A new Decrypt guest analysis by Verda Ventures general partner Alex Witt argues that stablecoin infrastructure is being funded in a different geography from where the strongest demand is emerging.

The core claim is not that the U.S. and Europe are irrelevant. They still dominate capital formation, licensing work, and many of the venture firms underwriting stablecoin companies. The tension is that much of the day-to-day utility for dollar stablecoins is outside those markets, especially in places where users need cheaper remittances, dollar access, cross-border settlement, or protection from local currency volatility.

That view lines up with recent third-party data, though the exact volume framing depends on methodology. Visa's onchain analytics page emphasizes adjusted stablecoin activity and lists $10.2 trillion in adjusted global transaction volume over the past 12 months, alongside more than $272 billion in circulating supply. The IMF, meanwhile, says Nigeria received about $59 billion in crypto-asset inflows between July 2023 and June 2024 and accounts for roughly 60 percent of Sub-Saharan Africa's stablecoin inflows since 2019. Chainalysis has also highlighted Latin American demand, including stablecoin-heavy exchange purchases in major local currency pairs.

The useful takeaway is conservative: stablecoins are no longer just an exchange settlement tool. They are becoming financial infrastructure in markets where banking access, currency stability, and payment rails are uneven.

For investors and builders, that shifts the question from "which issuer wins?" to "where is the last-mile infrastructure actually being built?" If founders in Lagos, Sao Paulo, Manila, and Buenos Aires are closer to the problems stablecoins solve, the next wave of durable stablecoin products may look less like Wall Street infrastructure and more like local payment, payroll, savings, and merchant software.