Can a Stablecoin Public Chain Still Hold Up the Next Narrative? The USDT Gas Model, the STABLE Token Mechanism, and the Real Opportunities in the "Stablecoin Chain Era"
#Stablecoin #STABLE #USDT
According to reports, at 13:00 (UTC) on December 8, the Bitfinex-supported Layer1 blockchain Stable announced the official launch of its mainnet Stable Chain, simultaneously launched its native governance token STABLE and an independent operating organization, the Stable Foundation. This network uses USDT issued by Tether as the Gas fuel token, and all on-chain transactions are settled in USDT.
The launch of the Stable mainnet caused a big stir in the crypto ecosystem and the community. Google Trends, in the week before launch, also saw its popularity gradually surge as the launch time approached. Besides Stable's own popularity, the fact that the stablecoin-driven public chain field urgently needed a focal point is also one of the reasons.
From Ethereum's scaling war, the brutal explosion of the EVM ecosystem, to the renewed return of the Solana-style performance narrative, every round of the market has a dominant narrative. But in this "public chain battle," the stablecoin-driven public chain has always been neither hot nor cold, and of course it has never truly been falsified.
However, the entire market has now entered a relatively cold cycle. So will the market really buy the narrative of stablecoin public chains?
If 2021–2022 was the competition of public chain performance, then the competitive focus of the crypto industry in 2023–2024 has already quietly returned to the "most fundamental value layer" - payments, cross-border settlement, dollar stablecoin exports, and the monetization of on-chain dollars.
The emergence of Stable Chain is not an accident. It stepped on a just-right node: tightening regulation, stablecoins going overseas, and dollar-pegged assets becoming the "base currency" of international crypto capital.
If you use only one sentence to summarize the biggest selling point of Stable Chain, it is: this is the first public chain personally operated by the actual controller of the stablecoin (Tether), which means this is the first time the industry has seen a truly vertically integrated "stablecoin infrastructure chain."
- Stablecoins are the most stable traffic entrance in the crypto world
Global USDT circulation exceeds 120 billion USD, and more than half circulates in Asia. For emerging markets, USDT has already become an "underground dollar system." A chain that uses USDT as Gas is essentially: turning USDT into the blockchain's "fuel" and "operating system."
This is extremely symbolic within the industry. - The regulatory era is coming, and stablecoin infrastructure is the "safest" and "rigid-demand" narrative
When the United States begins pushing stablecoin bills, when Circle cooperates with major banks, when Tether begins proactive auditing, the industry has ushered in the "legalization stage" of stablecoins, and this brings a huge opportunity: in the next 5 years, stablecoins will become the most rigid demand in the Web3 world, and whoever controls stablecoin infrastructure controls the underlying traffic.
Stable Chain precisely stepped on this cycle point. - Payment-level settlement speed + USDT Gas = a disruptive experience
Stable Chain puts forward two key selling points:
sub-second confirmation
USDT is Gas (native GAS-TOKEN MODEL)
This directly targets the biggest pain point on-chain right now: a chain oriented to ordinary people and cross-border payments should not让 users bear the uncertainty of Gas costs brought by token price volatility. This is why the market will refocus on this field: this is the most practically demanded infrastructure logic - rather than empty hype.
The STABLE Controversies: Insider Trading, KYC Lag, and Value Doubts
The insider trading incident: someone deposited hundreds of millions of USDT 23 minutes in advance
Stable opened two rounds of deposits before mainnet launch, but both rounds were highly controversial. The first phase of pre-deposit started in late October, with a cap of 825 million USD, yet it was filled within minutes after the announcement was released. The community questioned that some players had insider positioning. The top-ranked wallet deposited hundreds of millions of USDT 23 minutes before deposits opened.
The KYC lag incident: the system and technical capability triggered community criticism
The project side did not directly respond to the insider trading doubts, and on November 6 it opened the second round of pre-deposit activity with a cap of 500 million USD. However, the insider-trading controversy in the first phase did not reduce market expectations for Stable. After the second phase opened, its website at one point became slow and laggy, which triggered massive complaints and criticism from the community.
The combined first phase + second phase total exceeded 1.325 billion USD in USDT deposits. At the end of a bear market, a deposit scale of 1.3 billion USD is not unimpressive. This demonstrates one core issue: the market still has a large amount of capital willing to bet on the direction of "stablecoin infrastructure."
Of course, the controversy also, from another angle, proves that Stable's market heat is real.
The most controversial point about STABLE is: STABLE is not Gas, Gas is fully paid in USDT, so what value does it have?
This makes many investors concerned: since STABLE is not GAS, what value does it have? More importantly, will STABLE become a "governance token tool-man"? But from a deeper economic design perspective, STABLE's value comes from three parts:
- STABLE is the "power center" of the entire network
On Stable Chain, all consensus participation relies on DPoS + StableBFT, which means:
whoever holds STABLE can become a validator (Validator)
whoever holds STABLE can do delegation (Delegation)
whoever holds STABLE can decide protocol upgrades and key parameters
In other words: USDT is fuel, STABLE is the steering wheel. A more realistic viewpoint is: in the Web3 world, power itself is value, governance is value.
- STABLE is the main asset of ecosystem incentives
cross-chain rewards
liquidity incentives
early ecosystem developer rewards
partner subsidies
network growth incentives
STABLE is the "reserve pool of the incentive mechanism" of the entire network, and in the crypto industry, this role usually means a sustained source of demand.
- Token structure: risk and opportunity coexist
From STABLE's token allocation, there is no short-term sell pressure, and there is continuous release in the long term, which is a typical "large-scale infrastructure project curve." That means STABLE's price trend is highly likely to present the following pattern: an early sentiment-driven rise → entering a gradual digestion period → followed by a medium-to-long-term trend determined by ecosystem growth - a trajectory that shows obvious similarities to the early price movements of Plasma, TON, and Solana.
Is STABLE's first-day valuation: 2–3 billion USD high? Not high, but the risk is extremely high
According to derivatives market pricing, STABLE's implied FDV is around 3 billion USD. Many people think this is an "overvaluation," but in horizontal comparison across the industry it is not exaggerated:
Plasma: FDV 1.67 billion
TON: FDV 20+ billion
Solana: FDV 80+ billion
Avalanche: FDV 6 billion
Aptos: FDV 6 billion
In this dimension, pricing Stable Chain at 2–3 billion is not outrageous. The real problem is not "whether the pricing is high," but:
can the valuation withstand sentiment volatility?
can it withstand ecosystem growth?
can it withstand a "Gas model that does not rely on STABLE"?
These are the key factors that decide STABLE's mid-term price trend..
The Future of Stablecoin Public Chains: Three Certain Trends + Two Biggest Risks
Trend 1: Stablecoins will continue to expand their market dominance
USDT is currently the only asset in the crypto industry that has global currency attributes. As long as the crypto market still has cross-border transactions, OTC, and Web3 payment demand, stablecoin chains will not disappear.
Trend 2: Vertical integration of chains and stablecoins will accelerate
Stable Chain is the first public chain "built by the stablecoin issuer itself." In the future, Circle and PayPal may also go down a similar path.
Trend 3: Stablecoin chains will grow exponentially in emerging markets
Especially:
Southeast Asia
Middle East
Latin America
Africa
Users in these regions do not care about "decentralization ideals," they only care about:
is transfer cheap?
is it fast?
can it use dollars? Stable Chain is exactly aimed at this market.
Final conclusion: Does the market still buy the stablecoin public-chain narrative?
Short term: buy (because of heat, pre-deposits, TGE sentiment)
Mid term: wait-and-see (depends on the speed of ecosystem building)
Long term: extremely strong potential, but still needs real stablecoin usage scenarios to land
Whether Stable Chain will become the next "rich-ecosystem chain" will be decided by the market and development, but it is highly likely to become the most important "payments-grade infrastructure" in Web3.
From an investment perspective: STABLE is a token that needs to pass through time. It is not a hype token, but an infrastructure token. And from the industry trend perspective: stablecoin public chains will not disappear, and will become more and more important. But whether the market continues to buy depends on whether this track can create truly scalable usage scenarios.
