JPMorgan's latest data delivers a cold splash: the projected stablecoin market size in 2028 is only $500-600 billion, quite far from the market’s exuberant estimate of 2-4 trillion dollars.

This year, stablecoins have indeed been hot, surpassing $308 billion in size, but this growth mainly stems from a single source—the crypto community’s self-liquidation. Demand driven by trading hedges, leverage operations, and DeFi liquidity mining has powered half of the growth, while real-world payment use cases are almost nonexistent.

However, future variables are worth watching: cross-border settlement could become the next breakthrough, traditional banks are also developing tokenized deposits to capture market share, and the pace of central bank digital currency (CBDC) development is even more surprising. When official central bank stablecoins really arrive, will this sector be reshuffled? Or will it be monopolized by a few giants? These questions are quite thought-provoking.