According to data from app.rwa.xyz, there are 186.97 million stablecoin holders. This figure is probably higher when we consider that the data does not include several DeFi/algorithmic stablecoins like HBD.
That said, it still has significant value, tracked and reported and it gives us an idea of how many accounts or users are out there with liquidity to move around.
Certainly, crypto users are much larger than this, but considering that if the value isn't currently packed in stablecoins, it's safe to assume that those are invested value and not readily usable.
Why does it matter that we consider this?
The focus primarily is on capital that can be readily used since we are dealing with commerce and the best way to define such value right now, is to look at stablecoin users, since every other asset holder expects gains on their holdings from price growth.
So when we look at the stablecoin market having almost 200 million users collectively holding over $260 billion in capital, we can see a significant opportunity for commerce and this is what Consensys believes Ethereum will dominate, as the base layer.
Ethereum as “Trustware” – Consensys
Founded by Ethereum co-creator Joseph Lubin, Consensys has been instrumental in shaping the network’s infrastructure. In its latest report (Ethereum is Trustware), the Foundation outlines an ambitious roadmap for Ethereum’s future.
We spoke with chief economist Mallesh Pai, one of the report’s authors, about Ethereum's long-term trajectory:
“Over the next 5–10 years, Ethereum will go from the world’s leading smart contract platform to the base layer of the future global economy… Growth will be driven by the digitization of assets, starting with stablecoins and moving up the risk stack from there.”
As assets migrate onchain, Pai said, commerce will follow. But he emphasized that this advantage depends on both current contributors and a new generation of institutional and commercial builders. – Cointelegraph report
Considering where things are at, currently with Ethereum, I would say that it isn't a delusional prediction to make that the Ethereum blockchain will be the dominant settlement layer for the future of commerce.
Certainly, the question of fees may come up, but there are several L2s for Ethereum that can abstract away the cost of handling significant transaction volumes for global commerce. Base, developed by Coinbase, is already a customer-friendly L2 for Ethereum with current deployed products.
There's clearly the infrastructure for it and right now, there's not much competition other than Solana.
Notwithstanding, it isn't really important today who stands to dominate commerce on-chain, what's important is that traditional assets and capital are moving on-chain.
And as predicted by Pai, commerce will follow. Much of global value flow will go through blockchain networks, there's just so much incentives for that to become the reality within a couple decades.
We can see Ethereum becoming the foundational layer for institutional finance, eToro is reported to be in the process of tokenizing 100 most popular US stocks on Ethereum, the network already has 55.08% market share of current $25.15B tokenized real world assets (RWA), with this migration comes an incentive to fully move the business industry on-chain, bringing the world to an age where economic activities are recorded on decentralized and distributed systems.