Visa survey puts Asia-Pacific stablecoin intent at 46%, nearly triple past-year use

Six percent of 14,250 respondents is about 855 people who showed an accurate understanding of how stablecoins work ^[17]. Sixteen percent is about 2,280 who had used one in the past 12 months ^[18]. Even if all 855 were users, at least 1,425 of the past-year group, or 62.5% of it, used stablecoins without that understanding ^[19].

If understanding were what held people back, the users would mostly be the people who understand, and in Visa's sample most of them are not ^[19]. The fraud finding is the more useful one for a provider. It isolates the people who know what a stablecoin is, have not used one, and say why ^[5].

Visa's own stablecoin work, as CoinDesk describes it, goes into settlement: a wider network and support for more tokens and blockchains ^[12]. With the Reap tokens added, all of it is infrastructure behind the checkout, built, in our view, so that the person paying need not know a stablecoin is involved ^[13]. Nischint Sanghavi, Visa's head of digital currencies for Asia Pacific ^[9], said: "The opportunity now is to turn that interest into trusted and familiar payment experiences that work at scale." ^[10] He also said the research confirms what Visa has been building toward ^[11].

The weak point in this case is the 16%. Among people aware of stablecoins, 49% thought they could only be used to buy and sell other cryptocurrencies ^[21]. (CoinDesk also gives that figure as about half of all 14,250 respondents, a different base ^[21].) If much of the past year's use was exchange trading, payments use is below 16%, and the sample may hold too few genuine stablecoin payers to say anything about who wins them. CoinDesk's report does not describe how respondents were selected or which markets they came from ^[8].

Use could keep rising while understanding stays near 6% ^[4], in which case the provider that wraps the token in a card or a bank app takes the volume. Fraud fears could keep the informed holdouts out and leave the 30-point gap between intent and use open ^[16]. Or the 16% could turn out to be mostly trading, and the payments market would be smaller than either survey figure suggests. We think the first is the likeliest, given who is already using the product, and we'd expect money spent on scam protection to convert more of the 46% ^[2] than money spent explaining how a stablecoin works. A follow-up survey in which past-year use grows only among respondents who can explain the product would show we have this wrong.