BroadChain News, April 27 - Stablecoins are gradually penetrating from trading and DeFi scenarios into real-world business processes such as payroll payments, B2B settlements, cross-border clearing, and corporate treasury management. However, when on-chain dollars begin to carry real cash flows, the default transparency of blockchain also reveals another side: payees, amount changes, balance fluctuations, and transaction relationships can all be observed and deconstructed into corporate operational information over the long term. This means that the core issue for the next phase of stablecoins may no longer be simply "can transfers be faster," but rather "can institutional-acceptable privacy protection be provided while retaining verifiability."
According to forecasts from blockchain data platform Chainalysis, after "de-noising" adjustments, stablecoin transaction volume is expected to reach $719 trillion by 2035. The platform points out that this growth, driven by organic adoption, marks a structural shift in cross-border value flows and daily business operations. However, reports from McKinsey and Artemis Analytics show that stablecoin transaction volume will reach $35 trillion in 2025, but only 1% will be used for "real-world" payments. A large amount of on-chain stablecoin transactions are used for non-economic activities such as exchange aggregation, market-making cycles, and DeFi internal routing. If this noise is removed, the amount used for payments and the real economy will shrink significantly.
This does not diminish the importance of stablecoins but shifts the discussion from grand transaction volume narratives to more specific issues. What stablecoins truly need to enter is not the abstract "on-chain transfer market," but real cash flows such as wages, B2B settlements, cross-border clearing, and corporate treasury management. Once entering these scenarios, stablecoins carry not only dollar value but also sensitive information about corporate operations. Therefore, as the capital flows carried by stablecoins get closer to the real economy, transparency itself is accumulating new costs, becoming a "transparency debt" after stablecoin mainstreaming. This debt is reflected in at least four types of costs: competitive business costs (corporate financial rhythms, supply chain relationships, and procurement cycles may be analyzed by competitors), compliance friction costs (companies need to explain transaction backgrounds additionally), operational efficiency costs (adopting complex operations to avoid transparency), and trust costs (companies may abandon stablecoins due to privacy concerns).
In this context, the competitive logic of on-chain privacy is also shifting: from emphasizing anonymity to emphasizing default confidentiality, selective disclosure, and compliance connectivity. Taking Aleo as an example, it builds programmable, auditable, and compliant privacy stablecoin infrastructure through zero-knowledge proof technology, allowing transactions to be encrypted by default while retaining the ability to selectively disclose to auditors or regulators when necessary. This "privacy-first, compliance-accessible" design is becoming key infrastructure for institutional-grade stablecoin adoption.