The whole world is issuing stablecoins, but only with buyers is there a moat.

Author: Chuk

Editor: Deep潮 TechFlow

Deep潮 Guide: As regulatory policies for cryptocurrencies (such as the GENIUS Act) become clearer, stablecoins are evolving from mere trading media to enterprise-level financial infrastructure. This article provides an in-depth analysis of the current state of the “Stablecoin Issuance as a Service” market. Author Chuk points out that although the underlying technology for token minting has become increasingly homogenized, differences among issuers in compliance stance, liquidity operations, and ecosystem integration make them still highly irreplaceable for different types of buyers (enterprises, fintech companies, DeFi). In the future, the competition focus for stablecoins will no longer be on the tokens themselves but on the business closed-loop and network effects built around them.

The underlying architecture of tokens is converging, but the final outcomes vary greatly.

This article was originally published on Stablecoin Standard, where you can find the complete archive and subscribe to receive similar and other analytical reports via email. Special thanks to Artemis for providing issuer data!

Introduction: The world is issuing stablecoins

Stablecoins are transforming into application-layer financial infrastructure. With the clearer rules following the introduction of the GENIUS Act, brands like Western Union, Klarna, Sony Bank, and Fiserv are shifting from “integrated USDC” to “issuing their own dollar tokens” through white-label issuance partners.

Driving this shift is the surge in “Issuance-as-a-Service” platforms for stablecoins. A few years ago, Paxos was basically the only candidate. Today, depending on your product, there are over ten reliable options, including emerging platforms like Bridge and MoonPay, compliance-first players like Anchorage, and established giants like Coinbase.

This richness makes issuance seem “commoditized.” At the token plumbing layer, convergence is indeed happening. But whether it is “commoditized” depends on the buyers and their specific jobs-to-be-done.

Once you separate the token’s underlying architecture from liquidity operations, compliance stance, and peripheral support (deposits/withdrawals, orchestration, accounts, cards), the market no longer looks like a simple price war but more like a segmented market competition. Pricing power is increasingly concentrated in areas where “results are hardest to replicate.”

Figure caption: White-label stablecoin supply is growing rapidly, creating a large new issuer market beyond USDC/USDT. Source: Artemis

If you see issuers as interchangeable, you overlook the real constraints and where profits are most likely to persist.

Why do brands issue their own stablecoins?

That’s a good question. Companies do this mainly for three reasons:

Economic benefits: Extract more value from customer activity (balances and traffic) and tap into adjacent revenue streams (financial management, payments, loans, cards).

Control over behavior: Embed custom rules and incentive mechanisms (e.g., loyalty programs), and choose settlement paths and interoperability that meet product needs.

Faster action: Stablecoins enable teams to launch new financial experiences globally without rebuilding the entire banking tech stack.

Importantly, most brand tokens do not need to reach the scale of USDC to be considered “successful.” In closed or semi-open ecosystems, key performance indicators (KPIs) are not necessarily market cap but can be metrics like ARPU (average revenue per user) and unit economics improvements: i.e., how much additional revenue, retention, or efficiency is unlocked by stablecoin functionality.

How do white-label issuers operate?

To determine whether issuance is “commoditized,” we first need to define the work involved: reserve management, smart contracts + on-chain operations, and distribution.

Figure caption: Issuers mainly handle reserves and on-chain operations; brands handle demand and distribution. Differentiation lies in the details.

White-label issuance allows a company (the brand) to launch and distribute its branded stablecoin while outsourcing the first two layers to a licensed issuer.

In practice, ownership is divided into two categories:

Mostly owned by the brand: Distribution. Where the token is used, default user experience (UX), wallet placement, and which partners or environments support it.

Mostly owned by the issuer: Issuance operations. Smart contract layer (token rules, admin permissions, mint/burn execution) and reserve layer (reserve assets, custody, redemption operations).

Operationally, most of this is now productized via APIs and dashboards, with deployment times ranging from days to weeks depending on complexity. While not every project currently requires a US-compliant issuer, for issuers targeting US enterprise buyers, compliance posture has already become part of the product even before the formal implementation of the GENIUS Act.

Distribution is the most challenging part. Within closed ecosystems, enabling token usage is mainly a product decision. Outside the ecosystem, integration and liquidity become bottlenecks, and issuers often break down barriers by assisting with secondary market liquidity (exchange/market maker relationships, incentives, injections). Brands still control demand, but this “go-to-market support” is one of the areas where issuers can materially influence outcomes.

Different buyers emphasize these responsibilities differently, which is why the issuer market splits into distinctly different clusters.

Market segmentation, commoditization depends on the buyer

“Commoditization” refers to a service becoming sufficiently standardized so that providers can be interchangeable without changing the outcome, shifting competition to price rather than differentiation.

If switching issuers changes the outcome you care about, then issuance is not commoditized for you.

At the token architecture level, switching issuers usually does not change the result, making them increasingly interchangeable. Many issuers can hold reserves akin to government bonds, deploy audited mint/burn contracts, provide basic admin controls (pause/freeze), support mainstream public chains, and offer similar APIs.

However, brands rarely just buy simple token deployment. They buy “results,” and the required results are highly dependent on the buyer type. The market is divided into several clusters, each with a critical point where alternative solutions fail. Within each cluster, there are usually only a few feasible options:

Enterprises and financial institutions, led by procurement, aim to “trust.” When compliance credibility, custody standards, governance, and large-scale (hundreds of millions of dollars) 24/7 redemption reliability differ, alternatives no longer hold. This is essentially a “risk committee” procurement: issuers must be impeccable on paper and extremely robust in production.

Fintech companies and consumer wallets, led by product, aim to “launch and distribute.” The critical point where alternatives fail is in deployment time, integration depth, and supporting infrastructure (such as deposit/withdrawal channels) that enable tokens to be used in real workflows. This is a “go live within this development cycle (Sprint)” procurement: the winning issuer is the one that minimizes KYC/deposit/ orchestration work and gets your entire functionality (not just stablecoins) live fastest.

DeFi and investment platforms are native on-chain, aiming for “composability” and “programmability,” including designs that optimize yields at the expense of different risk trade-offs. Alternatives fail in reserve model design, liquidity dynamics, and on-chain integration. This is a “design constraint” procurement: if it can improve composability or yields, teams will accept different reserve mechanisms.

Figure caption: Issuer clusters are categorized based on enterprise compliance posture and access methods. Enterprises and financial institutions (bottom right), fintech/wallets (middle), DeFi (top left).

Differentiation is moving upward in the protocol stack, especially evident in the fintech/wallet segment. As issuance becomes a “function,” issuers compete by bundling adjacent infrastructure—compliant deposit/withdrawal channels, virtual accounts, payment orchestration, custody, and card issuance. This can sustain pricing power by changing time-to-market and operational outcomes.

Figure caption: Although there are over ten white-label stablecoin issuers, options for specific buyers quickly narrow to a few.

With this framework, the issue of commoditization becomes clearer.

Stablecoin issuance is commoditized at the token layer but not at the outcome layer because buyer constraints prevent service providers from being interchangeable.

As the market develops, issuers serving each cluster may converge on similar products needed for that market, but we have not yet reached that stage.

Where might lasting advantages come from?

If the token’s underlying architecture is already a basic threshold and marginal differentiation is slowly eroding, the obvious question is: can any issuer establish a durable moat? Currently, it seems more like a customer acquisition race, retaining clients through switching costs. Changing issuers involves reserve/custody operations, compliance processes, redemption behaviors, and downstream integrations, so issuers are not “one-click interchangeable.”

Besides bundling, the most reasonable long-term moat is network effects. If brands increasingly need seamless 1:1 exchanges and shared liquidity, value may flow toward issuers or protocol layers that become the default interoperability network. The unresolved question is whether this network is owned by issuers (strong control) or a neutral standard (broad adoption, weak control).

An interesting pattern to watch is: will interoperability become a commoditized feature or the main source of pricing power?

Summary

Currently, issuance is commoditized at the core but differentiated at the edges. Token deployment and basic controls are converging. But in operations, liquidity support, and critical integrations, outcomes still vary.

For any specific buyer, the market does not seem as crowded as it appears. Practical constraints quickly narrow the candidate list, and “reliable options” are often only a few, not ten.

Pricing power derives from bundling, regulatory posture, and liquidity constraints. The value lies not just in “creating tokens” but more in the surrounding infrastructure that makes stablecoins usable in production environments.

It remains unclear which moats are sustainable. Network effects built through shared liquidity and exchange standards are a viable path, but as interoperability matures, who captures the value is not obvious.

Next, focus on: Will brand stablecoins converge into a few exchange networks, or will interoperability become a neutral standard? In any case, the lesson remains: tokens are just an entry ticket. The business is everything built around them.