The forecasts keep going up.

Since the passage of the GENIUS Act in the United States, we have seen an increase in the forecasts regarding stablecoins. The estimates keep increasing.

What started as a couple trillion, a number I long espoused, we quickly moved to $3 trillion. This was even stated by the US Treasury secretary.

Now we are seeing some estimates that feel it will be larger than that. The fact that some are calling 2025 the "ChatGPT moment" for blockchain is telling. Not only are we at the forefront of the stablecoin market, but real world asset (RWA) tokenization is just getting started.

In short, we are probably looking at a completely new financial system being constructed. The very premise of payments appears that it will be shifting to stablecoins.

Source

Citi: Stablecoin Market Up To $4 Trillion

Citi is one of the largest banking conglomerates in the world. It has both investment and commercial banking operations.

It recently raised its bull case on stablecoins to $4 trillion. This is more than a 10% increase from earlier in the year.

Much of this is driven by what is taking place around the world. While most payment systems within countries work well, cross-border payments are another issue. FinTech is still lagging, opening up the opportunity for a new entrant.

Stablecoins are likely to fill that role.

What gets interesting is the economic productivity that Citi believes will be tied to the stablecoin explosion.

At 50x velocity (see page 22), similar to fiat payment velocity over time, stablecoins could support nearly $100 trillion in transaction activity by 2030 (base case). The same velocity for our bull case (market size $4.0 trillion) would imply $200 trillion.

Read that again. If $4 trillion in stablecoin market cap is achieved, the bank estimates that it will impact $200 trillion in transaction activity. If we look at transactions feeding into economic activity, what kind of growth are we looking at overall?

This is important if we consider the fact that 2030 is a little more than 4 years away.

Of course, it is still a small portion of the overall money flow of banks which is over a trillion dollars per day.

AI Currency

One area that I question whether Citi is considering is when it comes to AI, specifically agents.

This is going to revolutionize economic activity in ways that most are still missing. Since I didn't delve into the background of the analysts responsible for the research, I can only presume they are financially focused. The majority are not aware that money, today, is technology.

Thus, all the rules of information technology apply.

Here is where things can get crazy. I utilize the word "abundance". There are others that are applicable. The key, to me, is the exponential curves that AI will take things.

When we look at an agentic age, which certainly will exist in some form by 2030, it is hard to grasp exactly how large that could be. We could see tens of trillions in economic output conducted by agents. It could make up 10%-20% of the global economy.

Another important component, in this discussion, is the fact that stablecoins are the currency of AI. There is no way they will operate on the existing bank infrastructure. While that is being reimagined, blockchain and other newer networks will likely pick up a lot of the activity.

This can radically expand once we add in the fact that DeFi applications are growing in number and utility.

All of this feeds the same outcome: the agentic age will, at some point, dwarf the present economy as we know it. This will generate numbers that seem outrageous to us right now.

Maybe we will see Citi raise its estimate to $5 trillion by the middle of next year.