Stablecoin Infrastructure Attracts $94M as Standard Chartered Eyes $2T Market
Stablecoin infrastructure attracted a fresh wave of institutional capital on March 31, 2026, as forex startup OpenFX closed a $94 million Series A round backed by Accel, Atomico, Lightspeed Faction, Pantera and others. The same day, Standard Chartered published research maintaining its forecast that the stablecoin market will reach $2 trillion in market capitalisation by 2028, even as velocity, the ratio of transaction volume to outstanding supply, has doubled over the past two years. Taken together, these developments point toward a structural inflection: stablecoins are no longer principally a crypto-native instrument but are becoming the settlement layer for institutional cross-border finance.
OpenFX: A $200 Trillion Market With Decades-Old Plumbing
The framing offered by OpenFX founder Prabhakar Reddy is worth examining carefully, because it is not rhetorical. The global foreign exchange market processes more than $200 trillion annually, yet its core settlement infrastructure is largely unchanged from the correspondent banking model that predates the internet. Traditional cross-border payments routinely require multiple business days, pass through chains of intermediary institutions each extracting a fee, and oblige participants to maintain pre-funded nostro accounts that immobilise capital with no productive return. Industry estimates suggest trillions of dollars sit dormant in these accounts at any given moment.
OpenFX addresses this structural problem by using stablecoins as the actual settlement instrument, bypassing correspondent channels entirely. The platform currently supports more than 40 currency pairs, operates on a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week basis, and prices transactions between 0.01% and 0.3%, well below conventional FX fees. Most transactions settle in under 60 minutes. The company reports that its annualised payment volume climbed from $4 billion to $45 billion over the past year, a more than tenfold increase that reflects genuine adoption rather than inflated notional figures. Reddy launched the company in 2024 with operations spanning the United States, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates and India; the Series A proceeds are earmarked for expansion into Southeast Asia and Latin America, two regions where domestic payment systems are reasonably functional but international transfers remain costly and slow.
The investor roster merits attention. Accel and Atomico are among Europe’s most analytically rigorous venture firms; Pantera has deep expertise in blockchain infrastructure. The presence of all three in a single round at this size, $94 million for a company founded in 2024, signals that sophisticated capital has concluded the stablecoin-rails thesis is not speculative but commercially executable at scale.
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Dogecoin DOGE$0.1023▲1.42%Standard Chartered’s Velocity Paradox
Standard Chartered’s research introduces a counterintuitive dynamic that has structural consequences for how the market develops. Stablecoin velocity, meaning how frequently a given unit of supply turns over in transactions, has doubled over the past two years. In classical monetary theory, higher velocity implies that the same stock of money supports a larger volume of transactions. Applied to stablecoins, this means that supply does not need to grow at the same pace as transaction volumes in order to sustain economic activity, because each token is being recycled faster.
The bank nonetheless maintained its forecast that total stablecoin market capitalisation will reach $2 trillion by 2028. To contextualise that number: the stablecoin market is currently well below $300 billion in aggregate outstanding supply, which means Standard Chartered is projecting roughly a sevenfold expansion over approximately two years. The primary drivers they identify are USDC’s deepening integration with traditional finance workflows and the emergence of AI-driven automated payments, a use case that barely existed at scale two years ago. The Block’s coverage of the Standard Chartered report describes the bank’s characterisation as “unstable velocity,” a phrase that captures both the opportunity and the analytical uncertainty: if velocity continues rising faster than expected, the $2 trillion supply figure may arrive sooner, or the market may support $2 trillion in economic throughput with less outstanding supply than currently modelled.
The practical implication is that market cap alone is becoming a misleading headline metric. A stablecoin market with twice the velocity is twice as financially significant even if outstanding balances remain flat. Analysts and regulators calibrating systemic importance by supply figures alone will consistently underestimate the sector’s actual weight in global settlement flows.
Circle Mints $750 Million on Solana in 24 Hours
Against this structural backdrop, Circle minted approximately $750 million in USDC on Solana within a single 24-hour window on March 31. The scale of that single minting event is instructive: it represents a deliberate routing decision by institutional actors who are selecting Solana’s throughput and fee characteristics over alternative chains for dollar-denominated liquidity deployment. Solana’s DeFi activity, trading infrastructure and institutional flows have been accelerating for several quarters, and this minting event is consistent with a broader pivot of on-chain stablecoin activity back toward high-throughput settlement rails.
This also reflects a more deliberate strategy from Circle itself. The company has been under scrutiny in recent months; its stock fell between 18% and 22% in a single session in late March following pressure from the CLARITY Act targeting stablecoin yields. Aggressively deploying liquidity onto high-activity chains is one mechanism for demonstrating transaction volume growth that justifies its valuation independent of the yield question.
Europe’s Euro Stablecoin Deficit
While dollar-denominated stablecoin infrastructure consolidates its lead, a consortium of 12 European banks is working to construct a competing euro-denominated alternative. The group, operating under the Qivalis banner, has sounded an explicit alarm about what its chief executive has called digital dollarization: the risk that the euro becomes a second-class currency in on-chain financial infrastructure because no credible, regulated euro stablecoin exists at scale.
The concern is structurally grounded. Dollar stablecoins currently account for the overwhelming majority of stablecoin transaction volume globally. As more cross-border trade, remittances and treasury management migrate to stablecoin rails, the absence of a euro-denominated alternative means European corporates and banks will settle in dollars by default, reinforcing dollar hegemony through the mechanism of technological convenience rather than deliberate policy choice. CoinDesk’s interview with the Qivalis CEO sets out the strategic logic in detail: Europe is not competing on ideology but on the structural question of who controls the monetary infrastructure of digital commerce.
The Qivalis consortium faces two compounding challenges. First, the regulatory environment for euro stablecoins under MiCA is more prescriptive and capital-intensive than the framework that USDC operates under in the United States, creating an asymmetric compliance burden. Second, network effects in payment infrastructure are powerful and self-reinforcing; the longer dollar stablecoins remain the default, the more difficult it becomes for any alternative to displace them in practise, regardless of regulatory intent. A 12-bank consortium is a serious institutional commitment, but it is entering a market where USDC alone is being minted at $750 million per day on a single chain.
Who Captures the Economics
Jeff Handler, co-founder at OpenTrade, frames the structural question with precision in a Cointelegraph opinion piece: the technology problem is solved, the dollars are flowing, and the remaining variable is understanding who collects the economic rent. His answer is that issuers and exchanges are currently capturing the majority of the value created by stablecoin velocity, while the enterprises and consumers generating that velocity receive primarily the operational benefit of faster, cheaper settlement rather than a share of the financial return.
This distribution matters for assessing which business models are durably valuable. Stablecoin issuers earn yield on the treasury assets backing their outstanding supply; at current short-term interest rates, a $150 billion supply generates several billion dollars annually in essentially risk-free income. Exchanges earn trading fees and spread on every conversion. Infrastructure providers like OpenFX earn a basis-point margin on each transaction, which is thin per unit but potentially enormous at $45 billion in annualised volume and growing. The enterprises using these rails gain working capital efficiency and reduced FX cost but receive none of the yield that their transacted dollars generate while in motion.
The yield question has already become politically contentious, as the CLARITY Act’s targeting of stablecoin yield-sharing arrangements demonstrated. The regulatory debate about whether stablecoin issuers must pass yield to holders, or whether holding stablecoins should be treated as a deposit-like activity subject to banking regulation, will directly determine how the economics of this infrastructure are ultimately allocated. That debate is unresolved, but its resolution will define the valuation ceiling for every company in this sector.
Directional Assessment: Dollar Rails Win the Near Term, Structural Questions Accumulate
The evidence from March 31 points in a clear direction for the next two to three years. Dollar-denominated stablecoin infrastructure is capturing institutional capital, transaction volume and developer attention at a pace that euro or other currency alternatives cannot currently match. OpenFX’s 11-fold volume expansion, Circle’s $750 million single-day Solana mint and Standard Chartered’s $2 trillion forecast are not independent data points; they are reinforcing signals of an institutional migration toward stablecoin settlement rails that has moved from pilot to production.
The entities that benefit most clearly in this environment are stablecoin issuers with regulatory clarity and large outstanding supply, infrastructure providers with volume-based fee models and the capital to expand into high-growth corridors, and the networks, particularly Solana, that can handle the throughput at low cost. The entities under the most structural pressure are correspondent banks whose revenue model depends on the inefficiencies that stablecoin rails eliminate, and European financial institutions that lack a competitive euro-denominated alternative to offer their clients.
The Qivalis consortium’s effort deserves sober respect rather than dismissal, but the window for a euro stablecoin to achieve meaningful market share before dollar network effects become self-sustaining is measurably narrower today than it was 12 months ago. Standard Chartered’s velocity analysis implies that the dollar stablecoin market will process an increasingly disproportionate share of global settlement volume even before the supply base reaches $2 trillion. The structural questions around yield capture, regulatory treatment and monetary sovereignty will take longer to resolve than the market is taking to grow, which means the institutions building dollar-denominated infrastructure today are accumulating a position that will be very difficult for later entrants to displace on purely competitive grounds.
