Cathie Wood's Bitcoin Thesis Acknowledges Stablecoins Captured the Payment Use Case

Cathie Wood built ARK Invest's Bitcoin thesis around the premise that Bitcoin would become a global monetary layer—programmable, borderless, inflation-resistant, and ultimately dominant in payments. The most recent iteration of that argument concedes that stablecoins arrived there first on the payments front. In an interview with The Rollup, the ARK CEO stated that stablecoins have taken over a segment of the role ARK once expected Bitcoin to fill for emerging-market payments. At the same time, ETF-era institutions appear to be averaging down during drawdowns, which reduces the boom-bust severity that characterised prior cycles. I think it is worth noting the actual data here. Stablecoin payments currently run at roughly $390 billion annualised, according to McKinsey and Artemis estimates—approximately 0.02% of global payments volume. Stablecoins have absorbed much of the transactional lane in crypto markets where Bitcoin once competed for that role. DefiLlama data indicates the stablecoin market capitalisation exceeds $320.6 billion as of 27 April, up over 56% since early 2025, with USDT commanding 59.16% of the market. TRM Labs' first-quarter adoption report found that Venezuela's retail crypto activity runs primarily on stablecoins. USDT accounts for 90.2% of active Binance P2P Venezuelan bolivar listings, compared to Bitcoin at 1.9%. In Brazil, roughly 66% of crypto transaction volume was conducted via USDT, with Bitcoin at 11%, and officials noted that stablecoins are effectively the preferred medium for everyday transactions. The data suggests stablecoins have decisively captured the payments narrative in practice, even as Bitcoin remains the dominant store-of-value asset. A practical question for Coincex users: does this shift change how you evaluate Bitcoin's role in your own portfolio, or do you treat payments and store-of-value as entirely separate use cases?