The first time I watched someone use a dollar stablecoin to send money home, it didn’t feel like a technology demo. It felt like relief. They had been paid online, their family needed cash quickly, and the usual options were a maze of cut-off times, fees, and that low-grade fear that the transfer might land late. Stablecoins didn’t fix every part of the journey, but they removed one ugly piece: the waiting. And the economics are still pushing people in that direction. The World Bank’s Remittance Prices Worldwide database put the global average cost of sending remittances at 6.49% in Q1 2025.
That remittance story is where many people start, but it’s not where they stop. Once you have a balance you trust, you stop thinking of it as a transfer method and start treating it like a wallet. Then the next question arrives: what is my money doing while it sits here? Today, that question is showing up more often because stablecoins are being pulled closer to mainstream plumbing. In the U.S., the GENIUS Act created a federal framework for payment stablecoins in July 2025, leaning on full backing and supervision. In Europe, MiCA kicked in in two steps: stablecoin issuer rules applied from June 30, 2024, and the rules for crypto-asset service providers applied from December 30, 2024.
Payment networks are also wiring stablecoins into familiar workflows. Visa’s December 2025 announcement described bringing USDC settlement to U.S. institutions and cited more than $3.5 billion in annualized stablecoin settlement volume, with broader availability planned through 2026. When that kind of infrastructure shows up, stablecoins start to feel less like a niche product and more like a new kind of cash rail.
Once you look at stablecoins as a cash rail, the “treasury” part comes into view. Many stablecoins are backed heavily by cash and short-term U.S. government debt, and the policy push around “high-quality” reserves makes that connection more explicit. The awkward detail is that the yield on those safe assets mostly accrues to issuers, not to the people who hold stablecoins as their savings. That isn’t a scandal; it’s how the product is constructed. But it creates a simple itch: if I’m already orbiting Treasuries, why can’t I hold something that pays like them without losing the simplicity of a digital dollar?
Tokenized Treasuries and tokenized money market fund shares are one practical answer, and they’ve moved from concept to category quickly. The Financial Times described investors piling into tokenised Treasury and money market funds during 2025, attracted by yield and faster settlement. Public trackers like RWA.xyz show tokenized U.S. Treasuries around the $9–10 billion range. Reuters reported a bridge into traditional finance: DBS partnered with Franklin Templeton and Ripple to let eligible investors trade a tokenized money market fund share (sgBENJI) alongside Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin, and explore using the fund token as collateral.
This is where Plasma’s idea lands. Plasma positions itself as a layer-1 chain built specifically for stablecoins, emphasizing near-instant transfers and low or zero fees for basic stablecoin movement. A Trust Wallet integration announcement frames the same point in everyday terms: move USDT without needing to keep a separate token just to pay network fees, and handle fees in stable assets. If you take that design seriously, “from remittance to treasury” stops being a slogan and becomes a product direction: a single place where sending is frictionless, and where parking value can look more like modern cash management than like a speculative detour.
But the caution tape is real. Reuters and the BIS have highlighted worries that rapidly growing dollar stablecoins could accelerate dollarization and shift cross-border money flows in ways that undermine monetary sovereignty or create instability. I find that warning hard to shrug off. Still, the direction of travel is hard to miss: stablecoins are becoming less about escaping the system and more about rebuilding familiar money functions on new rails.
