Stablecoin issuance is commoditized at the token layer, but not at the outcome level where compliance, liquidity, and integration matter most.
Buyers face far fewer real choices than it appears, as regulatory, operational, and liquidity constraints quickly narrow viable issuers.
Long-term pricing power is more likely to come from bundled rails and network effects than from token creation itself.
Stablecoin issuance is becoming commoditized at the token level, but real competition now centers on compliance, liquidity, distribution, and bundled services that determine real-world outcomes.
EVERYONE IS ISSUING STABLECOINS
Stablecoins are evolving into application-level financial infrastructure. Following the introduction of the GENIUS Act and the emergence of a clearer regulatory framework, brands such as Western Union, Klarna, Sony Bank, and Fiserv are shifting away from simply “integrating USDC” toward launching “their own dollars” through white-label issuance partnerships.
This shift is being driven by the rapid rise of issuance-as-a-service platforms. A few years ago, Paxos was almost the default choice. Today, depending on the type of project, there are more than 10 viable issuance paths, ranging from newer platforms like Bridge and MoonPay, to compliance-first providers such as Anchorage, and industry heavyweights like Coinbase.
The growing number of options makes stablecoin issuance appear increasingly commoditized—at least at the level of the token’s underlying architecture. But commoditization depends on who the buyer is and what problem they are trying to solve. Once token mechanics are separated from liquidity management, regulatory posture, and the surrounding infrastructure—such as on- and off-ramps, treasury orchestration, account systems, and card programs—the market no longer resembles a simple price competition. Instead, it becomes a layered contest, where pricing power concentrates around outcomes that are genuinely difficult to replicate.
In other words, while core issuance capabilities are converging, providers are far from interchangeable when it comes to compliance, redemption efficiency, time-to-launch, and bundled services—areas where operational outcomes matter most.
>>> More to read: What is “GENIUS Act”? Can Stablecoins Really Save the Dollar?
WHY DO COMPANIES LAUNCH THEIR OWN BRANDED STABLECOINS?
It’s a fair question. In practice, companies are driven by three main motivations:
✅Economic upside.
By retaining more customer funds and balances, companies capture greater value from money flows while unlocking adjacent revenue streams such as treasury management, payments, lending, and card programs.
✅Behavioral control.
Branded stablecoins allow firms to embed customized rules and incentive mechanisms—such as loyalty or rewards programs—and to determine their own settlement paths and interoperability choices, aligning the currency more closely with their product design and user journeys.
✅Faster time to market.
Stablecoins enable teams to roll out new financial experiences globally without having to rebuild a full banking stack from scratch.
Importantly, most branded stablecoins do not need to reach USDC-scale to be considered successful. In closed or semi-open ecosystems, the key metric is often not market capitalization, but improvements in ARPU (average revenue per user) or unit economics—namely how much incremental revenue, retention, or operational efficiency the stablecoin functionality brings to the core business.
>>> More to read: What is Stablecoin ? Stable Virtual Assets
MARKET STRATIFICATION: WHETHER ISSUANCE IS COMMODITIZED DEPENDS ON WHO THE BUYER IS
Commoditization refers to a service becoming so standardized that switching providers does not change the outcome, shifting competition from differentiation to price.
If changing issuers would alter the outcomes you care about, then issuance has not been commoditized for you.
At the token-infrastructure level, switching issuers usually does not affect results in a meaningful way, which is why this layer is becoming increasingly interchangeable. Most providers can hold similar Treasury-backed reserves, deploy audited mint-and-burn contracts, offer basic control features such as freezing or pausing, support major blockchains, and expose broadly comparable APIs.
But brands are rarely purchasing a “simple token deployment.” They are buying outcomes—and the outcomes required depend heavily on the type of buyer. At a market-wide level, issuance has split into several distinct clusters, each with a point at which substitutability breaks down. Within each cluster, teams typically end up with only a small number of truly viable options in practice.
Enterprises and financial institutions are driven by procurement processes and optimize primarily for trust. Substitutability breaks down around regulatory credibility, custody standards, governance structures, and the reliability of 24/7 redemptions at scale—often involving hundreds of millions of dollars. In practice, this is a “risk committee–style” purchase: issuers must withstand formal scrutiny on paper and operate in production environments that are stable, predictable, and even deliberately boring.
🔍 Representative providers: Paxos, Anchorage, BitGo, SoFi.
Fintech companies and consumer wallets are product-led, with an emphasis on delivery and distribution. Alternatives fail on time-to-launch, depth of integration, and the value-added rails that allow stablecoins to function in real business workflows, such as on- and off-ramps. In practice, this is a “ship within the current iteration cycle” procurement strategy: the winning issuer is the one that minimizes coordination around KYC, fiat rails, and treasury flows, and gets the full experience—not just the stablecoin—into production fastest.
🚩 Representative providers: Bridge, Brale (MoonPay and Coinbase may also fall into this category, though public information is limited).
DeFi and investment platforms are on-chain–native applications that prioritize composability and programmability, including yield-maximizing structures designed around different risk trade-offs. Substitutability weakens around reserve design, liquidity dynamics, and on-chain integration. In practice, this is a “design-constraint tradeoff”: teams are often willing to accept alternative reserve models if they improve composability or returns.
🔍 Representative projects: Ethena Labs, M0 Protocol.
Issuers therefore cluster along two dimensions: enterprise-grade compliance posture and customer access model. Enterprises and financial institutions sit in the lower right, fintech and wallets occupy the middle, and DeFi lies in the upper left.
Differentiation is increasingly moving up the stack—most visibly in the fintech and wallet segment. As issuance itself becomes a feature, issuers are competing by bundling more complete service stacks to deliver full outcomes and support distribution. These bundles often include compliant on- and off-ramps with virtual accounts, payment orchestration, custody, and card issuance. By changing time-to-market and operational outcomes, these services help issuers retain pricing power.
Viewed through this lens, the commoditization question becomes clear.
Stablecoin issuance is commoditized at the token level, but not at the outcome level—because buyer constraints make providers difficult to replace.
Over time, issuers serving each cluster may converge toward a similar capability set required by that market. But the ecosystem has not reached that point yet.
WHERE COULD DURABLE ADVANTAGES COME FROM?
If the token layer has already become the cost of entry, and differentiation at the edges is gradually eroding, the obvious question is whether any issuer can build a lasting moat. For now, this looks more like a customer-acquisition game, with retention driven by switching costs. Changing issuers affects reserve and custody operations, compliance workflows, redemption mechanisms, and downstream system integrations—issuers are not something you can “swap out with a single click.”
Beyond bundled services, the most plausible source of long-term moats is network effects. If branded stablecoins increasingly require seamless 1:1 convertibility and shared liquidity, value may accrue to the issuer or protocol layer that becomes the default interoperability network. What remains unclear is whether that network will be controlled by issuers themselves (enabling strong value capture) or evolve into a neutral standard (supporting broader adoption but weaker value capture).
A key trend to watch is whether interoperability becomes a commoditized feature—or the primary source of pricing power.
CONCLUSION
At present, the core of token issuance is commoditized, while differentiation lives at the margins. Token deployment and basic controls are converging, but outcomes still diverge meaningfully across operations, liquidity support, and system integration.
For any buyer, the market is far less crowded than it appears. Real-world constraints quickly narrow the shortlist, and the number of “credible options” is usually only a handful—not dozens.
Pricing power comes from bundled services, regulatory posture, and liquidity constraints. The value is not in “creating a token,” but in the full stack of rails that make a stablecoin function.
Which moats will endure over the long term remains uncertain. Network effects built around shared liquidity and redemption standards are a plausible path, but as interoperability matures, it is still unclear who will ultimately capture the value.
The next question to watch is whether branded stablecoins converge onto a small number of redemption networks, or whether interoperability ultimately becomes a neutral standard. Either way, the conclusion is the same: tokens are just the foundation—the business model is the core.
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〈Where Stablecoins Really Compete: Regulation, Liquidity, and Reach〉這篇文章最早發佈於《CoinRank》。
