On Ep. 2 of Stablecoin Stats, Anthony Yim, Co-Founder @ Artemis and Andrew Van Aken, Data Scientist @ Artemis discuss OTC desk experience with Tether on Tron in Hong Kong, regional differences in stablecoin usage and more!
On Ep. 2 of Stablecoin Stats, Anthony Yim, Co-Founder @ Artemis and Andrew Van Aken, Data Scientist @ Artemis discuss OTC desk experience with Tether on Tron in Hong Kong, regional differences in stablecoin usage and more!
Timestamps:
This episode is brought to you by Visa
A world leader in digital payments, Visa is bridging the gap between traditional financial institutions and innovative blockchain networks, helping players in the payments ecosystem navigate the ever-evolving world of tokenized fiat currencies with confidence and ease. Learn more at visa.com/crypto.
This podcast is powered by Artemis
***
We’d also like to remind you that the views or opinions of our contributors today are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the companies they are representing. Nothing we say should be taken as tax, financial, investment or legal advice, do your own research!
Music by Henry McLean
Anthony Yim 00:00
Steve, welcome back to tokenize stablecoin stats edition. The show focused on stablecoins and the institutional adoption of tokenized real world assets. We are back again this month to dive into the stats behind the stablecoin market. My name is Anthony Yim, co founder of Artemis, a crypto analytics startup. Joining me today is my colleague and friend Andrew Van Aken, data scientist at Artemis. A quick disclaimer before we get into things, I need to remind you that the views or opinions of our contributors today are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the companies they are representing. Nothing we say should be taken as tax, financial investment or legal advice. Do your own research. And lastly, before we get into stats, I'm thrilled to remind you that this podcast is made possible by Visa and powered by Artemis. So Andrew, how are you doing this lovely morning?
Andrew Van Anken 01:01
It's a beautiful morning in New York City. I'm here for the Artemis off site, q2, q3, whatever year we're in, and I'm enjoying these overpriced coffees based on this windfall of around $27 that I got from you. I woke up one morning to see my tether on Tron wallet increase by set amount. And I thought, who was sending me this windfall of cash? And it turns out it was you, Anthony Yim, sending you from halfway across the globe. How did this come about, and how did you go about doing this? Yeah,
Anthony Yim 01:30
well, I was in Hong Kong visiting my parents last week, and I was just walking around in the downtown area of Hong Kong, and saw this OTC disc that is allowing people to transfer on tether, Buy Bitcoin or Ethereum. And I've been hearing so much about these OTCs, I just couldn't help myself but give it a shot. So I wanted to see what the experience was like. And so as you see in this photo that I took, it's literally just like a shop front. And so for those who don't, who are not familiar, like these OTC quote, unquote. Desks are essentially a way for consumers to interact with crypto without having to sign up for an account on binance or Coinbase or even have your own wallet. It's basically like this service that you can just fork over cold hard cash to this dude behind the desk and they will sell you Bitcoin or help you transfer stable coins. And the experience was very interesting. So how it works is that I go up to the storefront, I'm like, hey, I want to send some tether to my friend, and he basically points me to this QR code that is a whatsapp link, and I basically type in Andrew's Tron wallet address, and I'd be like, hey, I want to transfer X amount of dollars using tether to this address, and to this guy on the other side, we go through this whole like process of he confirms the wallet address like four times with me, once verbally, the second time, he sends me a reply of my whatsapp message with the same address, and he makes me read it out back to him, and the third time he prints it out on this little piece of paper, he hands it to me and tells me to, like, confirm it again, so three times. And then once I've confirmed everything, he then actually sends this transaction. And while I was waiting for the transaction to go through, I was just asking him, like, hey. Like, what is it like being an OTC like, how long have you guys been around? Like, how many storefronts Do you have? So they they've been around for a couple of years, two, three years, four different location, Hong Kong. I actually think I sent more than just $27 because the the minimum buy was 400 and so I actually had to go to an ATM to take off more cash so I can actually meet their minimum buy amount. And the fee was $50 Hong Kong, which is about $6.25 I think US dollars. And then largely after, there's sort of the crazy back and forth confirming the wallet address for three times. It was very smooth. I mean, it was just he did it, and then couple minutes later, he showed me the blockchain explorer confirmation of the transaction going through. And that was it, you know. And it's obviously no KYC. And so, you know, this is, like, if you were to money launder so this is kind of how you would do it, right? And so I'm not saying this, like, I do not condone money laundering, but it was very interesting to actually, like, go through with the process and see how it
Andrew Van Anken 04:14
works. And the only option they gave you was tether on Tron, is that? Right? That's
Anthony Yim 04:20
correct. And I asked him, Hey, do you support any other blockchains? And he kind of actually looked at me like, I'm crazy. I was like, No, it's strong. He's kind of annoyed me for asking that question, you know. And so I think there was no other option. And you can see from this screenshot, they obviously only support tether as well.
Andrew Van Anken 04:36
Well, that clearly got me thinking, how are we going to incorporate this into stablecoin stats, and we have a metric on Artemis actually that what we call P to P volume. This is essentially address to address volume. So it's people or entities that are not contracts or smart contracts. So this is trying to estimate what the. Actual volume of exchange to person and person to exchange person to person is and the data is overwhelmingly convincing that Tron is, by far and away, the largest blockchain used for P to P transfers. This is looking at monthly volume going back all the way to 2018 and you can see that the red line of Tron is clearly up and to the right, we actually just hit an all time high of transfer volume, a little less than $600 billion and last month dipped slightly. But by far and away, Tron is clearly the most utilized chain. And from your experience in Hong Kong, it clearly indicates that people are people are mostly using
Anthony Yim 05:36
Tron. Yeah. And I actually have another anecdote. I was traveling, and I met a tour guide too, who was a farmer in China. He grew up as a farmer, and so I was just curious. Asked him if he uses any crypto, and he does so he uses, actually, OKx. He showed me his okex account and asked him, Hey, do you use any stable coins? And he, to my surprise, said, Yes. And primarily what he uses stable coins for is to convert from the Chinese yuan to tether so he can buy bitcoin. And he proceeded then to show me Bitcoin for next five minutes and how it's digital gold, the scarce supply. There's a happening. It's gonna get more valuable. It's gonna hit a million dollars by 2040, or something. And, and he has to do all this through to VPN. It's, it's not strictly legal in China. And, and he has a Twitter account, and he follows all these Chinese influencers on Twitter. He got his wife also in buying Bitcoin. So, and it's, he's using tether on Tron to buy bitcoin as, I think, as a startup founder, we're taught to be very proximate to your customers. And it's not enough to just hear from third party sources. We have to go talk to people on the ground and do direct conversations with them and to understand, like how they're thinking. And I think it was just what this farmer said wasn't entirely surprising, but it's just very interesting to see it in real life. He doesn't know what USDC is. Never heard of it,
Andrew Van Anken 06:57
yeah. And I think the one thing that we hear from our customers all the time is, how do you grow stablecoin supply? And this is probably an area that we see as one of the most overlooked areas, because there is so many places with these boots on the ground strategy, where we really see these three ways of growing stablecoin supply. And the first one is clearly this, boots on the ground strategy, PDP, transfer, volume, low cost chains, et cetera. And we also see this in our most recent study that we did with Castle Allen and Dragon Fly ventures, where even large corporations are using Tron to facilitate payments. And so our study looked at B to B remittance, B to P, and almost 60% of stablecoin volume is driven on Tron, with another about 30% on Ethereum. And so we say a lot, every bank, every company, needs a stablecoin strategy. And really this getting stablecoins in the hands of people. How do you do that? Build these payment networks, build these OTC desks, build out liquidity. And it's really interesting to see that not only you can see it on on chain data, but we can also see it on off chain data, that yeah, Tron and Ethereum are the top two chains by stablecoin supply. Also happen to be the top two chains in stablecoin transfer volume. We also see this very interesting trend of regional differences of stablecoins. So what we're looking at here is essentially what time of day in eastern standard time do blockchains see the most stable coin activity? And so I believe you sent your transaction around 230 and I fortunately was sleeping then, and so did not see it. But the Tron blockchain, what's very interesting is that it peaks in usage around four in the morning, Eastern Standard Time, and then declines by almost 80% by 4pm so clearly, this very distinct regional use case of Tron is going on right now. But the subtle blockchain interesting enough that actually spikes around 9am Eastern Time, which would be, you know, afternoon time in the UK and Africa and European time zones, which is really one of the areas that sell out has focused on very prolifically, is driving stable coin adoption in these regional places. And then finally, Solana, actually, their stable coin transfer volume spikes at four o'clock. So you really need this multinational, global team that's trying to address all these different places and regional preferences to drive this stablecoin volume. Does this make sense
Anthony Yim 09:29
to Yeah, I mean, while you were talking, I looked up quickly what the hours of this OTC desk are. It's 11am to 8pm sort of Asia time, so Hong Kong time and so that tracks this chart. Literally, they're not open after 8pm and they're they're not open before 11am I think I see that the spike really, getting really high. Obviously, you know, this is just n of one like, we can't extrapolate that much, but it seems to be tracking,
Andrew Van Anken 09:54
yeah, exactly. So what you really think about, you know, how do we drive stable coin supply? It's. You have to be boots on the ground and in almost every country, really, every region of the world. And then one thing that we started to think about is supply of stablecoins and transfer volume almost are becoming inversely correlated for different non USD stablecoins, especially So, what we wanted to do here was look at, we hear a lot of like stable coins being used for saving and being on exchanges and trading, et cetera. But are people actually using stable coins for like these payments or remittance or B to B use cases? And you can clearly see this trend increasing with non USD stable coins. So Turkish Lira, Euro, Indonesian rupee, all stable coins are increasing in transfer volume, but the supply of these stable coins is actually almost below $10 million and non USD stable coins represent less than 1% of the actual market. So curious, Anthony, your take, given your experience at PayPal, how do companies make money in this space, or how do they monetize without, you know, this huge stable coin supplies?
Anthony Yim 11:07
Yeah, that's great question. I mean, ultimately, for example, you just look at something like CPN, right? It's a takeaway model. And so what matters for payments is volume. It's velocity really, right? It's like, how efficient can you make your every dollar and so, like, the more every dollar changes hands, more that is better for business, because you're doing a percent fee on the volume as your business model and so and so. It's funny, because I think in this, like, sort of high interest rate environment, everyone's obsessed with supply and increasing stablecoin supply, but I think if things can go the way they are in the United States, we're probably going to see rate cuts in 2026 and I think reality will catch up to a lot of the stablecoin players that you can't just rely on interest income as a revenue stream, and that the reality for payments is that you make money on a takeaway basis. So therefore your number one metric that you need to track is volume, and how far every dollar can go in terms of payment volume.
Andrew Van Anken 12:07
Yeah, exactly. And what we're seeing actually on chain right now is what we call the velocity of blockchains is increasing. So here, what we're looking at is a chart by major blockchains that facilitate stablecoin volume of what we call velocity, which is essentially the supply of stable coins, or all the stable coins outstanding, divided by the transfer volume. And these chains, like polygon, Solana Tron, they've all been very steadily increasing their velocity, if you will, indicating that these blockchains are starting to behave more like payment networks, in a sense, where money is moving a lot more and it's moving faster. And so while stablecoin supply on some of these chains might be even decreasing or flattening off, the utilization rate or the productivity of blockchains is actually getting a lot better, and you see that in a lot of apps, actually. So here we're looking at a chart of stellar transaction volume, actually. So stellar transaction volume for stablecoins was pretty flat from November 21 through the 23rd but then a company called Felix pago, which primarily does remittances, started to take off, they raised the series a about a year and a half ago, and then they launched a series B, and stellar transaction volume went from about $200 million of stable coin transfer volume to now it's about $1.5 billion that, though, is despite the fact that stellar stable coin supply is actually pretty flat. So while it goes up and down, it's only at about 170 million dollars right now. So it's interesting to see how a lot more apps are coming online for stablecoin related payments. The supply, however, is not increasing, but the transfer volumes and velocity is really spiking. And so really thinking about, how do blockchains really change their strategy of monetization with this new imperative.
Anthony Yim 14:01
Very cool. Yeah, I'm a big fan of the stellar team. Actually, they got a chance to meet them a couple years ago. And also, most recently, in consensus Toronto, they're really missionary folks who care a ton about just like making payments work for people who don't have, you know, who live in places to have mature financial infrastructure. And they've always been very focused on this from day one. And I'm glad that they're getting a whole bunch of traction in 2025 because I think they really deserve it for being so focused on this, like secular mission. Yeah, exactly.
Andrew Van Anken 14:31
So changing gears a little bit. So how do you grow stablecoin supply? The number two way that we see is clearly trading. The original use case of crypto, was clearly trading crypto, and you can see volumes of finance, opx absolutely explode. And a very interesting trend that we were seeing is that the supply of Solana stablecoins has really rocketed, starting in January 2025 when decentralized exchange volumes on Solana really exploded. And so traders. Is needed another pair to trade against Solana meme coin, what have you. And so the supply of stable coins on Solana almost like doubled overnight, from 5 billion to 10 billion, and now it's settled around 11 billion. But in the shadows, sending things creeping up, is a perpetual exchange called hyper liquid, which allows users to trade it up to 100 times leverage, and their stable coin supply has went from, you know, a few 100 million dollars back in October 2024 to now it's over $3 billion and might actually be starting to cannibalize share from Solana as people look for different venues to trade at. But the more interesting thing is this almost holy grail of settlement that is potentially coming online, which is tokenized stocks. So recently, about two weeks ago, a company called back lock launched tokenized stocks, which you can buy, popular, us, stocks, Tesla, Apple and volumes spiked to about $7 million fell off a little bit with the July 4 holiday. But the key thing to note here is these stocks are actually settled against USDC. So you think about how many billions and trillions of dollars are traded on New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, et cetera, our thesis is that there's this huge audience of people that can't really get access to US stocks, that are trying these different ways that could potentially be unlocked with USDC and yeah, really curious. Your thoughts here, Anthony, on how do you see this market developing over the next few years?
Anthony Yim 16:35
Yeah, I mean, I think my first impression is that tokenized stock is something that emerging markets and people who don't have easy access to an American brokerage account would really want and we've been hearing about people demanding for US dollars in emerging markets and places that have unstable currencies. They transact in tether. This is the first time that like anything, a product that's suitable for these emerging market audiences, that's denominated in USDC. So I think it's like a really interesting and I think exciting time for circle like this would be an interesting go to market, I think, to try to capture an audience that traditionally has been more used to tether and to go back to sort of my trip in Hong Kong. So Hong Kong is very special place because it's a special enrichment region of China. It follows a common law. It doesn't follow Chinese law. And so I think even though technically it's in China, the people in Hong Kong have access to actually buying US equities, and there's an insane demand for it. So there's an app called futu, F U, T, U. It's called mumu on and I think in US and Canada, and I think they're in UK as well, but it's basically the Robin Hood of Asia. And it's like complete taken over Hong Kong. There are storefronts in downtown area of Hong Kong where you can go and get, like, technical support for using this like Robin Hood of Asia. And their main selling point, if you look at their app store page is that you can buy US equities. And so because Hong Kong has a special administrative region that follows British common law, it's an exception in that I think it's like fairly easy to have access to US equities and but I think that's not true for a lot of places. For example, China banned futu. You literally cannot use futu to buy US equities in China. And so at the end, I think, as an American, I'm a bit biased, I think American tech companies are still some of the biggest drivers of innovation and capture and generate a ton of value. And these are blue chip assets that will continue to grow and appreciate for many decades to come. I think there's a ton of pent up demand for US equities across the entire world. And I think Hong Kong is kind of like a preview of that. And because of regulatory wise Hong Kong is, again, it's like very Western and so I think tokenized equity is not as relevant for Hong Kong, but I think it's like a proxy to the demand that you see for US equities outside of United States. Look, it's like, Robin Hood literally had one of the most, like, paid attention events in ECC, and they were launching Robin Hood in in Europe, the Europeans want to buy US equities. But just like, think of like, all these other countries that futu is not supporting, like India, Indonesia, these are countries with a billion people in population, and they don't have access to this stuff, right? So that's where it's really fascinating.
Andrew Van Anken 19:22
Yeah, it's a great wedge for circle too, especially because if you have to make a payment, our previous studies have shown 85% tether dominance in payments. You go to Hong Kong, you can only use tether on Tron for a payment for an OTC desk. But now if you can only buy tokenized stocks, and the deepest liquidity comes in USDC. It'll be interesting to see this battle play out of, you know, how do people manage their tether versus USDC? Or, you know, does tether start incentivizing liquidity pools for these things? So I think it's a very interesting wedge for USDC to sort of open this market. Yeah. I mean, the
Anthony Yim 19:57
other piece is also tokenized stocks. You. In theory, allow for more fractionalization of US equities. So it's like, I can buy a portion of Nvidia, and so lowers the barrier of entry. You can put small sizes into high quality assets as a way to just have, like, access to, again, high quality investment products. And I think that's also really interesting, yeah,
Andrew Van Anken 20:20
exactly. So that's one of the second areas that we're seeing on how to grow stablecoin supply is clearly, people wanna trade all different sorts of assets, equities, Bitcoin, leveraged Bitcoins, and more often than not, the collateral that's being used to settle these is within stablecoins. And then finally, we're seeing this return to traditional defi, if you will. And so ripple actually launched a stablecoin back in around September of 2024 peaked at around $100 million and is now actually on a tear. It's close to exceeding $500 million in supply, and growing at a very quick rate. And so we decided to say, like, what is actually driving this demand for ripple USD? And what's very interesting is that it's mostly defi driven. And so aase took a significant amount of ripple USD. They're close to about two, $50 million they also did a very smart strategy of incentivizing curve pools, which is a decentralized Exchange, which allows people to trade from USDC to RL, USD to tether. They're also looking at incentivizing pools like Euler, and you really don't see any centralized exchanges come up as the top holders of ripple, USD, Oh, wow. And I think right now, as we're in this sort of defi summer with protocols like maple, Ave hitting new highs. We really want to stress like we can't just forget about defi. It's certainly still here. It's certainly still growing, and it's absolutely a way to find demand for stablecoin usage.
Anthony Yim 21:55
And this is pretty like contrary to the other stablecoins, because I believe for circle and tether the largest amount of supply, it's all in centralized exchanges.
Andrew Van Anken 22:05
Yeah, exactly. So I think in defi, USDC right now is the most utilized coin, but tether is not as utilized in defi, but the vast majority of it sits on centralized exchanges. So it's really interesting to see now, with stablecoin market getting a lot more crowded, how these different stablecoins are picking one of these strategies to say, Okay, can I get my wedge in through trading, through defi, through payment? Should I focus on a specific region to really sort of get that foot in to start growing stablecoin supply? I
Anthony Yim 22:38
think hyperlink just like an incredible success story, in a sense that it's been taken. Been taking market share away from centralized exchanges, right? Because it's one of the most effective on chain or to book, yeah, like dexes, and so it's able to match the efficiency of a sex with minimum slippage for a lot of especially like smaller pools that are in, I guess, like, it can out compete non order book Dexs for tokens that have less liquidity, because centralized order book model is a lot more efficient. So Andrew, what do you make of this incentive program that ripple is driving? I mean, you're humble, dudes. Tai, I'm gonna talk you up for a second. You're, I believe, one of the best data scientists in this industry. And you know, you've been helping chains and protocols and state point issuers on designing their incentive programs for many years. And so I'm curious, like, what your take is on this attempt.
Andrew Van Anken 23:34
Well, first, that's too kind, but second, I know and why you sent me that Tron tether bonus. So thank you for that, but you're right. It's absolutely something that we see time and time again, where protocols companies will pay out incentives for different lending strategies, trading strategies, et cetera, to get that flywheel started. I think that the smart thing to do, and I think ripple really nailed it, where you wanna incentivize the most liquid and most loyal pools. So for example, Ave tends to have these more institutional adopters, larger deposit sizes. It's one of the most safe lending protocols. Curve has been around for almost forever in the defi landscape, has very deep liquidity, and so it's almost essential that in order to get the flywheel started, you need to run these incentive programs. But really like finding the most optimal incentive rate and doing an analysis of, okay, you know, if I pay out 300% you know, obviously I'm gonna get a lot of mercenary capital. But you know, if I pay out four or 5% and I go with these blue chip defi protocols, we see time and time again, less capital outflow because people are more trusting of them, you get safer capital come in. And so you really have to find that intersection of incentive rate and really trustworthiness and brand recognition of different defi
Anthony Yim 24:55
protocols. Interesting on that point like, what do you think in general, if somebody. Came to you and like, hey, how do I increase supply in a high quality way for a stable coin? What would you say? How would you advise somebody?
Andrew Van Anken 25:07
Yeah, great question. And I mean, I think we've seen a lot of stable coins evolve from different strategies over the years. If we were starting from zero, the strategy would definitely have to be, you know, you have to pay out some sort of incentives, incentivize people to mint stable coins, get them into, you know, a defi ecosystem, a trading ecosystem. But and once you start that flywheel going, you really have to find these partners to really showcase technology. So for example, you know, Felix pago partnering with stellar, you know, clearly that was a huge boon to the stellar ecosystem for 10x same transfer volume. So you have to pay out a little of incentives, possibly to get the flywheel going, but then you almost have to serve as a scout or venture capitalist, if you will, and really push the partnership teams to find these different interesting use cases, find these companies that are really solving really interesting, challenging problems. And Felix pago is targeting one of the largest remittance corridors in the world, and they're doing it in a cheaper manner. And so if you can really solve pain points with stable coins and find these companies that are really doing interesting activity, you can grow supply, grow transfer volume, and really form this really loyal, sticky user base. And then third, I would say, then what next? What do people do with these stable coins? So you almost have to become this consolidator of offering payments, remittances, but then you want to keep the stable coin within your system. So maybe Felix, like company, starts offering yield on it. Maybe they start offering trading. Maybe start offering tokenized stocks. And so you can see, when you start from zero, you incentivize a little bit, expand the offerings for people actually solve problems, and then before you know it, you're a billion
Anthony Yim 26:50
dollar stable. Pun, yeah, no, that's a great Tai because I think ultimately, right, everyone needs to figure out, like a sticky second act is kind of how I interpret it. And the second act, I think, is what a lot of people forget, because you see this, like, immediate jump in supply when you're doing something on defi, having incentives. Everyone feels good, but then if you see it time and time again, supply falls precipitously afterwards, because, ultimately, pure defi use cases, I think it's very a lot of people are just farming or they're farming incentives, but then, like, what did they do after? And I think the teams that don't succeed are the ones that don't figure out what the second act is. And I think that's kind of like my learning. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Andrew Van Anken 27:26
Well, on that note, I guess I should send value back this money. I haven't spent it all yet, but yeah, I guess I should send it back to
Anthony Yim 27:31
you. Thank you. We'll talk about your bonus, your actual bonus, some other time. Andrew, well, I think that's all the time we have for today. Thank you for listening and watching to our tokenized steep point stats show Andrew, where can people find out more about you? Well,
Andrew Van Anken 27:45
you can follow us at Artemis on Twitter and also LinkedIn, and feel free to always send us kind messages and leave reviews.
Anthony Yim 27:52
And if you haven't already, please subscribe to tokenize on Apple Spotify or whatever podcast platform you use. And finally, if you enjoyed this and you want more, leave us a review. It really helps others find the show. Thank you. Stay stable, everyone.