Science popularization: Re understanding stablecoins through the three elements of currency Is USDT "money"? This question may seem foolish, but in fact, many people have not thought about it carefully. When it comes to stablecoins, many people's first reaction is still "for speculation", seeing it as the US dollar in the cryptocurrency world, used to buy and sell coins or temporarily avoid a sharp drop. But Binance's stablecoin research report completely overturned my understanding. Let's dive in! ⬇️ Stablecoins: Transforming The Financial Landscape is a newly released stablecoin research report by @ BinanceResearch, which is still hot. I guess many people just downloaded it and didn't read it carefully. I spent a morning studying it carefully, trying to start from the three uses of currency, observe Binance, and summarize the market pattern of stablecoins. To determine whether something is considered "good money", economics has the oldest test - to see if it can meet the three major uses of currency: storage, payment, and valuation. Stored value: much more fragrant than banks, globally applicable If your bank deposit has an annual interest rate of only 0.38% and inflation is 3%, you are actually losing money, right? If there is an account in which you can get 2% to 4% of the income every year by depositing US dollars, there is no threshold for deposit and withdrawal, and you can deposit at least US $0.01, and you can use it in Argentina, Türkiye, and Nigeria, will you be moved? This is not science fiction. This is the on chain savings on today's stable currency. Users can earn profits by depositing stable currency through products such as Coin Safe, which is derived from real returns such as token based US treasury bond bonds and hedging strategies. Since 2022, Binance has distributed a total of $1.2 billion in rewards to stablecoin depositors. What is more indicative is the premium. In countries with severe inflation, people are willing to pay much higher prices than the official exchange rate when buying stablecoins. The average premium in areas with malignant inflation is 62%, while in areas with high inflation, the premium is 27%. Ordinary people won't pay an extra 60% for convenience, they are fleeing for their own savings. Binance's layout plays a key role here: it provides the smoothest entrance from fiat to stablecoins, while using Binance to earn coins as a savings layer, upgrading stablecoins from a simple digital dollar to an interest bearing digital dollar. At present, 33% of stablecoins on the platform are deposited into coin earning products, covering 14 million users, while the deposit share in the Middle East and North Africa region has increased by 67% since 2025, indicating that this is not only a game for old crypto players, but also a realistic choice for ordinary people in emerging markets to fight inflation. Payment: Cheaper than Visa, faster than banks, non-stop on weekends Let's talk about payment. If you use a credit card, the merchant will have to pay a 2% -3% handling fee; If you transfer money from the United States to Mexico, the intermediary bank will charge several tens of dollars and you have to wait for two or three days. What about stablecoins? A transfer can arrive in just a few minutes or seconds, with transaction fees of a few cents or even lower. BNB Chain processes 10 million stablecoin transactions per day and has 15 million monthly active addresses, which is the highest among all public chains. In 2026, Binance Pay's monthly transaction volume increased by 114% year-on-year, and the median payment amount also rose from $10 to $18. The increase in numbers indicates that people are no longer just using it to buy small things, but are starting to use it for legitimate business transactions. The most interesting thing is the weekend effect. Traditional stock and bond markets closed on weekends, and the foreign exchange market was also thin, but stablecoins still flowed $76 billion every weekend, equivalent to Visa's global trading volume in a day. What does this mean? This means there are a large number of real financial activities such as hedging, hedging, and cross-border transfers, and smart people choose to use stablecoins to complete them while others are resting. Binance Pay, the payment network of Binance, has been connected to 21 million registered merchants worldwide, with stablecoins accounting for 98% of transaction volume. This is no longer called encrypted payment, it is the payment itself, just running on a cheaper and faster track. Pricing: From cryptocurrency trading quotes to global asset settlement layers The third function is the most difficult to perceive, but the most profound. Previously, when it came to stablecoin pricing, it basically referred to the quotes in cryptocurrency transactions. But now, traditional stocks are settled on the chain through tokenized perpetual contracts, with a cumulative trading volume of over $1.1 trillion in the first five months of 2026, and Binance accounting for 47%. That is to say, some people use stablecoins to trade US stock indexes on weekends, and settlement is completed instantly without waiting for T+2. Non US dollar stablecoins are also growing. Local currency stablecoins such as Euro stablecoin EURI and Pound Sterling stablecoin AEUR have accumulated over $5 billion in trading volume on Binance since 2025, with an average monthly transaction volume of $316 million. This indicates that the currency basket on the chain is diversifying and no longer exclusive to the US dollar. More cutting-edge is machine payment, with small settlements between AI agents, with a median amount of only 0.34 US dollars. This kind of amount cannot be transferred by credit card or bank transfer at all, and the handling fee is higher than the transaction amount. But stablecoins can, as their settlement costs tend towards zero. Binance's position in this settlement revolution is quite unique: it holds $53 billion in stablecoin reserves, $42 billion more than the world's second-largest exchange, and its market share has further expanded from 54% to 57%. I checked the global US dollar foreign exchange reserves and found that Binance is almost equivalent to the amount of a medium-sized sovereign country. More importantly, three of the four fastest-growing stablecoins have their main circulating volumes concentrated on Binance and BNB Chain. Have you participated in both $U and USD1? Anyway, I have been steadily earning profits from stablecoins throughout the year. / Stablecoins are not meant to replace the US dollar or banks. Under the framework of global regulatory compliance, they are more like optimizing and filling gaps in the traditional financial system. Stablecoins take root and sprout in areas such as inflation, weekends, cross-border transactions, and small payments. Binance's role in this new system is no longer just an exchange. It is the world's largest stablecoin reserve pool, the largest on chain revenue distribution platform, one of the largest stablecoin payment networks, and also the fastest channel for new stablecoin projects from birth to scale. Few people are aware of this. I have a good friend who is working on the implementation of Binance Pay, and we have talked a lot about it. Binance has made a lot of layouts, and it is said that it can be smoothly implemented in some Southeast Asian countries. Let's find time to experience it. After so much ado, the simple summary is that stablecoins have grown into real currencies, even more powerful than the currencies we commonly understand. If you have only used a small part of the currency function, then starting today, you can broaden your thinking and re understand stablecoins. Appendix: Complete Report Original Text Download https://www. (binance.com)/zh-CN/research/analysis/stablecoins-transforming-the-financial-landscape Wish us good luck! / Author: Anymose | A Soft Core Science Popularization Writer This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute any investment advice. Always remember DYOR!