Understanding Stable: A Comprehensive Overview

Key Insights

• As stablecoin usage expands beyond trading into payments and settlement, demand is rising for infrastructure purpose-built for this vertical. Stable has launched StableChain, a USDT-native Layer-1 designed to prioritize predictable transaction costs, rapid finality, and consistent settlement performance.
• Stable built a technical architecture optimized for stablecoin settlement. The core stack includes StableBFT for consensus, StableEVM for execution, StableDB for storage, and a custom RPC layer for network interfacing.
• STABLE is the project’s native token and is used for governance and staking. The token has a total supply of 100 billion and trades at a $700.9 million circulating market cap with a $2.63 billion FDV as of Sept. 25, 2026.
• Stable Mainnet v1.8.0 went live with improvements that increase transaction capacity and execution reliability while providing more predictable blockspace access for high-volume payment, settlement, and agentic transaction flows.
• Stable plans to expand its payment infrastructure through higher-throughput network upgrades, broader institutional integrations, and agentic payment systems designed for continuous, programmatic transactions.

Introduction

In 2025, stablecoin transaction activity reached new highs, with total volume estimated at roughly $33 trillion. By September 2026, USDT remained the dominant stablecoin, accounting for more than 60% of the total stablecoin market cap. USDT processed a record $4.4 trillion of onchain transfer value and 2.2 billion transfers in Q4 2025, with 88.2% of those transfers below $1,000. Tether had more than 570 million global users as of March 2026. These figures indicate increased use for payments-oriented flows, such as remittances, consumer transactions, and payouts, rather than primarily for speculative trading.

As stablecoins see broader adoption for payments, demand is rising for infrastructure purpose-built to support payment and settlement workloads. Despite continued progress in high-throughput blockchain design, several constraints still limit the viability of at-scale onchain payment systems. Network fees on generalized blockchains can become volatile during periods of congestion, undermining the cost predictability required for microtransactions and institutional adoption. Additionally, the coordination required to reach consensus introduces settlement latency, resulting in slower finality than in traditional payment systems, which can authorize transactions almost immediately. While decentralized networks offer meaningful advantages over legacy rails, resolving these performance and predictability gaps is essential to bringing payment activity onchain at scale.

Stable aims to address these shortcomings through StableChain, a Layer-1 (L1) network designed to support low-cost, high-throughput USDT transactions. The network prioritizes consistency over generalized execution flexibility and favors stability over expressiveness to limit unpredictable behavior under load. StableChain implements these principles through stablecoin-denominated fees to reduce fee volatility, more deterministic execution characteristics to support consistent settlement timing, and an architecture optimized for sustained payment throughput. By optimizing for payments at the base layer, StableChain aims to reduce uncertainty for developers, payment providers, and institutions building real-world settlement workflows.

Background

Stable was publicly introduced in July 2025 as an L1 network designed for stablecoin settlement, emphasizing USDT-denominated transaction fees and EVM compatibility for smart contract deployment. Stable’s leadership team consists of Brian Mehler (CEO), Sam Kazemian (CTO), and Thibault Reichelt (COO). In July 2025, the project team announced a $28 million seed round led by Hack VC with participation from Bitfinex, PayPal, USDT0, and Franklin Templeton. The fundraising round also included notable angel investors and advisors, including Paolo Ardoino, Bryan Johnson, Nathan McCauley, and Divseh Makan.

The network’s mainnet launched on Dec. 8, 2025, following a public testnet period announced on Nov. 4, 2025. Alongside the mainnet launch, the network also introduced its native token, STABLE. The token will be (i) used for governance decisions and (ii) staked/delegated to active validator nodes, which secure the network and validate transactions.

Technology

Consensus Mechanism

Stable leverages a custom Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) model called StableBFT. This consensus mechanism is based on CometBFT, the software used to secure networks in the Cosmos ecosystem. The consensus protocol is optimized for deterministic finality, reducing the risk of transaction reversal due to forks, and for fault tolerance, ensuring uptime even if up to one-third of network validators act maliciously. StableBFT is built for speed, supporting the sub-second finality required to compete with traditional payment systems.

Execution

StableEVM, the network’s EVM-compatible execution layer, supports USDT-specific transfers while maintaining compatibility with the existing tooling and infrastructure popularized by Ethereum. Stable supports Solidity and Vyper for smart contract development and is compatible with frameworks like Hardhat and Foundry. Smart contracts on the network adhere to EVM standards such as ERC-20 approvals, event emissions, and access-control mechanisms.

The execution environment introduces three precompiles from the Stable software development kit (StableSDK) to bring key network functionality to EVM smart contracts:

• Bank Module - Provides basic token management capabilities (e.g., mint, burn, approval, and transfer functions).
• Distribution Module - Provides additional checks to ensure proper delegator and/or deposit functionality.
• Staking Module - Provides staking, delegation, and redelegation functionality.

Storage

For storing state data, Stable uses the StableDB database architecture, designed to minimize latency by separating real-time state management from historical archiving:

• MemDB: The memory database stores recent and active blockchain state, allowing Stable to process live transactions efficiently.
• VersionDB: The historical database stores past states, ensuring access to a verifiable record of previous network activity.

The dual-database model’s capabilities are amplified by memory-mapped file access (mmap). While most networks use log-structured merge trees (LSM-trees) for storage, Stable leverages the mmap architecture’s performance gains for frequent state lookups, a key feature for its goal of creating a high-performance payments system. Notably, other high-performance networks have already implemented memory-mapped databases, namely Sei and Cronos.

Network Layer

Stable’s custom remote procedure call (RPC) provides a standard JSON-RPC interface compatible with common Ethereum development tools such as Hardhat and ethers.js. The system uses dedicated RPC nodes rather than a single monolithic node, reducing resource contention and improving consistency in request handling. Stable’s architecture also includes indexing and real-time state processing, enabling faster access to chain data and logs than basic node setups. Together, these design choices allow developers to query network state, retrieve events, and submit transactions with predictable performance. Alchemy and Tenderly are StableChain's primary RPC providers.

USDT0 as Native Gas

Stable v1.2.0, activated on Feb. 4, 2026, made USDT0 the network’s native gas token and replaced the prior gUSDT model. USDT0 now serves as both as the asset used to pay network fees and as an ERC-20 token for standard application interactions, removing the prior wrapping and unwrapping flow between gas and application balances.

• USDT0 is an omnichain representation of USDT based on LayerZero’s Omnichain Fungible Token standard. Using the same dollar-denominated asset for gas and value transfer reduces multi-token complexity for users, applications, and automated systems, while retaining ERC-20 functions such as approve, permit, transfer, and transferFrom.

Guaranteed Blockspace

Stable v1.8.0 introduced Guaranteed Blockspace, which can reserve block capacity for selected traffic categories when configured through governance. The mechanism is intended to give eligible, time-sensitive payment and settlement flows more reliable transaction inclusion during periods of high network activity. For enterprises, this can improve execution consistency for payment providers, exchanges, and treasury platforms that operate continuously. The same capability also matters for agent-driven systems, where autonomous applications may submit frequent, programmatic transactions and need predictable access to blockspace. Guaranteed Blockspace improves inclusion priority for eligible traffic; it does not by itself guarantee end-to-end application performance or eliminate other sources of latency.

Tokenomics

Launched alongside the mainnet release, the STABLE token is the network’s native asset, used for security and governance. The total supply is 100 billion:

• Ecosystem and Community: 40 billion STABLE, or 40% of total supply, is allocated to the ecosystem and community and held by the Stable Foundation. Of this allocation, 8 billion STABLE, representing 8% of total supply, was unlocked at mainnet launch on December 8, 2025. The remaining 32 billion STABLE is included in the Universal Lock alongside the Team and Investors and Advisors allocations. The locked tokens are released pro rata across seven scheduled floors beginning Dec. 8, 2027, with each floor vesting linearly over approximately 180 days. The category includes an 11% validator allocation.
• Team: 25 billion STABLE, or 25% of total supply, is allocated to the team and is entirely locked. The Universal Lock has replaced the previously disclosed one-year cliff followed by linear vesting. Team tokens participate pro rata in the same seven-floor release schedule as all other locked allocations, beginning Dec. 8, 2027, and reaching full release by Dec. 8, 2029, subject to the schedule's price-based deferral mechanism.
• Investors and Advisors: 25 billion STABLE, or 25% of total supply, is allocated to investors and advisors and is entirely locked. As with the Team allocation, the original one-year cliff and subsequent linear vesting schedule have been superseded by the Universal Lock. These tokens are released pro rata according to the same seven-floor schedule, with full release scheduled no later than Dec. 8, 2029.
• Genesis Distribution: 10 billion STABLE, or 10% of total supply, was allocated to the Genesis Distribution and has circulated since mainnet launch. Together with the 8 billion STABLE day-one Ecosystem and Community unlock, this brought the initial circulating supply to 18 billion STABLE, or 18% of total supply. The Genesis Distribution is excluded from the Universal Lock.

Token Utility

The STABLE token underpins the network’s security and governance layers:

• Security: To participate in the consensus process, validators must lock STABLE as collateral, while tokenholders can delegate their tokens to an existing validating node. If a validating node violates consensus rules or is not reliably online, it risks having its collateral slashed, discouraging misbehavior and bolstering alignment between the network and its participants.
• Governance: Both stakers and delegators can participate in network governance, including decisions on protocol parameters and upgrades, as well as allocating the community treasury.

Notably, validators can choose to share the USDT gas fees accumulated in the protocol’s fee vault with delegators. This model aims to create demand for STABLE by distributing rewards denominated in a stable asset like USDT, incentivizing participants to lock their STABLE tokens.

As of Sept. 25, 2026, STABLE has a $700.9 million circulating market cap with a $2.63 billion fully diluted valuation (FDV).

Ecosystem

Stable’s ecosystem spans base-layer settlement, consumer payments, and treasury/yield infrastructure. Network activity measures adoption, while StablePay, StableEarn, and StableHub extend the network into end-user distribution, capital management, and account-level access.

Network Activity

As of Sept. 25, 2026, StableChain has processed 33.5 million cumulative transactions and recorded 39,500 deployed smart contracts, including 2,180 verified contracts.

StablePay

StablePay is Stable’s consumer payments application for using USDT in everyday transactions. The app enables instant, free transfers between StablePay users and abstracts away long wallet addresses through StableName, phone numbers, emails, payment links, and QR codes. Users can pay, receive, request funds, add funds, and withdraw through a single USDT-focused interface.

StablePay is live on iOS and Android across more than 160 countries, giving Stable a direct consumer distribution layer on top of StableChain. StableEarn is integrated into the application, allowing users to move idle USDT into yield opportunities without switching to a separate DeFi interface. The integration links payment activity and treasury functionality around the same USDT balance, although StablePay adoption and transaction economics remain distinct from the underlying network’s token economics.

StableEarn

StableEarn is Stable’s USDT-native treasury and yield infrastructure layer, designed for institutional treasury balances, payment float, and idle stablecoin capital. The product extends Stable beyond transaction settlement into capital-efficiency infrastructure by giving users and integrated applications a way to deploy otherwise idle balances from within the Stable ecosystem.

StableEarn sources yield through structured capital deployment into curated Morpho lending markets. The product emphasizes transparent yield sources, risk controls, and integrations for wallets, exchanges, payment processors, and treasury platforms.

StableEarn launched with the “Prime Strategy,” a USDT-native lending deployment framework curated by Gauntlet risk management and support for multiple major stablecoin deposits. Stable has positioned the product for integrations with wallets, exchanges, payment processors, and treasury platforms, making the yield layer accessible as infrastructure rather than only as a standalone DeFi product.

StableHub 2.0

StableHub is Stable’s account interface for activity on the network. StableHub 2.0 is a redesigned version of that interface, intended to bring more of a user’s Stable activity into a single place. The updated Hub combines portfolio visibility, transaction history, access to financial products, and ecosystem discovery, with staking planned as part of the broader Hub experience.

The interface organizes that activity into several components:

• Portfolio and activity: Balances and transaction history for a connected account, giving users a consolidated view of assets held and transfers made on Stable.
• StableEarn access: StableEarn is built directly into StableHub 2.0, allowing users to view vault information, deposit or withdraw USDT, and monitor metrics such as APY, liquidity, total deposits, current balance, and projected earnings from the same interface.
• Discover: A searchable, filterable directory companies, protocols, and applications across the Stable ecosystem, organized into categories such as payments, DeFi, issuance, interoperability, and infrastructure.
• Staking: Planned as part of the broader Hub experience.

StableHub 2.0 shifts toward a broader account and ecosystem interface, giving users a single starting point to manage assets, track activity, access onchain financial products, and discover applications across Stable.

Taken together, StablePay, StableEarn, and StableHub broaden Stable’s product surface from base-layer settlement into consumer distribution, treasury management, and account-level access. The strategic rationale is that payments create transaction balances and float, an integrated yield layer can increase the utility of capital between payment events, and a unified account interface reduces the number of surfaces a user must navigate to reach both.

Roadmap

Stable’s remaining 2026 roadmap centers on scaling payment infrastructure, improving network performance, and expanding support for institutional and agent-driven transaction flows.

• Agentic Payments: Stable is developing payment infrastructure for autonomous systems that transact programmatically and at high frequency. The network’s USDT0-native gas model keeps revenue, settlement, and execution costs dollar-denominated, while gas waivers and signature-based payment flows can reduce the number of steps an agent must manage. Stable has also highlighted x402-style request-level payments as a target use case for machine-to-machine commerce.
• Institutional Partnerships: To drive broader use cases beyond crypto, Stable plans to scale the network through collaborations with traditional financial institutions, payment service providers, and fintech platforms.
• Expansion of USDT Adoption: As USDT adoption continues to grow globally, StableChain aims to become the primary settlement layer for the world’s largest stablecoin.

Beyond these key initiatives, Stable also has a multi-phase technical roadmap for StableChain, aimed at scaling at the infrastructure layer to support mass adoption.

Stable Mainnet v1.8.0

Stable v1.8.0 went live on Aug. 26, 2026. The upgrade coordinates changes across execution, mempool processing, state storage, and transaction inclusion through Optimistic Parallel Execution, Selective RecheckTx, MemIAVL, 2D Nonce, and Guaranteed Blockspace. The design aims to raise throughput while making performance more predictable under sustained load. For high-volume payment providers, exchanges, and treasury platforms, the practical objective is greater transaction capacity and more consistent access to blockspace during periods of high demand.

The upgrade also affects agent-driven applications. Independent nonce channels reduce the risk that one delayed transaction blocks subsequent transactions from the same account, while Guaranteed Blockspace can prioritize eligible traffic categories. These features matter for automated systems that submit continuous transaction streams, though realized performance will depend on configuration, workload characteristics, and post-activation network conditions.

Consensus Upgrades

In the long run, Stable plans to integrate Autobahn, a first-generation Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based BFT engine, with its existing BFT consensus mechanism, StableBFT. This model aims to address the core tradeoff in traditional BFT protocols: latency vs. robustness. Stable argues that while commonly used protocols like PBFT and HotStuff optimize responsiveness during periods of network stability, performance degrades during transient disruptions. In contrast, DAG-based BFT protocols like Narwhal and Tusk enable consistent network progress during periods of distribution but incur high latency due to communication overhead and asynchronous ordering.

Autobahn aims to bridge these two design philosophies by separating data dissemination and consensus to support both low latency and robustness. Autobahn is a BFT state machine replication (SMR) protocol that keeps multiple replicas of a shared system in sync, provided that a sufficient majority of those replicas are honest. Autobahn’s data dissemination layer, which broadcasts client transactions asynchronously, is parallelized, allowing each replica to propose transactions in an independent advancing chain called a “lane.” Each data proposal includes a group of acknowledgments known as a Certification of Available Request, or “car.” Cars are chained together via a reference to the previous car in each proposal, allowing the consensus layer to know that all prior data is retrievable by referencing the tip of a lane, as it implies the availability of the entire lane history. Because cars act as Proof-of-Availability (PoA), Autobahn requires minimal coordination between the consensus layer and the data dissemination layer and can trust that at least one correct replica holds the data and can retransmit it if required. This decoupled architecture enables high throughput and low latency, even during periods of high load or partial network failures.

Autobahn’s consensus leverages its data-lane structure to commit the state of many independent lanes at once by agreeing only on each replica’s latest proposal, or “tip,” rather than on all underlying data. Using a PBFT-style coordination pattern, the protocol reaches agreement on this summarized “tip cut” in either one or two rounds, after which replicas can independently reconstruct and synchronize any missing data in parallel, without blocking consensus progress. If the consensus leader receives enough votes, it can enter the “Fast Path” and commit immediately. Otherwise, it needs another quorum of acknowledgments before committing. Notably, replicas can vote based on tips alone, even if they haven’t received the full proposal data, because data availability is tied to cars, and each car references the previous car in its lane.

Execution Upgrades

Historically, networks have relied on sequential ordering, where transactions within a block are processed one at a time. While this approach is straightforward, many sequential transactions can limit throughput and increase latency. To work around this constraint, some blockchains have adopted parallel execution, enabling transactions to be processed concurrently. Static parallelism was among the first approaches to parallel execution, in which developers decide which instructions to execute in parallel to avoid transactions writing or reading the same resources. While this approach offered meaningful advantages over sequential ordering, the high burden on developers has limited the viability of static parallelism.

Dynamic parallelism detects conflicts during execution so independent transactions can be processed concurrently while preserving deterministic state. Stable v1.8.0 introduced Optimistic Parallel Execution (OPE), which executes independent activity in parallel and resolves conflicting state access while maintaining deterministic results across validators. The upgrade is intended to improve throughput on workloads with sufficient transaction independence.

Stable will leverage Block-STM, a parallel execution engine developed by Aptos Labs and utilized by multiple networks, including Polygon, Starknet, and Sei. The engine uses optimistic concurrency control, where transactions execute in parallel, and conflicts are resolved through re-execution during a validation phase. The mechanism aims to enhance performance through the following techniques:

• No Locks: Block-STM stores multiple versions of each memory key, allowing several transactions to read and write simultaneously without mutex locks (tools that prevent multiple threads from accessing shared data concurrently). Because it checks conflicts only after execution, this mechanism maximizes throughput during processing.
• Minimal Overhead: When a transaction fails, it's flagged with an ESTIMATE marker. This mechanism enables fast conflict detection and minimizes overhead, as dependent transactions immediately halt and wait to be re-executed if they read an ESTIMATE-marked value.
• Efficient Scheduling: Block-STM features a Collaborative Scheduler that distributes tasks between execution and validation markers. It prioritizes work on lower-indexed transactions, those most likely to unblock the commit frontier, thereby reducing wasted parallel effort and improving efficiency.
• Determinism: Because transactions follow a fixed order, any re-executed transaction still commits in the same sequence. This maintains safe, deterministic state agreement across nodes and preserves consensus integrity even under parallel execution.

Stable also plans to implement optimistic block processing (OBP). Originally proposed by Sei in 2022, this mechanism allows validators to process transactions as soon as they receive a block proposal, rather than waiting for the precommit and prevote steps of consensus to complete. Because the first proposed block at a given height is typically approved after voting, transactions from that initial proposal can be processed optimistically. The resulting state is cached in memory, and if the block is rejected, the cached data is discarded, and subsequent rounds at that block height will not use OBP. If the block is accepted, the state cache is committed immediately. By optimizing execution timing, OBP can further reduce latency on StableChain, delivering enhanced performance during periods of high transaction load.

Beyond parallelization and block-processing enhancements that optimize concurrent transaction processing, Stable is also exploring EVM alternatives to improve each transaction's performance. One leading option is EVMONE, a C++ EVM implementation that Stable expects could deliver up to a 6x improvement in execution performance.

RPC Upgrades

To support applications that require high transaction throughput, Stable aims to release a performant RPC with node-level enhancements for chain-state processing, a node-integrated indexer for consistent API performance, a scalable WebSocket architecture for reliable subscription and event delivery, and a hybrid load balancer for intelligent traffic distribution.

Closing Summary

StableChain is built from the ground up to meet the rising demand for onchain payment systems. The network facilitates low-cost, high-throughput USDT transfers through its core technical architecture: StableBFT for consensus, Stable EVM for execution, StableDB for storage, and a custom RPC for application interaction and enhanced performance. Beyond the core network stack, features such as Guaranteed Blockspace and confidential transfers highlight the project’s commitment to supporting enterprises exploring onchain payments. STABLE, the project’s native token, aims to foster long-term ecosystem alignment by allocating tokens to core contributors, investors, and community initiatives, including campaigns surrounding the mainnet launch.

Looking ahead, Stable’s roadmap remains focused on increasing network performance and expanding the range of payment activity the network can support. Planned improvements to consensus and RPC infrastructure, along with further development of institutional and agentic payment systems, are intended to help StableChain better support high-volume USDT settlement across consumer, enterprise, and autonomous applications.