Institutional finance has always needed a settlement layer that moves money between organizations. For decades, that layer was correspondent banking: bank-to-bank, one to three days, closed on weekends.
In 2025 alone, stablecoins moved $33 trillion, roughly double Visa’s annual payment volume. JP Morgan settled debt in USDC on Solana. Visa settled $3.5 billion in USDC through US banks.
PayPal launched its own stablecoin across 70 markets. The settlement layer has changed. This piece traces how stablecoin infrastructure replaced it, and who built the rails that institutional finance now depends on.
$10.5 Trillion in One Month, and Institutions are in the Driving Seat
Total stablecoin market cap reached $317.89 billion as of April 2026, up from roughly $125 billion in early 2024.
The GENIUS Act, signed into law in mid-2025, created a federal framework for payment stablecoins, unlocking institutional adoption. The growth since has been vertical.
Dune Analytics data shows stablecoins transferred $10.5 trillion in January 2026 alone. For context, Visa processed $16.7 trillion in total fiat payment volume across its entire fiscal year 2025.
Mastercard processed $10.6 trillion in gross dollar volume over the same period. One month of stablecoin transfers on public blockchains approached what Mastercard’s fiat network moved in an entire year.
The DefiLlama leaderboard from earlier clearly tells the institutional story. PayPal’s PYUSD ranks #7, with a supply of $3.95 billion. BlackRock’s BUIDL is #8 at $2.96 billion.
The Mastercard-partnered USDG is #11 at $1.92 billion. These are not crypto-native tokens. These are stablecoins issued by or connected to the largest names in traditional finance, now ranked alongside USDT and USDC.
USDC moved $8.3 trillion of the January total, nearly five times USDT’s $1.7 trillion despite being 2.7 times smaller in supply. USDT dominates holdings. USDC dominates movement.
That distinction matters because USDC is the stablecoin Visa chose for settlement, JP Morgan used for the Galaxy debt deal, and Stripe’s infrastructure runs on. The institutional settlement layer runs primarily on a single token, minted by Circle.
Meanwhile, PayPal’s PYUSD moved $22.8 billion. Mastercard’s USDG moved $11.7 billion. The TradFi stablecoins are now visible on the volume charts, and every one of them traces back to just two minters.
Two Minter, One Rail, and It Bypasses Banks Entirely
Circle and Paxos are the two minters. Circle mints USDC, the token that moved $8.3 trillion in January. Paxos mints PYUSD for PayPal and USDG for the Global Dollar Network that Mastercard anchors alongside Robinhood, Kraken, and DBS Bank. Between them, every major TradFi stablecoin integration traces back to one of these two entities.
Arkham Intelligence data shows what happens after minting. Paxos has pushed $89.2 billion outward across 5,208 mint-and-burn transactions. The recipients are not banks.
They are Binance ($22 billion), Wintermute ($12.77 billion), Jane Street ($6 billion), Coinbase ($2 billion), and other big names.
These are Wall Street market makers and crypto-native trading desks, not correspondent banking chains.
Circle’s counterparty data shows the same pattern. $6.17 billion in mint and burn activity. Wintermute at $1.64 billion. Coinbase at $2.1 billion combined across multiple deposit addresses.
Coinbase appears as a top counterparty for both minters, the one distributor straddling both sides of the TradFi settlement market.
The Paxos and Circle outflows are dominated by mint and burn operations, the mechanism by which stablecoin issuers create new tokens when clients need them and destroy them on redemption. The scale of the counterparties reveals where institutional settlement sits.
When firms of that size receive billions from Paxos, those funds are freshly minted stablecoins for institutional use, whether to fill a PayPal merchant payout, settle a Mastercard acquirer obligation, or provide liquidity for a Visa banking partner. The stablecoin is created for settlement and redeemed afterward.
That on-demand cycle does not exist in correspondent banking. That is how stablecoin infrastructure became the settlement rail. But where do those stablecoins sit between minting and burning?
Between Minting and Burning, Stablecoin Infrastructure Relies on Crypto Custody
As a result, the stablecoin infrastructure serving institutional finance does not just depend on who mints the tokens. It also depends on where they sit between creation and redemption. USDC is used by millions, making it difficult to attribute specific holdings to institutional settlement.
USDG, however, is different. It exists for one purpose: the Global Dollar Network that Mastercard, Robinhood, Kraken, and DBS Bank anchor. Consequently, every large USDG holder is directly tied to that institutional network.
Arkham data on USDG reveals where institutional stablecoins actually sit. The largest single holder is Fireblocks Custody at $150 million, representing 8.97% of the total supply.
Alongside Fireblocks, OKX holds $519 million across three cold wallets, while Kraken, a named Global Dollar Network partner, holds $128.97 million. Pendle Finance also holds, indicating that USDG is flowing into DeFi yield strategies.
What makes Fireblocks significant is that it also serves as the custody layer banks use for USDC operations, including on Solana, where Visa settles. In other words, one custody provider sits at the intersection of both the Mastercard settlement rail through USDG and the Visa settlement rail through USDC.
The full stablecoin infrastructure path is now visible.
Circle and Paxos mint. Coinbase, Wintermute, and Jane Street distribute. Fireblocks and exchange cold wallets hold. The reach extends beyond card networks.
Arkham’s Paxos entity page confirms that Paxos also processes payments for Mercado Pago, the largest fintech platform in Latin America, meaning the same minting infrastructure serving Mastercard and PayPal also serves emerging market settlement.
At every step between minting and redemption, institutional finance depends on the same concentrated set of crypto stablecoin infrastructure providers.
Four TradFi Strategies, Same Stablecoin Infrastructure Underneath
With the settlement stack mapped, the question becomes how institutional finance is actually connected to it. Each major player chose a different strategy. All of them plugged into the same underlying stablecoin infrastructure.
Visa committed the hardest. As of December 2025, it settled $3.5 billion annualized in USDC on Solana through Cross River Bank and Lead Bank.
It expanded to four stablecoins across four chains: USDC, PYUSD, USDG, and EURC on Solana, Ethereum, Stellar, and Avalanche. Stablecoin-linked cards via Stripe’s Bridge are live in 18 countries, expanding to 100+.
Visa also built its own on-chain analytics dashboard with Allium Labs, tracking $12.9 trillion in adjusted stablecoin volume and treating on-chain data as core business intelligence.
And Solana carried $552 billion in stablecoin transfers in January 2026 alone (top 4), the same chain on which both Visa and PayPal’s PYUSD settle.
Mastercard hedged instead, enabling four stablecoins across its network: USDC, PYUSD, USDG, and FIUSD. It joined the Paxos Global Dollar Network for USDG, the same stablecoin held by Fireblocks Custody at $150 million, as shown earlier.
Stripe acquired the infrastructure directly, buying Bridge for $1.1 billion. Bridge now powers both the Visa stablecoin-linked cards and Stripe’s own stablecoin financial accounts across 101 countries, running on the same USDC that Circle mints.
PayPal built its own stablecoin. PYUSD, minted by Paxos, reached $3.95 billion in supply across 70 markets (per DeFiLlama data).
On Solana, PYUSD circulates at 0.6x daily velocity, four times its Ethereum rate, concentrating on the same chain that Visa chose.
Four strategies. Same stablecoin infrastructure underneath: Circle or Paxos minting, Coinbase distributing, and Fireblocks holding. But everything needs to be linked better.
The Stablecoin Infrastructure Stack That Now Settles Institutional Finance
The evidence across this piece converges into a clear answer. Stablecoin infrastructure became the settlement layer for institutional finance, not because institutions adopted crypto. It became one because a small number of providers built pipes that were faster, cheaper, and available 24/7, and every major institution plugged in rather than building its own.
The stack has four layers, each of which is concentrated.
At the supply layer, Circle and Paxos mint the stablecoins that institutional finance depends on. Circle’s USDC moved $8.3 trillion in a single month. Paxos mints for PayPal, Mastercard, and Mercado Pago through the same entity.
At the distribution layer, Arkham data shows both minters routing stablecoins through the same counterparties: Coinbase and Wintermute. The settlement rail bypasses correspondent banks entirely.
At the custody layer, Fireblocks holds $150 million in USDG as the largest single holder, while also receiving USDC on Solana, straddling both card network settlement rails through a single custody provider.
At the integration layer, Visa settles $3.5 billion annually and monitors stablecoin flows as core business intelligence. Mastercard enabled four stablecoins. Stripe bought Bridge for $1.1 billion. PayPal launched PYUSD across 70 markets. JP Morgan settled debt in USDC on Solana. None built new rails.
This mirrors the pattern from our previous analysis of institutional crypto custody, where seven entities across four layers control where crypto sits.
Here, a similar concentration controls how institutional money moves. Different function, same structural conclusion: institutional finance is scaling on stablecoin infrastructure built by a handful of providers. The rails exist. The question now is whether the next wave of adoption diversifies that dependency or deepens it.
The post Who Really Runs Stablecoin Settlement? A Structural Analysis appeared first on BeInCrypto.
