The past year has been quite depressing for the crypto market. Collapses, bankruptcy filings, and stagnated prices are the characteristics that stood out in 2022. With the gloomy year almost coming to an end, Peter Johnson, Co-Head of Venture at Brevan Howard Digital took to Twitter to share a positive development pertaining to stablecoins.
Stablecoins: The Crypto Market’s Knight In Shining Armor?
In 2021, stablecoins settled around $7 trillion in on-chain. However, the rate is already up to $9 trillion per year now. Johnson highlighted that the amount settled by other payment-processing corporations like Mastercard (~$2.2T), Amex (~1T), and Discover (<200B) were fairly lower. Visa's processing rate alone, on the other hand, stood around $12 trillion per year.
A host of stalwarts from the space opined on the growth in total value settled with stablecoins. Prominent Analyst and Co-Founder, General Partner at Variant Fund Spencer Noon exclaimed, “What a chart.” Messari’s Founder and CEO Ryan Selkis, on the other hand, tweeted,
“The stablecoin market is thriving.”
In fact, CoinMetrics’ latest ‘State of the Network’ issue brought to light that Tether noted a 61.9% rise YoY in the number of active addresses. To put things into perspective, the number dropped by 7.6% and 10.2% respectively for Bitcoin and Ethereum. USDC, on the other hand, registered a minor 1.7% shrink.
In fact, in terms of the daily average transactions and transfers also, Tether and USDC were in a better off position than Bitcoin and Ethereum. Tether, for instance, noted a 72.2% and 60.9% rise on the said fronts. Ethereum, on the other hand, registered an 11% dip and a minor 3.7% incline.
In this distressing year, seems like stablecoins have managed to collectively come through. In fact, Johnson feels that their performance in 2023 will further manage to astonish everyone. He opined,
“Expect that 2023 on-chain stablecoin volumes will not only surpass Visa volumes, but will also likely surpass the aggregate volume of all four major card networks (Visa, Mastercard, AmEx, and Discover).”