Stablecoin Adoption Is Getting Stronger After PayPal Launches PYUSD

JAKARTA - Jamie Coutts, an analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence, has predicted significant growth in stablecoin adoption after regulatory barriers in the US were overcome. He revealed that "stablecoin adoptions (stablecoins) will secretly explode."

Coutts argue that the use of stablecoins could exceed bitcoin usage, especially as more companies like Paypal are starting to integrate these assets into their payment systems.

In Coutts' view, although stablecoin markets have recently faced challenges due to regulatory uncertainty in the US, the use of this tool will continue to develop in the future. He believes that despite facing growing regulatory challenges in the US, this payment method is likely to be adopted by large companies such as Paypal, Visa, and Mastercard.

In its analysis, Coutts acknowledged that the stablecoin market had grown rapidly during 2022, with total payments using stablecoins in various blockchain networks reaching nearly US$6.9 trillion (around Rp105 quadrillion). Even so, this number has decreased sharply by 80% year-on-year.

Coutts believes that stablecoins are ready to "explode" as more and more institutions want to follow this trend. Companies like Paypal have taken steps forward by issuing an internal stablecoin called PYUSD. In addition, Visa and Mastercard have also invested to integrate their services into open networks.

Payment companies that do not follow the trend of stablecoin adoption can be left behind on the growth scale that occurs, said Coutts.

However, Coutts indicates that stablecoin market growth may be limited by blockchain capacity to deal with this spike. Open networks may not have scalability comparable to networks like Visa or Mastercard, which can process more transactions with less complexity.

Coutts highlights that Ethereum and its L2 expansion layer technology such as Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base will play an important role in this growth. Future improvements will make transactions at the L2 layer cheaper through proto-danksharding technology, also known as EIP-4844.

Lastly, Coutts explains that stablecoin adoption has the potential to go beyond Bitcoin adoption depending on market conditions.

It is possible that stablecoin usage could exceed Bitcoin in the next 3-5 years thanks to the effects of payment networks and integration with large companies such as Paypal, Visa, and Shopify. Progress on scale will also be an important foundation for this adoption into mainstream, "said Coutts.