Stablecoin stocks are regular shares of regular companies, like Coinbase, PayPal or Visa, that now earn real money from blockchain-based dollars. Despite the word “stablecoins” in the name, it has little to do with crypto itself.
TradFi and crypto used to be rivaling camps. But TradFi decided to use the “Can’t defeat them, join them” approach. And started quietly absorbing crypto's best features.
And that’s TradFi’s Trojan horse.
“Who wins, banks or crypto?” - this question is no longer on the agenda. The most relevant one: why buy the stock and not the token?
Key Takeaways
Wall Street is actively adopting crypto.
Stablecoin stocks are just regular shares in companies making money from crypto.
They let you profit from the crypto market without actually buying any coins.
Investors choose stablecoin stocks because they are safer and follow standard stock market rules.
The main risks are strict new government laws and stablecoins losing their real dollar backing.
What Exactly Are “Stablecoin Stocks”?
Definition:Stablecoin stocks are shares of public companies that make money from those very stablecoins like USDT or USDC. Some issue the tokens, some distribute them, some run payments through them.
Basically, there are 2 categories:
Crypto natives: companies like Circle, which issues USDC, and Coinbase, which distributes it.
Payments company with its own token, PYUSD, issued by Paxos
Payment fees, with PYUSD as a small add-on
Small part
Visa (NYSE: V)
Payment network
Payment fees, with some payments settled in stablecoins
Small part
Data as of Q2 2026 company reports.
How stablecoin stocks work
Stablecoin stocks work like any other shares. The price follows the company’s profit, and a stablecoin stock only differs in where that profit comes from.
Take Circle. You send it $1, it creates 1 USDC and parks your dollar in cash and short-term US Treasuries. The interest stays with Circle, you get none of it.
That interest is about 95% of Circle’s revenue. Remove the blockchain from the equation and you get a deposit-taker that pays nothing on deposits.
Circle shares the income with platforms that bring in customers for it. Like Coinbase.
If USDC is held on Coinbase, Coinbase keeps all the interest on it.
If USDC is held somewhere else, Coinbase gets half the interest under this arrangement.
Visa earns on moving money. PayPal’s PYUSD holds under 1.5% of the market, and stablecoins remain a tiny percentage of its business.
Key takeaway:Stablecoin stocks is not a bet on stablecoins - the “stable” part is there for a reason, they are pegged to fiat anyway. But rather a bet on the companies running the stablecoin business.
Where to buy stablecoin stocks
In the same brokerage account that holds your Apple shares. Circle trades on the NYSE as CRCL, Coinbase on Nasdaq as COIN, PayPal on Nasdaq as PYPL and Visa on the NYSE as V. You pay in dollars.
The Trojan Horse: Upgrading the Financial Rails
TradFi is adopting crypto tech because there's a demand for speed, low costs and 24/7 operations. And they can't ignore that.
Faraj Abutalibov, Senior Advisor at Middle East Stellar, described that trend in a TOKEN2049 interview with Ramia Farrage for NOW Effect:
“For us, adoption means that the majority of traditional finance infrastructure moves to blockchain. It becomes 24/7. In the past, even during this conference, a lot of people were believing and talking from the stage that blockchain will replace the financial system. Now the majority of people agree that it just gets embedded in the traditional finance system and makes it cheaper, more efficient, 24/7, instant settlement, auditability, etc.”
The card networks show what “embedded” looks like.
Wirex, a Visa principal member, settles card payments with Visa in USDC and EURC on the Stellar blockchain, without bank intermediaries. Mastercard integrated its Crypto Credential solution with the Stellar network in 2024.
The point: TradFi is in. It’s actively building and buying into stablecoins.
Investor's Perspective: Why Buy the Stock and Not the Token?
Everyone wants the best of the two worlds: explosive growth of the crypto market and the reliability of the traditional finance systems.
That is the entire premise of the trade.
The Problem with Crypto
Crypto is a brilliant infrastructure with a front door that is either hard to find or it’s stuck.
Retail and institutional investors both hit the same wall like all the seed phrases, wallet hacks, phishing links, regulatory gray areas, you name them. Of course, banks have their own versions of the last three. But the seed phrase is crypto’s own, and it comes with wallet addresses, networks and gas fees and a whole bunch of other side quests that crypto throws at a user before he even got to make their first transaction.
Here's a story for you to illustrate the point. Our blog has a guide on how to swap tokens in Phantom Wallet, a question that people Google a lot.
When my colleague was writing this piece, she tried to perform a swap in Phantom herself and saw why people were puzzled. The swap function hides inside the interface, and finding it took a while.
In TradFi, if you forget a password, you click a button or call your bank, hang on the line with nice music for 15 minutes and get help. It’s manageable.
Custodial platforms work the same way: they hold your keys for you, so you can reset your password with a couple of clicks. This convenience requires a certain level of trust though, since your coins depend on the platform that is holding them.
With self-custody services, nobody is responsible for your keys but you. Lose a piece of paper with 12 words on it, and no hotline will help you recover the access to your funds.
Crypto purists call this financial sovereignty. Wall Street tends to call it an unacceptable risk.
Stocks fix the architecture problem and shield the user from all that blockchain mumbo jumbo.
You buy a share through a standard broker. You get SEC oversight, SIPC insurance, and no pain in the neck. Well, almost none.
When a traditional company integrates stablecoins, they absorb all the technical road bumps. They build the compliance APIs, manage smart contract risks. And you just buy the ticker.
Actually, it’s the oldest strategy in the investing playbook: don’t buy the gold, buy the company selling the shovels. Especially when the gold is digital and surprisingly easy to lose.
Hidden Risks of Stablecoin Stocks
Circle and Coinbase stocks are the ones exposed to most risk here. Because stablecoins are most of Circle’s income and a big part of Coinbase’s. For Visa and PayPal they are a small part of the revenue, so the risks below barely touch them.
Congress may ban stablecoin rewards
And that would hurt Coinbase and Circle. The US stablecoin law says issuers like Circle can’t pay interest to holders directly. But platforms like Coinbase can still hand out rewards.
On October 21, the OCC published its final rules and basically said it would look at each rewards program case by case instead of assuming they’re bad. Banks are still pushing to close that door, because rewards could pull deposits away from them. If the banks win, fewer people will keep USDC on Coinbase. Less USDC means less interest income for Circle, and a smaller cut for Coinbase.
A de-peg can hit Circle and Coinbase
Every stablecoin promises a real dollar behind every token. When that promise looks shaky, people usually run to a rival.
When the EU pushed USDT off regulated exchanges, USDC picked up the slack. In 2023 it went the other way. Part of USDC’s reserves got stuck at Silicon Valley Bank when it failed, USDC dropped to 87 cents, holders swapped it for USDT, and Coinbase paused USDC-to-dollar conversions over the weekend. USDC recovered within days after US authorities protected the bank’s depositors.
Tether is the bigger unknown. It holds most of the stablecoin market, it’s private, and its first full audit by a Big Four firm only started this year . Part of its reserves sits in gold and bitcoin, which move with the market.
If trouble at Tether pushes people from USDT to USDC, Circle wins. If it makes people doubt stablecoins in general, Circle and Coinbase both lose.
Falling interest rates cut the income
Circle earns interest on the dollars behind USDC. When the Fed cuts rates, the same amount of USDC brings in less money. Coinbase’s cut of that interest shrinks with it.
Conclusion
TradFi gets a faster backend, crypto gets adoption, and the two camps stop pretending to be enemies.
Stablecoin stocks let everyday investors take a cut of that deal, provided regulators, interest rates and Tether behave.
A Trojan horse works because nobody checks what’s inside. Faraj Abutalibov from Stellar expects people to meet blockchain the same way:
“I would say within the next three to five years, you would use, maybe unknowingly, but still blockchain in your everyday life.”
Share this article
Stablecoin Stocks: How TradFi is Secretly Buying into Crypto | ChangeNOW Blog
