As Stablecoins Lead Crypto Investment Themes, Bitcoin Is No Longer The Favorite Child

Stablecoins, and all the start-up investment going to building the payment architecture for a new blockchain-based digital finance ecosystem, has arguably taken the wind out of Bitcoin’s (CRYPTO: BTC) sails.

What is the case for Bitcoin now? Why use it as a payment when saving Bitcoin to pay for a debt, or purchase, could see the value collapse? That won’t happen with fiat-backed stablecoins.

As a result, all the energy in crypto is shifting to stablecoin infrastructure.

Bitcoin is far below its highs.

It’s fallen below its $65,000 price support.

Some see BTC going to $25,000.

Institutional investors post the first negative inflow into Bitcoin since 2023.

If stablecoins become blockchain’s dominant commercial use case, where does future economic demand for Bitcoin reside? Can Bitcoin Surf in Stablecoins Wake? Some say it’s not over for BTC in payments.

It’s next in line. "The Bitcoin side still needs rails that are genuinely production-grade for payments, meaning fast, cheap, and final without forcing custody compromises," said Mark Zalan, CEO at GoMining.

The Cyprus-based company started as a Bitcoin mining platform and gradually expanded into a broader Bitcoin financial services ecosystem.

GoMining’s GoBTC Pay is hoping to fulfill the promise of Bitcoin’s use case as real money you can buy things with.

Stablecoins lower the barrier to entry but purpose-built Bitcoin rails are what will convert that readiness into actual Bitcoin payment volume.

He thinks Bitcoin payments can easily piggy back off of the stablecoin infrastructure being built everywhere these days.

A "payment rail" is a way money is moved from one point to the next, such as credit card rails, or PayPal (NASDAQ: PYPL ), for example. "A business that has solved on-chain wallets, custody, and compliance for stablecoins has built most of what it needs to support Bitcoin payments," Zalan said. "The second asset is far cheaper to add than the first.

So the use cases aren’t separate at the infrastructure layer; they sit on a common foundation, with stablecoins being the on-ramp that gets the Bitcoin payments foundation built." This might be the best case scenario for Bitcoin going forward.

Otherwise, BTC becomes a speculator’s token of choice, often dependent on Fed money printing to post gains.

Alt coins become an even riskier bet in the stablecoin-first market.

Even the big blockchains led by Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) have done poorly investors this year.

Their only real use case is obvious: you buy their tokens because you think there will be more on-chain developers using them to pay for on-chain fees.

Future-thinking investors are better off in space stocks.

Still, Bitcoin is for retail traders looking for alpha.

Stablecoins are for private money building a new digital finance infrastructure.

Investors are not cashing in on stablecoins.

They are cashing in on start-ups that have done well or sold at a premium to other buyers. "For most of the last decade, crypto sold a story about what money might become.

Stablecoins are the first part of that story that actually shipped at scale.

The shift we are seeing isn’t really Bitcoin losing relevance; it’s the conversation finally separating two different things that were always conflated," said Bernardo Bilotta, CEO of Stables. "Bitcoin is an asset you hold.

A stablecoin is a thing you use.

Those serve completely different jobs, and the market is starting to price them as different jobs." Stables was founded in Australia in 2021.

It started as a stablecoin wallet and spending platform.

Over time, it has evolved toward becoming infrastructure for stablecoin payments, remittances, treasury operations, and cross-border settlement.

This is where the energy is in crypto, suggesting the only way to make money in this market is in venture capital.

When a technology stops needing a narrative and starts solving a Tuesday-afternoon problem, that’s when it gets serious. "We see this in our own corridors every day.

The demand isn’t speculative, it’s people and businesses moving real money for real reasons," said Bilotta. "The platforms tracking this are reporting that the overwhelming majority of stablecoin volume is now business and payments activity rather than trading.

That tracks with what we see on the infrastructure side.

The asset-class framing is a category error at this point.

Nobody calls the SWIFT network an asset class, and stablecoins are increasingly doing the same job for a different generation of users, just faster and cheaper." Stablecoins Lead Crypto Investment Themes In a report published in July 2025, McKinsey & Company predicted stablecoin transactions to surpass legacy payment volumes in less than a decade.