Bitwise CIO: DoorDash, Meta pilots could push stablecoins to $4T

Matt Hougan, chief investment officer at Bitwise, wrote in a client note Tuesday that stablecoin payout pilots by DoorDash and Meta could help dollar-pegged stablecoin supply reach $4 trillion by 2030, up from about $302 billion today.

DoorDash is testing stablecoin-based payouts with Stripe for roughly 10 million Dashers across more than 40 countries. Meta is running creator payout pilots in the Philippines and Colombia that use the Solana and Polygon blockchains. Hougan said the global creator economy includes about 200 million contributors.

Hougan described the pilots as small in dollar terms but said they increased his confidence that stablecoins can scale to trillions. He wrote that the main appeal for companies running global payout programs is operational simplicity rather than cost savings. Stablecoins can settle payments for a few cents compared with tens of dollars for traditional bank wires, he added.

He identified a set of operational benefits: a single wallet address per recipient, no need for local banking rails and no currency conversions for firms processing large numbers of micropayments. Hougan labeled that use case the “stablecoin killer app” and called the pilots “not a big deal” in current dollar terms. He wrote, “I suspect all global tech companies with distributed gig workers will follow DoorDash and Meta on this path.”

Market data show dollar-pegged stablecoin supply is about $302 billion. Tether's USDT represents roughly $189.5 billion of that total and Circle's USDC about $79 billion. Payments and settlement firms are expanding blockchain offerings: Western Union launched a USD-pegged token on Solana for round-the-clock settlement across a network covering more than 200 countries, and Visa reported a stablecoin settlement pilot reached a $7 billion annualized run rate after expanding to nine blockchains and more than 130 card programs in over 50 countries.

Hougan wrote he expects other large technology companies with distributed gig or creator workforces to adopt similar wallet-based payout methods, which he said would bring large numbers of users into crypto wallets and payments. Stablecoins are digital tokens pegged to a fiat currency, most commonly the U.S. dollar, and are used to move value on public blockchains.