Stablecoins Gain Ground in Blockchain Gaming as Studios Cut Spending, Study Says

Stablecoins are emerging as the backbone of blockchain gaming economies, with new industry research revealing that developers are increasingly relying on tokens tied to fiat currency to manage payments, rewards, and cross-game transactions as they move away from speculative design models.

Stablecoins processed an estimated transfer volume of $27.6 trillion in 2024, a scale that the Blockchain Game Alliance will have in 2025. report highlighted now exceeds the combined volumes of Visa and Mastercard.

More broadly, they account for around 30% of all crypto transactions, with USDT and USDC accounting for more than 90% of fiat-backed supply, according to the report.

The report also found that confidence in the sector, which collapsed in 2024 as the broader crypto market contracted, began to recover in what it called a “corrective phase”, with 65.8% of respondents expressing optimism as 2026 approaches.

The shift comes as blockchain game studios face a cooling market and seek to rebuild around predictable settlement rails and more disciplined, revenue-driven operations.

Stablecoins “simplify players’ payment experience by enabling fast, low-cost, borderless transactions without exposure to volatility,” the report said, adding that they become a convenient basis for everyday in-game purchases and programmable savings.

However, barriers remain.

One of these factors is “end-to-end UX fragmentation,” Matt Aaron, co-founder of the multi-chain portfolio tracking and analytics platform. Skysaid Decrypt.

“Even though stablecoins are establishing themselves quickly, players still face friction when acquiring, storing, sending or exiting them,” he said. “This becomes even more difficult on multiple chains like Solana and Base, because the same stablecoin lives in different environments and often requires bridging or additional steps.”

Game developers should improve the abstraction for these on-chain streams, Aaron added.

“Until this entire workflow becomes invisible to the user, stablecoins cannot function as a universal settlement layer between game titles,” he said.

Capital scarcity and changing rules

The blockchain gaming industry is also moving away from its speculative roots and entering a more disciplined phase, the report claims. This is reflected in how studios respond to changing market conditions.

The capital shortage has forced game developers “to prioritize product quality, real player demand, defensible revenue models, and operational discipline over short-term financial engineering,” the report said.

“Clarity and consistency” of regulation could pose a barrier to how studios adapt and integrate stablecoins, said Flavien Defraire, director of global development at the Blockchain Game Alliance. Decrypt.

Given that studios operate in multiple jurisdictions and stablecoin rules “create uncertainty and uneven readiness in markets,” broader institutional integration and adoption “still matters,” Defraire said.

“Stablecoins become more useful as a settlement layer when they are easier for teams to integrate into existing commerce and payment operations,” he said.

This transition is primarily driven by regulatory developments in the United States, where policy debates and early signals have prompted other countries, including these. in Asiato formalize their own stablecoin frameworks.

The report cites Singapore, which in November introduced a formal regime for single currency stablecoins, imposing capital and redemption rules while conducting interoperability tests with local banks.

In Japan, the Financial Services Agency has prepared rules that would require crypto exchanges to hold reservations of liability for losses due to hacks, remove the existing cold wallet exemption and more closely align treatment with that of traditional securities firms.

Japan has also maintained a stable currency framework that restricts yen-denominated issuance to fully collateralized instruments offered by licensed banks and other regulated intermediaries, where major lenders have a presence. already flying their own models.

Hong Kong, for its part, has created a licensing system for fiat-listed issuers, which sets standards for reserves, security controls and repurchase guarantees.

Further west, the United Arab Emirates has issued regulations on payment tokens through its central bank, as it tests cross-border settlement systems and government payment experiments. This week he granted licenses for CircleTether and Binance.

Responding to the UX challenges raised earlier, Defraire notes that stablecoins could work “beyond crypto-native players” if games could create “familiar payment flows and frictionless onboarding,” such that “non-crypto audiences can use them without being forced to learn complex wallets and transaction steps.”

For teams to achieve consistently viable in-game economies, they will need a “product-first approach,” Defraire said.
“It starts with a refocus on tangible player value and a focus on fun, to design economies around a game that people actually want to play, rather than around financial incentives.”

Yet even though Web3 games consider an active player base as an indication of strong product-market alignment in previous cycles, those numbers might not have adequately shown “whether people were actually playing and coming back,” Defraire noted.

The key, he says, is to move “towards real and repeated commitment rather than vanity measures”.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to add comments from Blockchain Gaming Alliance.