Stablecoins are turning into one of the biggest forces in global finance, warns the CEO of one of the world’s largest independent financial advisory organisations.
Nigel Green of deVere Group’s comments come as the total stablecoin market cap pushes toward an all-time high above $318bn, led by Tether’s USDT at more than $184bn and Circle’s USDC above $78bn.
Forecasts for where the sector goes next are striking: one leading global bank sees the market reaching $2 trillion by 2028, the US Treasury has modelled growth of roughly 700% to a similar figure over the same period, and another major bank’s upper-end scenario puts the market at $4 trillion by 2030.
He says: “Stablecoins have gone from a crypto curiosity to a genuine pillar of the dollar system, and the scale of it should be turning heads in every finance ministry and central bank on the planet.
“Every dollar that flows into a stablecoin has to sit somewhere, and increasingly that somewhere is short-dated US government debt.
“Tether alone now holds more than $100bn in Treasury bills, more than the reserves held by the likes of Germany or the UAE.
“The stablecoin industry as a whole is already one of the 20 largest external holders of Treasuries on the planet, and it got there in barely a decade.”
Nigel Green draws a clear line between the coins themselves and the opportunity building around them.
“Stablecoins are built to stay exactly at one dollar, not to make anyone rich,” he says.
“Nobody should mistake this for a bet on the coin’s price. Where the opportunity actually sits is with the businesses and infrastructure built around them, the issuers and institutions now racing to plug into that flow of money, and the sheer scale of demand it’s creating for government debt.”
Nigel Green argues the scale of the shift is only just starting to register in traditional finance and government circles.
“This has stopped being a niche corner of crypto and started becoming genuine plumbing for the US Treasury market,” he says.
“When one bank talks about a $2 trillion stablecoin market within two years, and another talks about $4 trillion by the end of the decade, they’re describing a structural buyer of government debt that barely existed five years ago.”
He points to the wave of institutional money now moving into the space as confirmation the trend has real momentum.
“A group of major global banks has just moved to build a joint dollar stablecoin venture of their own, right as US regulators finalise the rulebook for issuers under the GENIUS Act,” the deVere CEO explains.
“When banks stop fighting a trend and start building infrastructure for it, that’s usually the surest sign the trend has already won.”
Nigel Green says the scale of demand stablecoins could generate for government debt carries implications well beyond crypto markets.
“Every trillion dollars of stablecoin growth is a trillion dollars of fresh appetite for short-dated government paper,” he says. “At a moment when governments across the developed world are struggling to fund enormous deficits and investors are demanding higher yields for the privilege of lending to them, a new multi-trillion-dollar buyer showing up ranks among the more significant shifts in the plumbing of global debt markets in a generation.”
He concludes: “The market cap numbers are only the surface. The real question now is how fast regulators, banks and governments adapt to a buyer of this size, because stablecoins have already let themselves into mainstream finance.”
