Stablecoins didn’t start as infrastructure. They emerged as a workaround, a way to step out of volatility without leaving the crypto ecosystem, a neutral layer between positions rather than something protocols would build around.

That framing no longer holds.

Over time, stablecoins moved from being a tool inside the system to becoming the system itself. Today, they sit at the center of almost every on-chain activity: lending markets are denominated in them, liquidity pools rely on them, and protocol accounting layers converge around them as a common unit of value.

They didn’t just grow in usage, they became the default way value moves across DeFi.

Once an asset reaches that level of adoption, its design stops being a detail and starts acting as a constraint. The way stablecoins are structured now directly shapes what can be built on top of them.