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San Francisco Stablecoin Weekly Insights: The XYZ Coordinate System in 2026

Author Charlie, Venture Partner at Generative Ventures. Previously served as Vice President of Strike, a cryptocurrency unicorn (involved in El Salvador's Bitcoin bill and responsible for Bitcoin and stablecoin payment businesses in Latin America), macro analyst at Franklin Templeton, a trillion-dollar fund, and an early member of Adyen North America, a global payment giant. Currently serves as a cryptocurrency strategic advisor to multiple public companies, startups, and investment firms.

Last week was San Francisco's Stablecoin Week, bringing together stablecoin industry leaders from around the globe.

After attending various events, I had an increasingly strong feeling: everyone is talking about 'stablecoins,' but they're no longer referring to the same thing.

In some venues, discussions centered around Circle’s stock price, financial reports, and valuation reassessments.

In other venues, topics included agents, wallets, authorization, payment protocols, and whether AI really needs a card.

In yet other venues, the discussions were less glamorous, focusing more on practical issues like Brazil, Europe, corporate treasury management, local fund inflows and outflows, non-US dollar liquidity, and cross-border fund transfers. Each jurisdiction has its own compliance logic, banking restrictions, and settlement bottlenecks—transferring money is never as simple as just 'sending it over.'

On the surface, everyone is talking about stablecoins, but in reality, they're discussing three different businesses.

This was my biggest takeaway from San Francisco’s Stablecoin Week this year: by 2026, stablecoins will no longer be a single narrative but are gradually evolving into a three-dimensional coordinate system.

The X-axis represents Agentic Commerce.

The Y-axis represents RWA and Credit.

The Z-axis represents On-Chain FX.

Stablecoins remain the underlying form of currency, serving as the shared monetary substrate.

But the businesses being built have clearly diverged.

This round of increase has made this change even clearer.

In terms of earnings reports, its data is certainly solid: by the end of 2025, the circulation of USDC will reach 75.3 billion US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 72%; in the fourth quarter of 2025, the on-chain transaction volume of USDC will reach 11.9 trillion US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 247%.

But what's more worth watching is that it is consciously transforming itself from a 'stablecoin issuer' into a larger set of internet financial infrastructure: regulated stablecoins, tokenized money market funds, developer tools, Arc, Circle Payments Network. These pieces together are no longer about one coin but an entire stack.

The old perspective is starting to feel inadequate. The stablecoin remains the same asset, but the business growing around it has completely changed.

First, the X-axis: Agentic Commerce. The real change isn't in payment but rather in 'who is spending.'

I started writing about agentic commerce about a year ago. At that time, this term wasn't as popular, and many people’s first reaction upon hearing this concept was still 'AI helps you shop,' 'AI helps you browse Taobao.'

But I've always felt that what's really worth looking at isn't this.

The most important change in agentic commerce isn't that shopping experiences are becoming smarter, but that a new type of actor has appeared in the commercial system: software with delegated intentions.

This statement may sound abstract, but its consequences are very specific.

In the past, the core of e-commerce was checkout. Whoever shortened the funnel or made the payment experience smoother had a better chance of winning.

But as agentic commerce moves forward, the question is no longer just 'how to pay,' but 'who can pay.'

Who authorizes the agent? What are the boundaries of that authorization? How much can it spend, and in what scenarios?

How is identity linked? How is risk control managed? How are disputes resolved? How are audit trails maintained?

If these issues aren't resolved, the payment rail itself isn't all that important.

So over the past few months, I've been telling many friends that Circle's deepest moat isn't just reserve yields, distribution, or regulatory advantages, but whether it can, in a deeper sense, become x402-native.

I'm not talking about 'owning x402' here, since x402 wasn't invented by Circle after all.

What I mean is something else: if the future internet really develops a machine-native payment layer, can Circle become the default dollar, the default wallet, and the default settlement asset in that payment ecosystem?

This is a crucial distinction.

Because if you look at agentic commerce today, despite OpenClaw going viral, for the most part it’s still 'AI placing orders on behalf of humans.'

But what will likely explode first may not be the most obvious front-end scenario.

In many mature markets, agents still prefer to use existing card networks, bank transfers, or merchant-side vouchers because these channels are cheaper, more familiar, and easier for handling disputes.

The first real opportunity for stablecoins is likely much deeper:

Machine-to-machine settlements, per-API-call payments, content and data billed by usage, low-value high-frequency transactions, autonomous treasury operations, and software-native global capital flows.

In other words, the first victories for stablecoins in agentic commerce may not be about 'AI helping you buy a cup of coffee,' but rather 'software finally being able to spend money like software.'

This is why I repeatedly emphasize one point:

If the internet is going to develop a machine economy layer, the strategic high ground has never been about 'issuing a dollar-pegged coin,' but becoming the wallet and settlement system that best aligns with machine behavior.

It’s not an extension of human checkout systems, but the starting point for software-native money.

Axis Two: Real-world assets (RWAs) remain primarily about 'on-chain legacy finance,' but the most interesting developments are the few truly chain-native new asset classes.

Today, the majority of RWAs still involve familiar financial assets being moved onto the blockchain.

The most typical example, of course, is U.S. Treasuries. Beyond that, there are credit instruments, commodities, funds, and increasing experimentation with tokenized equities.

At the end of the day, what most RWAs are doing today is shifting existing financial products to a new track: making them more programmable, easier to distribute globally, and enabling more efficient settlement.

Therefore, I don't think that InfraFi, as proposed by Messari this year, represents the main focus of the current RWA space.

But precisely because of that, I pay even more attention to it.

Because within the broader RWA landscape, InfraFi may be one of the few areas that truly feels native to the on-chain world, rather than simply being traditional financial products repackaged and redistributed.

A tokenized Treasury is, in essence, still a Treasury.

A tokenized stock is, in essence, still a stock.

They are certainly important and will continue to grow, but their economic identity remains unchanged.

InfraFi is somewhat different.

It targets a category of assets or cash flows that were previously difficult to standardize, hard to continuously verify, and challenging to effectively securitize. Thanks to on-chain verification, programmable ownership, and continuous data streams, these are now beginning to become truly investable objects.

This is also why I place greater importance on it.

Not because it is the largest today, but precisely because it is not yet large.

But it may represent a new way of asset creation.

In this direction, Arkreen's EnergyFi is one of the cases I am most interested in at the moment.

My interest in it does not lie in the superficial narrative of 'energy + RWA', but rather in how it might demonstrate the emergence of a truly on-chain native asset class.

In the past, many infrastructure-related cash flows were not without value, but rather too fragmented, too dispersed, too reliant on offline verification, and too dependent on post-event aggregation, making it difficult to become an object that can be monitored frequently, priced continuously, and financed effectively. Often, it’s not that the asset itself is flawed, but that its factual basis is too weak.

What EnergyFi attempts to solve is precisely this problem.

If the underlying energy production, usage, and settlement processes can continuously generate reliable data;

If these data are not secondarily recounted through monthly reports, audit summaries, or third-party narratives, but instead directly become verifiable, callable, and traceable streams of facts;

Then what gets financialized would not just be a packaged revenue right, but a cash flow system that can be continuously verified.

Why is this important?

Because what it addresses is not only energy, not only DePIN, but the core pain points of private credit and even broader private investing.

The recent incident involving Blue Owl Capital has exposed many issues within private credit. On the surface, these appear to be problems of structural design, liquidity, and valuation, but fundamentally, it boils down to a very basic question: Is the underlying information you have access to truly accurate? Timely enough? Comprehensive enough? Continuously verifiable?

If not, then essentially, it's still garbage in, garbage out.

If the underlying facts are ambiguous, delayed, or filtered, then no matter how sophisticated the upper structure is, it merely repackages opacity.

What makes something like EnergyFi worth serious attention is not because it introduces a new concept, but because it may offer an alternative: rather than making 'reports' prettier, it transforms the underlying operational realities into continuously verifiable data objects.

This would directly change underwriting, alter monitoring, and could even transform the due diligence logic of both primary and secondary markets.

If this path proves viable, the significance of on-chain finance would not just be about 'adding another distribution channel,' but introducing a new layer of truth.

In this sense, I view EnergyFi as one of the potential foundations for the future of private investing, rather than a peripheral narrative.

Moreover, there's a very practical backdrop to this trend: the energy bottleneck for AI.

In recent years, energy has often been treated as the backdrop behind the tech narrative.

But as AI enters the infrastructure competition phase, energy is no longer just a supporting condition; it's becoming one of the hardest constraints again.

If AI remains one of the most important industrial themes over the next decade, then systems around energy production, financing, verification, and cash flow securitization will sooner or later move from the periphery to the center.

From this perspective, EnergyFi is not about adding a 'green story' to RWA, but more like an early demonstration: whether on-chain finance can really tap into the backbone of next-generation infrastructure financing.

Third, Z-axis: On-Chain FX is not a payment issue, but a market structure issue.

During this trip to San Francisco, I think the most underrated conversations actually came from on-chain FX.

Perhaps because this group of people is closer to real liquidity, real corridors, and real balance sheets, they tend to speak more cautiously and are less likely to frame things as a simple story of 'faster payments' or 'cheaper transfers.'

My biggest takeaway is that many people’s understanding of on-chain FX still停留在跨境支付的延伸上remains an extension of cross-border payments.

But the real difficulty of this matter has never been 'getting money there faster'; what's truly difficult is market structure.

Foreign exchange has never been just an information transmission problem or a settlement issue.

It is first and foremost a problem of balance sheets, funding, and liquidity.

What blockchains excel at is atomic settlement; what mature FX markets excel at, however, is netting.

The former is clean, direct, and trust-minimized but highly capital-intensive; the latter has a complex system but saves the balance sheet significantly.

If every transaction must be gross settled, capital will be locked up.

Market makers' efficiency will drop, spreads will widen, and depth won't improve.

So this week, in multiple on-chain FX discussions, I repeatedly heard a very clear conclusion: what's really holding back this market right now isn't that contracts can't be written, wallets aren't good enough, or even just compliance issues—it’s capital efficiency.

This judgment is crucial because it directly changes how you view this space.

If you simply think of on-chain FX as 'currency exchange on the blockchain,' it's easy to reach an overly simplistic conclusion: build more infrastructure, issue more local stablecoins, add more trading pairs, and the market will naturally come.

But reality is completely different.

A better way to understand it is to break it down into three layers.

The first layer is fiat-to-fiat: this is the largest market but also the hardest to move immediately, as traditional institutions already serve it deeply.

The second layer is fiat-to-stable and stable-to-fiat: this is actually the segment seeing the most growth today, especially in emerging markets for treasury, remittances, and corporate settlements.

The third layer is stable-to-stable: it’s not large in scale today, but it may very well be the true endgame. Because only at this level does FX stop being about 'using crypto to plug into old rails' and start resembling a truly internet-native foreign exchange market.

This layered system also makes the boundaries of opportunity clearer.

The areas that are truly being transformed first, as I mentioned in my discussion with the founder of Airwallex about what’s wrong with stablecoins, are not the deepest G10 interdealer markets but the long tail that the old system has consistently failed to serve well: small and medium-sized enterprises, exporters, cross-border platforms, freelancers, migrant corridors, and various participants without prime broker relationships or large balance sheets but with real, ongoing cross-border needs.

The examples I heard this time were very representative.

One team mentioned that for a Starlink treasury corridor in Latin America, the settlement cycle was reduced from several days, or even weeks, to approximately 35 minutes.

Another team went live in mid-2025, reaching $1 billion in trading volume within six months, and another $1 billion three months later, primarily serving emerging-market FX and regulated institutional demand.

These cases illustrate one thing: the growth of on-chain FX is not sprouting from the center but growing from the edges.

It doesn't start by replacing the deepest markets but by first smoothing out the areas where the old system has consistently fallen short.

More interestingly, these discussions increasingly make me believe another point: on-chain FX is primarily not a supply-side infrastructure issue but a demand aggregation problem.

A statement I heard at the conference left a deep impression on me: 'start with the chicken, not the egg.'

The meaning is: don’t get obsessed with designing a perfect liquidity market from the start; instead, focus on capturing real flows first.

If you can aggregate real demand across various corridors through neobanks, PSPs, remittance platforms, treasury software, or products with inherent distribution capabilities, market makers will naturally come.

Conversely, without a stable flow, adding another trading pair or another venue won’t easily create depth.

This perspective is particularly important.

It implies that the winners in on-chain FX may not necessarily come from traditional exchanges but are more likely to emerge from the orchestration layer: these entities might not consume all liquidity themselves, but they will coordinate compliant inflows and outflows, aggregate demand, perform intelligent routing, and when appropriate, layer on netting and credit.

Ultimately, once you acknowledge that the bottleneck for on-chain FX is capital efficiency, you’re already close to the concept of credit.

Fourth, non-US dollar stablecoins are not just about issuing a coin; the real challenge lies in corridor capabilities.

If I were to pick the most underestimated line this week, it would be non-USD stablecoins.

They always sound great on paper: every country, every market seemingly should have its own stablecoin.

Logically, it makes sense, but in reality, this is a much harder business than USD stablecoins.

Why are USD stablecoins strong? Because in many countries, the US dollar is inherently a stronger store of value.

When issues like domestic currency volatility, capital controls, and banking capabilities stack up, the US dollar automatically becomes the default option. So it's no surprise that today’s stablecoin world revolves around the dollar.

The problem with non-dollar stablecoins is that many people think 'issuance' is the product, but in fact, issuance is just the easiest step.

What’s truly difficult is building relationships with local banks, managing offshore liquidity, engaging market makers, facilitating same-name pay-in/pay-out, integrating with local payment networks like SEPA and PIX, navigating regulatory frameworks corridor by corridor, and creating a user experience competitive enough to rival Wise, Revolut, local PSPs, and bank transfers.

More critically, you must answer a question far harder than 'Can we issue a coin?': Why would users want to hold local currency on-chain?

This question is actually very pointed.

In many markets, the demand for local currency isn’t primarily driven by store-of-value needs, but rather payout requirements.

Users may still want to use the US dollar as a store of value, but in areas like payroll, invoicing, supplier payments, tax, and domestic spending, they are forced back into the local currency.

This means what non-dollar stablecoins really need to achieve is not getting the market to 'recognize this token,' but instead positioning themselves as a bridge: one end connected to offshore liquidity, the other to local payment systems and real business flows.

Brazil is a very typical example.

What’s truly valuable isn’t the mere fact that 'BRL has been put on-chain,' but whether it can bridge the onshore and offshore worlds in a market where cross-border transactions are already extremely painful, order books thin out at scale, and holding foreign currencies across borders is highly restricted.

From this perspective, the token itself is not as important; what really matters is the entire corridor architecture.

I also think the market generally underestimates the path dependency of non-USD stablecoins.

USDT and USDC didn't grow because of logical consistency but because they tapped into real liquidity and distribution flywheels.

For non-dollar stablecoins to find their growth flywheel, they must also discover their own catalyst.

Without finding that catalytic point, it will remain in the stage of being theoretically correct but practically thin.

So I completely agree: non-dollar stablecoins are very important, but they are by no means a natural extension of USD stablecoins.

It's a business that is slower, harder, and tests corridor operational capabilities even more.

5. What's truly worth competing for in 2026 is not the coin itself, but the control points outside the coin.

If you put these three lines together, the coordinates for stablecoins in 2026 are actually quite clear.

Agentic commerce, at its core, is an authorization issue.

The challenge with RWA and on-chain credit lies in the verification issue.

On-chain FX ultimately boils down to a capital efficiency problem.

Stablecoins remain the common underlying layer, but the real competition ahead is no longer just about 'who issues more.'

Some will win based on intent and permission.

Some will prevail through truth and underwriting.

Others will succeed by excelling in corridor liquidity, routing, and netting.

This is why I increasingly feel that the term 'stablecoin company' itself is starting to become imprecise.

The market used to focus on issuance, but in the next phase, what truly matters is who controls the outer layer of structure around stablecoins: authorization, verification, credit, and liquidity.

In this sense, Circle's recent revaluation is certainly worth watching, but it should not be viewed merely as a stock story.

It is more of a signal: the capital markets are beginning to vaguely realize that stablecoins are no longer just coins, but the monetary foundation for three different types of businesses.

Stablecoins are of course still assets.

But the real business going forward is who gets to decide how this money is authorized, how it is verified, how it is financed, and how it is exchanged.

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