A crypto market analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence thinks it’s already “pretty clear” that Ethereum (ETH) will win the “upcoming stablecoin wars.”
Jamie Coutts says on the social media platform X that Ethereum and its broader ecosystem, including layer-2 projects like Optimism (OP), Base and Arbitrum (ARB), leads all other alternative networks across most network-adoption metrics.
Coutts does note, however, that transferring the top stablecoin by market cap, Tether (USDT), is “magnitudes more” expensive on Ethereum than on other networks, particularly layer-2s.
“ETH’s rollup-centric scaling roadmap will make L2 transactions even cheaper (10-100X) next year with EIP-4844 (proto-danksharding).”
The Bloomberg analyst also acknowledges the possibility that payments giant PayPal could launch its own layer-2 network in the future. PayPal rolled out a new stablecoin, PYUSD, earlier this month.
Coutts says that stablecoin “adoption under the hood” is exploding and notes that the number of stablecoin users could even overtake Bitcoin (BTC) users in the next three to five years due to merchant company integration, product innovation and scaling.
“A better metric for adoption than looking at cyclical volumes is addresses with > $1 stablecoin balance. This metric has just hit [an all-time high of approximately] 17.4 million. Since 2021, these addresses have gone up by 7X, outstripping Bitcoin and Ethereum growth.”
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