How Stablecoin Settlement Rails Are Becoming Capital Markets Infrastructure

Stablecoin transactions reached $33 trillion in 2025, exceeding the combined annual throughput of Visa ($15.7 trillion) and Mastercard ($9.8 trillion), according to data compiled by Artemis and reported by Bloomberg. That figure is no longer a payments story. It is a settlement story. Regulated stablecoins and tokenized cash are quietly becoming the cash leg of securities transactions, and the implications for clearing, custody, and market structure are larger than the headline number suggests.

The Settlement Problem Stablecoins Actually Solve

Every securities trade has two legs: the asset and the cash. In conventional markets these legs settle through separate systems, on separate timelines, through a chain of intermediaries. U.S. equities still settle on a T+1 basis. Cross-border transactions can take days, with cash moving through correspondent banking networks that close on weekends and holidays. The gap between trade execution and final settlement is where counterparty risk, capital lock-up, and operational cost accumulate.

Tokenizing the asset solves only half of this. A tokenized bond or a tokenized real-estate interest can move atomically on a ledger, but if the cash leg still settles through a Tuesday-to-Thursday wire, the trade is not actually final until the slowest component clears. The bottleneck moves from the asset to the money.

This is the specific problem regulated stablecoins address. A dollar-denominated stablecoin or tokenized deposit that lives on the same ledger as the asset lets both legs settle in one atomic transaction—delivery versus payment, on-chain, in seconds, with no holiday calendar. The asset and the cash either both move or neither does. That property, not speculation or yield, is why settlement volume is climbing.

From Payments Curiosity to Financial Infrastructure

The volume data shows a clear shift from retail and trading use toward institutional settlement. Stablecoin transfer volume reached $28 trillion in Q1 2026, and B2B stablecoin payments grew from under $100 million monthly in early 2023 to over $6 billion by mid-2025. Card networks have begun settling their own obligations in stablecoins—Visa's stablecoin settlement reached a $4.5 billion annualized run rate as of January 2026.

When a payment network chooses to settle its internal flows in stablecoins, the asset has stopped being a trading instrument and become plumbing. Industry analysts now project annual stablecoin settlement volume could exceed $50 trillion by the end of 2026, with total circulation crossing $1 trillion in the same window—up from roughly $323 billion in mid-2026, per Bloomberg reporting on the 2025 figures.

The relevance to capital markets is direct. A digital capital markets platform issuing tokenized securities needs a settlement asset that is programmable, instant, and regulated. Stablecoins backed one-to-one by cash and short-dated Treasuries fit that requirement in a way that legacy rails cannot. The cash leg becomes a ledger entry that settles in the same block as the security. You can see how that atomic flow fits into an end-to-end issuance and trading process in our how it works overview.

Why Regulation Made This Usable

Institutional settlement requires legal certainty, not just technical speed. The regulatory question—what backs the token, who is liable, and whether it counts as final money—determined whether stablecoins could move from crypto exchanges into regulated capital markets. That question now has a federal answer in the United States.

The GENIUS Act of 2025 established a federal framework for payment stablecoins. Per the Congressional Research Service, the law requires issuers to hold at least one dollar of permitted reserves for every dollar issued, limited to cash, insured bank deposits, short-dated Treasury bills, and similar government-backed instruments. Issuers must disclose redemption procedures and publish periodic reserve reports examined by registered public accounting firms.

Two provisions matter most for settlement. First, the Act clarifies that a compliant payment stablecoin is not a security—removing the classification ambiguity that kept regulated institutions on the sidelines. Second, the Federal Reserve is considering limited access to central bank payment rails for federally regulated issuers holding bank charters, which would let a stablecoin settle in central bank money rather than only commercial-bank money. That distinction is the difference between a useful instrument and genuine settlement-grade infrastructure.

For a compliance-first platform, the framework matters because tokenized assets and the cash that settles them now sit under defined, examinable rules. Reserve transparency, redemption rights, and reporting obligations are the same disciplines institutional allocators already expect from any cash-equivalent holding.

What This Changes for Tokenized Securities

Combine a tokenized security with a regulated stablecoin on the same ledger and several long-standing inefficiencies collapse at once.

Settlement finality moves from days to seconds. Atomic delivery-versus-payment eliminates the window in which one party has delivered and the other has not, which removes a category of counterparty risk that clearinghouses exist to absorb. Capital that was previously trapped during settlement cycles is freed for redeployment. Operational reconciliation between separate asset and cash systems disappears because both legs are recorded in a single transaction.

For markets in real-world assets—real estate, private credit, infrastructure—these properties expand who can participate. An investor in one jurisdiction can settle a position with a counterparty in another without waiting on correspondent banking hours, and a secondary trade can clear without a multi-day hold. Programmable settlement also allows conditions to be enforced in code: distributions, redemptions, and transfer restrictions can execute automatically against the same cash rail. Our marketplace is built around this model, where the asset and its settlement currency operate on common infrastructure rather than bolted-together systems.

The strategic point is that tokenizing assets without a corresponding cash rail leaves the harder half of the problem unsolved. Settlement is where cost and risk concentrate, and it is the layer stablecoins are now rebuilding. For deeper analysis of how these rails connect to digital capital markets infrastructure, see our ongoing coverage in the Commertize news section.

The Infrastructure View

The lesson in the $33 trillion figure is not that stablecoins are popular. It is that a settlement layer is being rebuilt in public, at institutional scale, under a federal regulatory framework, and the capital markets that adopt it earliest will operate with structurally lower settlement risk and faster capital velocity than those that do not.

For platforms tokenizing real-world assets, the cash leg is no longer an afterthought. Regulated stablecoins and tokenized deposits are becoming the default settlement currency for on-chain securities, and treating them as core infrastructure—rather than a payments feature—is what separates a tokenization experiment from a functioning digital capital market.

Sources: Bloomberg, U.S. Congress / CRS — GENIUS Act of 2025, Brookings Institution.

Have an asset you're evaluating for tokenization? Send the offering memo to deals@commertize.com or start at commertize.com/tokenize, and we will return a written tokenizability and capital-structure memo within 48 hours — free, no obligation.

Confidential review. No cost, no commitment, no calls unless it is a fit.