Beyond DeFi collateral
Stablecoins, tokens designed to hold a steady value by being backed roughly one-to-one with a reserve asset like the US dollar, started out mostly as plumbing inside crypto trading and decentralized finance: a way to move value between exchanges and protocols without cashing out to a bank account every time. That role hasn't gone away, but it's no longer the main story.
Stablecoins have become a genuine payment rail in their own right. Businesses use them to settle cross-border invoices in minutes instead of days, workers and families use them for remittances that would otherwise lose a meaningful cut to intermediary fees and multi-day delays, and some companies now hold a portion of treasury reserves in stablecoins simply because they can move that value globally, near-instantly, outside traditional banking hours.