Blockdaemon advisor on the state of stablecoins

Amor Sexton, a former COO and strategic advisor at Blockdaemon, shared her insights on the current state of stablecoins. Over the past decade, stablecoins have grown significantly, facilitating around $33 trillion in annual transactions by volume in 2025. While a large portion of this volume is due to trading and internal flows, the market has supported approximately $400 billion in organic payment activity in 2023, up from less than $30 billion in 2020.

Sexton highlighted that regulation is just one part of the equation for stablecoin adoption. Other components include compliance processes, treasury management functions, and agentic workflows, all of which need to operate at scale for widespread adoption.

Sexton emphasized that stablecoins are useful for faster, cheaper international transfers, enabling decentralized finance, digital commerce, and lower fees for international settlements. She noted that while tokenised deposits issued by banks are already facilitating trillions of dollars in annual transfers, stablecoins have a smaller but growing presence, particularly in parts of Asia like Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

The US Treasury Department recently proposed rules for issuing stablecoins, with the new legislation taking effect in 2027. Companies like Wells Fargo and BlackRock have also entered the market with tokenised deposits and money market products.

Sexton expressed her belief that the pace of development in the stablecoin sector is faster than many industry insiders perceive, likely due to her background in institutional banking. She attributed this rapid development to the convergence of AI and technological advancements in the sector. Sexton expects to see rapid progress in the next six to 12 months, driven by AI and automated workflows in financial transactions.

Despite some fragmentation in regulatory approaches, Sexton believes that the lack of a unified solution around issues like yields is not a significant barrier to adoption.