Stablecoins Deserve Better, And They’re Finally Getting It 2025
Stablecoin settlement times vary wildly depending on their blockchain. Purpose-built payment chains must remain open, or they will repeat TradFi fragmentation.
Opinion by: Neeraj Srivastava, chief technology officer at MNEE
When they first emerged, stablecoins were pitched as a revolution in payments. Traditional banking rails often take one to four days to settle debit card transactions (and weeks for wire transfers) and charge you a hefty sum for the service. Stablecoin settlements wouldn’t just be faster and cheaper; they’d be near-instant and cost almost zero.
Unfortunately, we can’t really claim they’ve lived up to that promise. While transaction settlement times have been significantly decreased, they still vary substantially depending on the blockchain used.
Ethereum, the home to the vast majority of the stablecoin supply, takes three minutes to confirm transactions, and its fees still occasionally spike up to multiple dollars.
We can do better. If stablecoins are to be truthfully marketed as instant money, blockchain infrastructure needs to become much more efficient.
For developers, fintechs and merchants integrating stablecoins, the wish list is relatively simple: near-instant finality, low-to-no gas fees, easy integration and predictable performance.
Yet when you compare chains, the differences are stark. If you make a transaction with USDC (USDC) on Solana, the payment achieves final confirmation within roughly 400 milliseconds. On Arbitrum, that same transaction takes about three minutes. On Base, the waiting time can be anywhere between three to nine minutes. Some chains, like Plume or ZKsync Era, may take 30 minutes or even hours.
We’re far from near-instant finality or predictable performance.
There’s also the issue of gas fees. Ethereum, the backbone of the stablecoin market, continues to experience fee spikes, which can increase the cost of a single USDt (USDT) transaction to $2 or $3. Other chains, such as Avalanche or Polygon, can process transactions for less than $0.0003, although this is partly because these chains experience less traffic.
Source: CoinTelegraph
