Stablecoin: 300M users, apps like Rizon bring dollar services to 122 countries

Retail cryptocurrency trading has cooled off, but the dollar-pegged tokens underlying it are having their best year yet.

"In the last 12 months, there have been over 300 million unique stablecoin users, an extraordinarily high number," said Patrick Kim of the analytics firm Artemis.

"If I had told someone this five years ago, they would have looked you straight in the eye and said you were bluffing."

This figure is Artemis's count of unique on-chain addresses that transact in stablecoins, not a verified number of people, and the address count may overestimate actual users because one person often controls multiple wallets.

Even discounting this aspect, the direction is clear: the companies moving the tokens are increasingly payment firms and consumer apps rather than cryptocurrency exchanges.

Growth is running counter to the trading market. Sami Start, who co-founded the fiat-to-stablecoin conversion service Transak, described the divide on the podcast On The Margin: "The total addressable market is much larger on the stablecoin side than on the crypto side now. There is a sort of crypto winter happening in terms of retail buying and selling of crypto, but the adoption of stablecoins is independent of this, and institutions are adopting stablecoins for real-world use cases."

Raj Kamal, who leads the Dubai-based cross-border company TransFi, said the base is still small compared to the opportunity: "Stablecoins are just starting. We are only scratching the surface of what is possible, because compared to traditional payments, stablecoins do very little volume."

Regulation is what has shifted the technology from the margins. "The Genius Act signed by Trump creates the rules on how stablecoins must be managed," said Ignas Survila, founder of the dollar banking app Rizon, adding that the European MiCA offers "fairly clear and straightforward regulation" for the software built on top.

Capital has followed the rules: Stripe paid about $1.1 billion for the stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge, Mastercard has moved to acquire the payment company BVNK, and Visa is building settlement on the same rails that operators like Circle and Tether use.

The recurring theme is that stablecoins correct a payment system that has never become faster.

"It’s still slow. SWIFT internationally can take seconds or days," said Brian Mehler, CEO of the stablecoin chain Stable, backed by Bitfinex.

"We look at AI adoption and how fast your 5G needs to be, but then for some strange reason we accept that payments are extremely slow and extremely costly."

Kim predicts that the entry point will be plastic: "Cards will likely be the number one use case for retail payments with stablecoins by the end of the year."

It is there that a wave of apps seeks to turn the technology into something ordinary users can touch, and most completely hide the crypto component.

"Our goal is to hide stablecoins," said Survila, whose app allows users to load money, get account details and a card, and send funds for free to another user.

Rizon avoids holding licenses itself: "We operate as a front-end technology provider, working with licensed entities that sponsor their licenses to us," with the U.S. company Rain issuing the cards.

It claims 122 countries in 65 weeks, compared to about 47 for Revolut, along with 280,000 users and $120 million in annual payment volume, self-reported unverified figures. The demand it describes is concrete.

"I earn amounts similar to an engineer in Europe, but I am in Pakistan," said Matas Olendra, who leads marketing at Rizon.

"My payments are getting rejected. I want Spotify, I want to watch Netflix, I want to order things from Amazon, but I keep getting blocked."

Not everyone thinks these apps are as new as they seem. Neo, who led Alipay's international QR payment expansion before launching the on-chain neobank UR and operates under a single professional name, argues that most apps favoring stablecoins are just a veneer over the same system: "Everyone is taking the easy route.

Easy USDC stablecoins, issue a card, suddenly you’re a neobank, and you can spend, and it’s very cool. But structurally, at the base, nothing really changes."

This is the open question for the entire consumer level, including Rizon: whether encapsulating a stablecoin in a card amounts to a truly better bank or just a cheaper way to distribute the same dollars.

Whether these apps will become licensed banks or remain thin front-ends, and whether regulators in the Global South will continue to tolerate dollar apps they do not control, will determine how far the number of 300 million will rise.

Issuers bet it moves in one direction. "Once you see there is an option, it’s very hard to put the genie back in the bottle," Mehler said. "It’s practically out. They know there is a better solution, and I think it will stay that way.",

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