk parameters (such as loan-to-value ratios), and allocating capital across markets.

Its revenue structure is also similar to traditional asset management, extracting a portion of the generated interest as performance and management fees. Since lending protocols like Morpho have already handled operational infrastructure, accounting, settlement, and custody, curators can efficiently expand by relying solely on their risk design expertise without incurring additional infrastructure costs.

Key Insights

Currently, the assets managed by on-chain curators amount to about $7 billion, which is only one-twentieth of the global traditional asset management market (approximately $147 trillion). This significant gap indicates that the on-chain asset management market still has a long growth runway.

However, high yields only make sense when the underlying systems remain stable. Recent incidents of decoupling and chain reactions in the re-staking sector have exposed operational risks and tail risks that cannot be identified solely through smart contract audits.

As a result, market funds are shifting from high-yield synthetic USD to products that offer relatively lower returns but are collateralized by government bonds. What institutional investors truly seek is not high APY, but predictability and risk controllability.

The Future Direction of Stablecoin Value Chains

The success of the stablecoin market does not depend solely on expanding issuance scale, but rather on who can control specific customer groups. Building infrastructure from scratch in a crypto-native way is both slow and expensive.

The most realistic and executable strategy is to overlay the efficiency of stablecoins (same-day settlement, 24/7 operation, low-cost transfers, programmable yields) onto existing traditional financial infrastructure (rails). Recent major mergers—such as Stripe's acquisition of Bridge and Mastercard's partnership with BVNK—point in this direction: the combination of traditional financial infrastructure and stablecoin efficiency.

Two major trends are amplifying this opportunity: the diffusion of regional currencies and the integration with regulated finance.

• Diffusion of Regional Currencies: When governments and institutions prepare to issue local stablecoins, they are more likely to adopt verified issuance infrastructures and local banking channels rather than building from scratch.
• Integration with Regulated Finance: Regulated financial institutions like JPMorgan, Visa, and BlackRock also clearly prefer mature infrastructures over self-developed technologies.

Therefore, the gateways that institutional finance must pass through—such as card issuance and settlement, custody infrastructure, and asset management—will further expand market opportunities in the future.

Because stablecoins are essentially currency, they represent a powerful "technological upgrade" that maximizes the efficiency of existing financial rails.

The issuance market is an oligopoly that requires substantial capital and trust, while the subsequent layers of deposit, payment, and asset management have relatively lower entry barriers, accommodating a richer variety of business models.

The current market is still in the early stages of integrating with traditional financial rails. Whoever can dominate the forms of integration and substitution will become the leader.

This transformation has become an unavoidable large-scale topic of our time. The EastPoint forum, held on September 28, 2026, in Seoul, will serve as a platform for in-depth discussions on this industry-wide transformation. Traditional financial institutions and the digital asset industry will explore the stablecoin ecosystem and broader topics under one roof, marking a substantial first step towards crossing existing boundaries and achieving true integration.