Settlement-First L1s: The STABLE Blockchain Thesis for Predictable Finality and Fees

Layer 1 blockchains have long been sold as “world computers” - generalized execution environments measured by peak TPS, DeFi composability, and speculative yield. That framing has produced rich ecosystems, but it also sits awkwardly with use cases that look like traditional financial infrastructure: payments, settlement, and custody of real-world assets.

The emerging “settlement-first” thesis flips those priorities. Instead of maximizing expressiveness and speculative activity, these networks are built as base layers for final settlement: predictable fees, deterministic finality, and resilience under load. Within that frame, the STABLE blockchain represents a specialized L1 designed for:

• Deterministic fee models, typically denominated in stablecoins.
• Stable, predictable throughput rather than eye-catching peak TPS.
• Security and finality guarantees tuned for regulated, long-lived financial flows.
• Native support for stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), including B2B payments and institutional settlement.

This article uses a STABLE-style architecture to explore the settlement-first L1 thesis: how stablecoin-based settlement networks are designed, how they perform, how institutions are engaging with them, and how they compare with general-purpose chains like Ethereum and Solana. It also looks at competitive positioning, key risks, and bull/base/bear scenarios for this niche.

The focus stays on what can be grounded in available research: the growth of stablecoins, the behavior of settlement-oriented L1s such as Arc and peers, and the structural reasons deterministic finality and predictable fees matter for institutional finance.

The Settlement-First L1 Thesis

From “World Computer” to Settlement Rail

General-purpose L1s launched with a broad mandate: host arbitrary computation and applications in a permissionless setting. Ethereum, Solana, and others optimized for:

• Rich smart contract languages.
• Composability across DeFi, NFTs, gaming, and more.
• High theoretical throughput and flexible execution.

That generality introduces trade-offs that show up most sharply in payments and settlement:

• Probabilistic finality: On Nakamoto-style systems and many PoS chains, confirmations are probabilistic. Transactions can be “confirmed” yet still vulnerable to reorgs until enough blocks have passed.
• Fee volatility: Gas auctions and blockspace competition cause fees to spike unpredictably during congestion.
• Resource contention: DeFi, NFTs, and other speculative traffic share blockspace with payments, making latency and costs erratic.

A settlement-first L1 like STABLE is designed around the opposite premise:

• Predictability over optionality: For regulated finance, stable costs and clear finality matter more than maximal expressiveness or speculative yield.
• Deterministic finality over probabilistic confirmation: Institutions want hard guarantees that a confirmed transaction is final and irreversible within a known window.
• Stable fees over gas auctions: B2B payments and RWA settlement need fee models that can be budgeted and written into contracts, not exposed to gas-market whiplash.

In this model, STABLE is not a universal substrate for all on-chain activity. It is a specialized chain for:

• Stablecoins as primary settlement assets.
• Tokenized RWAs (bonds, funds, securities, invoices).
• B2B and cross-border payments where throughput stability and compliance are non‑negotiable.
• Long-lived financial flows (recurring payments, treasury operations) rather than short-lived speculative bursts.

Design Priorities: Predictable Finality and Fees

A settlement-first chain orients around three core properties.

1. Deterministic finality

   Using Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus variants (PBFT-like protocols, HotStuff-style designs, or engines such as Malachite or StableBFT), settlement-first L1s can offer:

   • Sub-second finality (often cited in the 400–600 ms range).
   • Strong irreversibility once a supermajority of validators finalizes a block.
   • No need to wait for multiple confirmations for practical finality.

   Contrast this with:

   • Bitcoin: six confirmations (~1 hour) typically recommended for high-value transfers.
   • Ethereum: dozens of blocks often used as a rule of thumb for strong guarantees.

2. Stable, deterministic fee model

   Instead of using a volatile native token as gas, settlement-first L1s often:

   • Use stablecoins (e.g., USDC, USDT) as the fee and settlement asset.
   • Target narrow fee bands (e.g., consistently under one cent).
   • Design fee markets to avoid extreme spikes during stress.

   That enables:

   • Merchants and enterprises to budget transaction costs.
   • Payment processors to price services with minimal basis risk.
   • Contracts and SLAs based on stable assumptions about transaction costs.

3. Operational reliability under load

   Rather than chasing record TPS, settlement-first designs emphasize:

   • Stable throughput that degrades gracefully under bursts of activity.
   • Prioritization of settlement transactions over speculative traffic.
   • Architectural choices (deterministic scheduling, QoS-like policies) to keep latency and fee guarantees intact even under stress.

Combined, these priorities make a STABLE-style L1 behave less like an experimental compute platform and more like a high-availability payment rail.

Fundamentals of the STABLE-Style Architecture

The research does not spell out a full technical spec for STABLE, but it does describe the standard ingredients of settlement-first L1s that STABLE would logically adopt: BFT consensus, stablecoin-native fee models, and protocol-level support for compliance and settlement guarantees.

Consensus and Finality: BFT at the Core

Settlement-first L1s generally use BFT-style consensus. In practice:

• BFT consensus provides hard guarantees: once a supermajority of validators finalizes a block, it cannot be reverted without violating core assumptions.
• Production implementations (PBFT variants, HotStuff-style protocols, custom engines) can deliver sub-second finality.
• This deterministic finality is different in kind from the probabilistic guarantees on many PoW and PoS systems.

Networks like Arc (using Malachite consensus) and related settlement-first chains are cited as achieving:

• Deterministic finality in the 400–600 ms range.
• Immediate irreversibility suitable for merchant and institutional settlement.

A STABLE-style chain would likely use a similar BFT engine (e.g., StableBFT) to:

• Guarantee that inclusion in a block implies finality within a bounded time.
• Match finality semantics expected from traditional RTGS systems, where settlement is final at posting.

Native Stablecoin Integration

A second defining feature is treating stablecoins as native transaction currencies:

• Some settlement-first L1s (e.g., Arc) use USDC as both gas and settlement asset.
• Others integrate USDT or multiple stablecoins directly at protocol level.
• Fees are paid in stablecoins; balances and accounting are natively denominated in stable units.

This solves several chronic issues on general-purpose L1s:

• Users and enterprises need not hold a volatile asset (ETH, SOL) just to pay fees.
• Accounting and treasury ops simplify when on-chain and off-chain units match.
• Fee predictability improves because the unit of account is stable and fee bands can be engineered tightly.

In a STABLE-like design, that likely looks like:

• USDT (or a basket of regulated stablecoins) as the primary settlement currency.
• A separate native token (e.g., STABLE) reserved for validator staking, governance, or security bonding, not gas.
• A clear split between the economic layer for security and the transactional layer for payments.

Security and Compliance as First-Class Citizens

Fast, cheap settlement is not enough for institutional adoption. These networks also need:

• Compliance integration: Support for KYC/AML, sanctions screening, and regulatory reporting.
• Auditability: Transparent histories that reconcile cleanly with off-chain records.
• Governance and upgradability: Processes that institutions and regulators can understand and work with.

The research notes that:

• Institutional-focused networks like Canton have attracted major players (BNY Mellon, Nasdaq, S&P Global) by emphasizing compliance, privacy, and regulated asset settlement.
• Settlement-first L1s can build compliance primitives into the protocol, rather than relying purely on middleware.

For a STABLE-style chain, that implies:

• Protocol hooks for identity and permissioning when needed (e.g., whitelisting regulated participants for certain assets).
• Native support for regulated stablecoins and RWAs aligned with regimes such as MiCA in Europe and emerging US rules.
• Governance structures that are legible to regulators and institutional stakeholders.

Specialization vs. Generalization

The key conceptual difference between STABLE-style chains and “universal” L1s is a willingness to specialize. Where Ethereum and Solana aim to support everything from DeFi to games, a settlement-first L1 narrows its scope:

• Focus on predictable, regulated, long-lived financial flows.
• Deprioritize or restrict high-risk, high-volatility activity that could destabilize fee markets or raise compliance risk.
• Optimize data structures, state management, and execution for settlement and accounting rather than arbitrary computation.

That specialization enables:

• Simpler, more deterministic execution environments.
• Easier reasoning about worst-case performance.
• Tighter alignment with financial infrastructure requirements.

STABLE is not pitched as the next general-purpose smart contract platform. It is a settlement rail for stable-value assets.

On-Chain and Market Metrics

To gauge the opportunity for settlement-first L1s like STABLE, it helps to look at the broader stablecoin and settlement landscape: supply, transaction volumes, fee behavior, and performance.

Stablecoin Market Growth

The research points to substantial expansion in the stablecoin sector:

• Total stablecoin circulation reached roughly $250 billion by late 2025.
• Tether (USDT) accounts for over $155 billion of that.
• Circle’s USDC stands at around $60 billion.

Usage has grown alongside supply:

• USDC payments reportedly grew 337% year-on-year versus 2024.
• B2B stablecoin volumes reached about $3 billion per month by mid-2025, roughly a 30x increase from earlier levels.

Stablecoins have moved from niche trading tools to meaningful payment and settlement instruments, especially in cross-border and B2B flows.

Settlement Speed and Efficiency

Stablecoin-based settlement dramatically compresses settlement times versus legacy rails:

• Traditional cross-border payments can take 3–5 business days.
• Generic blockchain-based payments have cut this to under 3 minutes in many corridors.
• Stablecoin transfers specifically have achieved average completion times around 3.2 seconds, versus a broader blockchain average of 27 seconds for crypto payments.

For enterprises, this means:

• Faster working capital cycles.
• Lower counterparty and settlement risk.
• 24/7/365 operation, independent of banking hours and cut-offs.

Payment processors and networks that integrate stablecoins (e.g., Worldpay with USDC on Solana) already show:

• Instant settlement relative to 1–3 day clearing cycles.
• Continuous availability.

Settlement-first L1s aim to extend these benefits by pairing stablecoins with deterministic finality and engineered fee predictability.

Fee Structures and Volatility

Fee dynamics are where settlement-first L1s most clearly diverge from general-purpose chains:

• Ethereum:
  • Average transaction fees around $0.39, often much higher during congestion.
  • Fees paid in ETH, adding currency risk.
  • Gas auctions create unpredictable costs, especially during DeFi/NFT surges.
• Bitcoin:
  • Average transaction fees around $5.90, with high variance based on mempool conditions.
  • Poor fit for small payments and high-frequency settlement.

Settlement-first L1s instead target:

• Fees in the $0.001–$0.05 range.
• Stablecoin-denominated fees, eliminating FX basis between fee asset and settlement asset.
• Mechanisms to dampen fee spikes even during heavy usage.

For example:

• STABLE is described as targeting sub‑one‑cent transaction fees.
• Arc and similar networks offer sub‑cent USDC-denominated fees.

For merchants, processors, and enterprises, this is as much about predictable cost as low cost:

• Fixed or narrow-banded pricing becomes viable.
• Financial planning and margin management get simpler.
• End users aren’t surprised by fee shocks.

Finality Metrics

Finality sits at the heart of the settlement-first pitch. The research offers a comparative picture:

• Settlement-first L1s (typical):
  • Deterministic finality in 400–600 ms.
  • BFT consensus ensures irreversibility once finalized.
• Ethereum:
  • Practical finality often assumed after 12+ blocks (~3 minutes), with full economic finality over longer horizons.
  • Still probabilistic; reorgs, while rare, are possible.
• Bitcoin:
  • Six confirmations (~60 minutes) standard for high-value transfers.
  • Purely probabilistic.

The key difference is not just speed but semantics:

• On a settlement-first L1, “confirmed” means final within a strict bound.
• On probabilistic chains, “confirmed” means “very unlikely to be reversed,” but not impossible within the window.

That semantic clarity matters for:

• Physical goods shipment.
• Securities and RWA settlement.
• Interbank and corporate treasury moves.

Network Infrastructure and Adoption

According to the research:

• Settlement-first L1s are at mixed stages:
  • Some live on mainnet with institutional partners.
  • Others remain in testnet or private deployments.
• Arc launched publicly in late 2025 with institutional backing and uses USDC natively.
• STABLE is described as a USDT-native L1 optimized around stablecoin settlement.
• Tempo is another settlement-focused network supporting multiple stablecoins for fees.

By comparison:

• Ethereum TVL exceeds $10 billion.
• Solana TVL is around $7 billion.
• Settlement-first L1s are smaller in absolute terms, targeting a different segment: institutional settlement, not speculative DeFi.

Comparative Metrics Table

Key metrics comparing settlement-first L1s with major general-purpose L1s:

Settlement-first L1s do not primarily compete on raw TPS. Their differentiation lies in finality semantics, fee predictability, and compliance integration.

Competitive Landscape and Alternatives

Settlement-first L1s like STABLE sit among several overlapping alternatives:

• Other settlement-first L1s.
• General-purpose L1s adapted for payments.
• Layer 2 scaling solutions.
• Centralized and hybrid payment systems.

Direct Settlement-First Competitors

The research highlights a few networks that embody a similar philosophy:

• Arc (by Circle):
  • USDC as native gas and settlement asset.
  • BFT consensus (Malachite) for sub-second deterministic finality.
  • Open, public blockchain with institutional-grade settlement features.
• Tempo:
  • Stablecoin-agnostic settlement L1.
  • Multiple stablecoins supported as fee assets.
  • Focus on predictable settlement for payments and tokenized assets.
• STABLE:
  • USDT-native or generally stablecoin-native fee model.
  • Deterministic fees and throughput.
  • Emphasis on security, predictability, and regulated flows.

Common traits:

• BFT-based consensus.
• Stablecoin-native fees.
• Focus on B2B payments, RWAs, and institutional settlement.

Key differences:

• Primary stablecoin choice (USDC vs USDT vs multi-stable).
• Governance and validator composition.
• Degree of openness vs permissioning.
• Depth of integration with existing financial institutions.

General-Purpose L1s as De Facto Settlement Layers

Some general-purpose L1s have become important stablecoin rails despite not being designed for that role:

• Ethereum:
  • Original home for most major stablecoins.
  • Deep DeFi liquidity and composability.
  • Fee volatility and slower finality make it less ideal for high-frequency, low-margin payments.
• Solana:
  • High throughput, low fees, growing use for stablecoin payments.
  • Used by major processors and card networks in pilot programs.
  • Still relies on a volatile native asset (SOL) for fees, with probabilistic finality.

Their advantages:

• Large existing ecosystems.
• Established infrastructure (wallets, exchanges, custodians).
• Strong network effects.

Their gaps relative to settlement-first L1s:

• No deterministic finality with tight bounds.
• Non-stable fee units.
• Limited protocol-level compliance primitives.

Layer 2 and Off-Chain Solutions

L2s and off-chain networks also address payment and settlement needs:

• Rollups (optimistic, ZK):
  • Lower fees and higher throughput on top of Ethereum.
  • Ultimately inherit L1’s probabilistic finality and fee environment.
  • Complex finality semantics (e.g., challenge windows).
• Payment/state channels:
  • Instant, low-cost off-chain transfers with periodic on-chain settlement.
  • Require channel setup and locked liquidity.
• Bitcoin Lightning Network:
  • Off-chain BTC payments with fast, low-fee transfers.
  • Not stablecoin-native and not built for RWAs.

These can complement or compete with settlement-first L1s on specific use cases, but they bring:

• More complex UX and operational overhead.
• Dependence on underlying L1 fee/finality behavior.
• Less direct alignment with regulated, institutional settlement.

Centralized and Hybrid Payment Infrastructures

Existing systems remain powerful competitors:

• SWIFT and correspondent banking:
  • Global reach, embedded in institutional workflows.
  • Slow and expensive, but tightly integrated with compliance and risk frameworks.
• Card networks and PSPs:
  • Instant authorization; settlement delayed.
  • High fees compared to blockchain-based options.
• Private and consortium blockchains:
  • Networks like Canton focus on regulated asset settlement.
  • Strong compliance and privacy.
  • Typically permissioned rather than public infrastructure.

Public settlement-first L1s like STABLE must bridge:

• The openness and auditability of public chains.
• The compliance and governance expectations of institutional finance.

Their pitch: public verifiability and low fees, with protocol-level compliance hooks that capture some strengths of private networks.

Why Predictable Finality and Fees Matter

The STABLE thesis stems from how financial systems actually operate, not just from technical preferences.

Operational Risk and Finality

In traditional finance:

• Settlement finality is a legal and operational concept. Once a payment settles, it cannot be revoked except under extraordinary circumstances.
• RTGS systems are built so that posting a transaction makes it final.

On probabilistic blockchains:

• Merchants and institutions choose how many confirmations feel “safe,” creating subjective thresholds.
• High-value transfers often wait 30–60 minutes on Bitcoin to reach acceptable confidence.
• In volatile environments, that delay can be costly or unworkable.

Deterministic finality on a settlement-first L1:

• Aligns with legal and operational notions of final settlement.
• Lets businesses ship goods, release collateral, or update ledgers immediately on confirmation.
• Shrinks settlement risk windows and associated capital costs.

Cost Predictability and Business Models

For processors, merchants, and enterprises:

• Transaction fees are core to pricing and contract design.
• Volatile fees make fixed pricing and tight SLAs hard to sustain.
• In low-margin sectors, fee spikes can wipe out profit.

A deterministic, stable fee model:

• Supports fixed or cleanly tiered pricing for payment services.
• Reduces the need to hedge against fee volatility.
• Improves UX by avoiding unpredictable surcharges.

By using stablecoins as fee assets and engineering narrow bands, settlement-first L1s like STABLE directly target this issue.

Regulatory and Compliance Alignment

Regulators are increasingly treating stablecoins as payment instruments:

• Frameworks like MiCA in Europe and emerging US rules impose:
  • Reserve and redemption standards.
  • Oversight closer to bank or money market regulation.

This shifts stablecoins from speculative tokens toward regulated financial products.

Settlement-first L1s can align by:

• Embedding compliance primitives at protocol level.
• Supporting auditability and reporting.
• Enabling whitelisted or permissioned layers where required.

For STABLE, that means:

• Positioning as a settlement rail for regulated stablecoin issuance and redemption.
• Providing deterministic settlement and clear audit trails that match expectations for critical financial infrastructure.

Risk Analysis and Negative Scenarios

Despite a strong narrative, settlement-first L1s like STABLE face meaningful risks across regulation, technology, economics, and competition.

Regulatory and Policy Risk

Regulation is both a tailwind and a threat:

• Stablecoin rules lend legitimacy but also bring:
  • Licensing for issuers, and potentially for core infrastructure.
  • Jurisdictional fragmentation.
  • Possible discomfort with permissionless networks for regulated assets.

Downside scenarios:

• Regulators insist that systemically important stablecoins circulate only on:
  • Permissioned, consortium blockchains.
  • Infrastructure owned by regulated institutions.
• Tight limits on pseudonymous or permissionless access to stablecoin rails.
• Compliance burdens that make operating validators or nodes unattractive for institutions.

If policymakers steer toward permissioned setups, public settlement-first L1s like STABLE could be sidelined or forced into hybrids that dilute openness.

Stablecoin Concentration and Counterparty Risk

Stablecoins are heavily concentrated:

• USDT and USDC dominate supply.
• Each rests on a centralized issuer’s reserve management and policies.

Risks:

• Regulatory action against a major issuer.
• Loss of confidence due to reserve or operational issues.
• Address blacklisting or freezes at the issuer level.

For a STABLE-style chain deeply tied to one stablecoin (e.g., USDT-native), this is systemic:

• A problem at the issuer could impair the network’s core utility.
• Long-lived infrastructure looks riskier if it depends on a single issuer.

Mitigation requires:

• Supporting multiple regulated stablecoins.
• Designing for graceful degradation if one fails.
• Encouraging more diversified settlement assets over time.

Technical and Security Risk

By promising deterministic finality and high performance, settlement-first L1s raise the bar on:

• Robust BFT consensus under adversarial conditions.
• Resilience to network partitions, validator failures, and DDoS.
• Secure validator key management and staking.

Failure modes include:

• Consensus bugs that break finality guarantees.
• Validator collusion or compromise enabling double-spends or censorship.
• Implementation bugs in the fee model or execution engine.

Because the target customers are institutions, tolerance for such events is low:

• A single major failure can severely damage credibility.
• Some institutions may prefer slower but battle-tested systems to faster, newer ones.

Adoption and Network Effects

General-purpose L1s enjoy:

• Large developer communities.
• Deep liquidity and DeFi ecosystems.
• Strong brand and network effects.

Settlement-first L1s like STABLE must overcome:

• Cold starts: attracting validators, developers, and users to a new chain.
• Integration friction: convincing processors, custodians, and banks to add another network.
• Liquidity fragmentation: stablecoin supply and liquidity spread over many chains.

Negative outcomes:

• Settlement-first L1s stay niche with low volume and shallow liquidity.
• General-purpose L1s improve fee stability and finality enough to satisfy most institutional needs.
• Institutions gravitate toward private or consortium systems instead.

Fragmentation and Interoperability Risk

If multiple settlement-first L1s succeed (Arc, STABLE, Tempo, others):

• Liquidity and user bases fragment.
• Cross-rail interoperability becomes critical and difficult.
• Institutions may have to support multiple networks, raising complexity.

Without solid standards and tooling for cross-chain settlement:

• The vision of a unified settlement layer weakens.
• Network effects may concentrate around a small number of winners, leaving others marginal.

Scenario Analysis: Bull, Base, and Bear Paths

Given these forces, it’s useful to sketch plausible trajectories for settlement-first L1s like STABLE. These are directional scenarios, not price calls.

Bull Scenario: Settlement-First Becomes Core Infrastructure

In the bull case:

• Stablecoins keep growing quickly, with deep institutional use.
• Regulation matures in ways that:
  • Allow public settlement-first L1s to host regulated stablecoins.
  • Encourage transparent public settlement layers alongside private systems.
• Institutions adopt settlement-first L1s for:
  • Cross-border B2B payments.
  • Treasury and cash management.
  • Settlement of tokenized RWAs (bonds, funds, securities, invoices).
• Settlement-first L1s like STABLE reach:
  • High transaction volumes at stable, sub-cent fees.
  • Deep, multi-stablecoin liquidity.
  • Integration with major processors, banks, and custodians.
• General-purpose L1s remain central for DeFi and apps, while settlement-first L1s become the default rails for regulated settlement.

Here, STABLE and its peers resemble RTGS systems or card networks in importance, but as public, programmable settlement layers.

Base Scenario: Coexistence and Focused Dominance

In the base case:

• Stablecoin use keeps rising, but regulatory fragmentation tempers institutional use of public chains.
• Some regions and sectors favor permissioned or consortium solutions; others are open to public settlement-first L1s.
• Settlement-first L1s like STABLE find strong product–market fit in specific niches:
  • Underserved cross-border corridors.
  • Fintechs and payment startups that want open access and low fees.
  • RWA and DeFi-adjacent cases where deterministic finality is critical.
• General-purpose L1s improve their fee models and finality enough for many institutional use cases.
• Settlement-first L1s coexist with:
  • General-purpose L1s (Ethereum, Solana).
  • L2 solutions.
  • Private and consortium chains.

STABLE succeeds, but as one piece of a heterogeneous stack rather than the dominant settlement rail.

Bear Scenario: Marginalization and Regulatory Pushback

In the bear case:

• Regulation tilts hard toward:
  • Permissioned, institution-controlled stablecoin and RWA infrastructure.
  • Strict limits on public, permissionless chains for regulated assets.
• Major stablecoin issuers must:
  • Restrict circulation to whitelisted networks.
  • Enforce strict KYC/AML at the infrastructure layer.
• General-purpose L1s and L2s:
  • Improve enough on fees and finality for most needs.
  • Lean on network effects and liquidity advantages.
• Settlement-first L1s like STABLE:
  • Struggle to win institutional buy-in.
  • See limited integration with core financial institutions.
  • Remain niche or shift focus to less regulated use cases.

The thesis behind settlement-first design still makes sense in principle, but public L1 implementations fail to secure large-scale adoption.

Scenario Comparison Table

Positioning of STABLE Within This Landscape

Within this backdrop, the STABLE blockchain thesis can be stated more sharply:

• Core value proposition:
  • A settlement-first L1 optimized for:
    • Predictable, stablecoin-denominated fees.
    • Deterministic, sub-second finality.
    • High reliability under load.
    • Protocol-level support for regulated, long-lived flows.
• Target market:
  • Stablecoin issuers and processors seeking predictable settlement rails.
  • Enterprises and fintechs needing reliable cross-border and B2B payments.
  • Platforms issuing and settling tokenized RWAs.
• Differentiation:
  • Versus Ethereum:
    • Stronger fee predictability and clearer finality semantics for payments.
    • Less general-purpose composability, by design.
  • Versus Solana:
    • Stablecoin-native fees and deterministic finality.
    • Closer alignment with regulated settlement, potentially at the expense of breadth.
  • Versus Arc/Tempo:
    • Different primary stablecoin choice (e.g., USDT-native vs USDC-native).
    • Distinct governance and validator structures.
    • Specific ecosystem and regional focus.

STABLE’s trajectory will hinge on:

• Execution: delivering on finality, fee stability, and uptime.
• Ecosystem: attracting validators, builders, integrators, and end users.
• Regulatory fit: being seen as acceptable infrastructure for regulated stablecoin and RWA settlement.
• Interoperability: integrating with other chains, L2s, and legacy financial systems.

Conclusion

The settlement-first L1 thesis marks a clear shift in blockchain design. Instead of stretching for maximal generality and speculative throughput, networks like STABLE concentrate on what settlement infrastructure actually needs: deterministic finality, predictable fees, and operational reliability.

The research shows:

• Stablecoins now represent a large and growing asset class, with hundreds of billions in circulation and fast-rising usage.
• Settlement-first L1s, built on BFT consensus and stablecoin-native fees, can offer sub-second finality and sub-cent, predictable pricing.
• Those properties line up closely with the needs of B2B payments, cross-border settlement, and tokenized RWAs, especially as regulators increasingly treat stablecoins as payment instruments.

But the road is not straightforward:

• Regulatory outcomes are uncertain and may favor permissioned systems.
• Stablecoin concentration introduces issuer and counterparty risk.
• General-purpose L1s, L2s, and private networks are formidable competitors.
• Network effects and adoption hurdles are significant.

For STABLE, the challenge is to demonstrate that a specialized, settlement-first L1 can deliver clear, durable advantages over existing rails while staying aligned with evolving regulation. If it can, STABLE-style blockchains could become core components of global settlement infrastructure-public, programmable, and engineered specifically for predictable finality and fees.