For most of crypto's history, stablecoins were tenants. USDT and USDC paid rent on Ethereum, Tron, Solana, and a long tail of EVM L2s, and the chains underneath captured the gas. The 2025-2026 wave inverts that relationship. A new class of L1s has launched or announced with stablecoins as the default unit of account, the gas token, and the reason for existing. This guide maps the chains worth tracking, who is behind each one, and how they actually differ.
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Tether's circulating supply now sits near $189.5B and USDC near $78.1B, per DeFiLlama. That combined ~$268B float, plus another ~$50B across USDS, USDe, PYUSD, BUIDL, RLUSD, and the long tail, is what every chain in this list is competing to host.
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A stablecoin-native L1 is a base-layer blockchain designed around stablecoin payments and settlement rather than general smart-contract use. Native means stablecoins are the gas token, the validator-incentive asset, or the chain's primary product, not just an ERC-20 sitting in a contract. Plasma, Stable, Tempo, and Codex fit this definition; Monad and Converge are general-purpose L1s with deep stablecoin orientation.
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Three things converged. Tether grew past $180B in supply, making the rent it pays to Tron and Ethereum a strategic liability worth solving. The GENIUS Act and parallel EU MiCA rules clarified payment-stablecoin issuance for U.S. and European banks. And Stripe's $1.1B Bridge acquisition in 2024, followed by its 2025 Tempo announcement, signaled that mainstream payment companies want their own settlement layer rather than renting Ethereum blockspace. The result is a wave of purpose-built L1s, each backed by a different incumbent.
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The table below covers the chains most often grouped under the stablecoin-L1 banner in 2026. Status reflects public announcements and DeFiLlama data captured in early 2026. Native focus means the stablecoin the chain is engineered around, not every asset it supports.

Plasma is a Bitcoin-anchored, EVM-compatible L1 from the Tether and Bitfinex orbit, with Founders Fund and Framework among lead investors. The pitch is simple: USDT transfers should cost zero, and the chain's paymaster covers gas in USDT so users never touch the XPL token unless they want to. Plasma launched its mainnet beta in late September 2025 with several billion in USDT bridged on day one, per the project's own announcement and Bloomberg coverage.
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The differentiator is integration depth. Tether has confirmed USDT will be canonically issued on Plasma rather than bridged, and the chain settles checkpoints to Bitcoin for additional security. For a deeper breakdown, see support/en/articles/15010642.
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Stable takes Plasma's idea one step further. Instead of a paymaster abstracting gas, Stable uses USDT itself as the gas asset, with no separate L1 token required to pay fees. The chain is associated with the USDT0 cross-chain transport team and is positioned as a Tether-aligned settlement layer for remittance and merchant flows.
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As of early 2026, Stable is in testnet with a mainnet date publicly targeted for the first half of the year. Treat any TVL or supply numbers as pre-launch.
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Tempo, announced in September 2025, is a Stripe and Paradigm collaboration. Stripe contributes payments distribution, Bridge integration, and the merchant network it acquired in 2024; Paradigm contributes the engineering bench. The public framing is a payments-optimized L1 where stablecoins are the default gas asset and where Stripe's existing customers get a settlement rail without leaving the Stripe surface.
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Tempo is devnet-only as of early 2026, with no public mainnet date. The strategic significance is the distribution: Stripe processes well over $1.4 trillion a year, and any meaningful share of that flowing through a Stripe-controlled chain reshapes the stablecoin map.
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Codex is an Optimism-stack L2 that markets itself as a stablecoin-first rollup, with Coinbase Ventures and Dragonfly among backers. USDC pays for gas, and the chain targets B2B payments and stablecoin treasuries rather than DeFi speculation. Codex is live on mainnet in 2026 and is documented in Eco's existing explainer at /support/en/articles/13052727.
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Codex sits closer to Coinbase's USDC distribution than Plasma sits to Tether's, but it is technically an L2 rather than a sovereign L1. Whether that distinction matters depends on whether you treat Ethereum-anchored rollups as L1-equivalent for payments use.
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Converge was announced in March 2025 by Securitize and Ethena Labs. The chain is engineered for tokenized real-world assets and yield-bearing dollars: USDe and USDtb on the stablecoin side, BUIDL and other tokenized funds on the RWA side. Validators stake ENA, gas can be paid in USDe, and an institutional KYC lane sits alongside the permissionless one.
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Converge is testnet as of early 2026 with mainnet targeted for the first half of the year. For the full breakdown, see PLACEHOLDER-what-is-converge-blockchain.
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Monad is not a stablecoin L1 in the strict sense. It is a general-purpose, EVM-compatible L1 from Monad Labs, backed by Paradigm, that uses parallel execution to target 10,000 TPS with 1-second blocks. It earns a place on this list because every major payment-grade stablecoin including USDT, USDC, USDe, PYUSD, and USDS has either deployed or announced deployment on Monad mainnet, and the chain is being marketed as the default high-throughput EVM venue for stablecoin DeFi.
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For the architecture deep-dive, see support/en/articles/15010644. For an adjacent throughput-focused chain often compared in the same breath, see support/en/articles/15010643, and for the application-specific Hyperliquid case, see support/en/articles/15010645.
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The line worth drawing is whether the chain economically depends on stablecoin flow. Plasma, Stable, and Codex collapse if USDT or USDC walk away; their gas, validator economics, and product story are all stablecoin-denominated. Monad, Solana, and Ethereum keep going regardless. That dependency is a feature, not a bug, for treasurers and payment companies who want a chain whose incentives are aligned with theirs rather than with whatever DeFi narrative is trending.
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Eco Routes is a stablecoin transport API that abstracts whichever L1 is cheapest at the moment of payment. From a developer's perspective, a payment in USDC on Codex, USDT on Plasma, or USDe on Converge is the same single API call. The chain choice becomes an optimization, not a distribution problem, which is the entire reason these L1s can compete on cost without forcing every wallet and merchant to integrate them individually.
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A few chains that get grouped here but probably should not. Tron is the largest stablecoin host by USDT supply, but it predates the 2025 wave and was not designed around stablecoins; it just got there first. Solana hosts roughly $12B in stablecoins but is general-purpose. Hyperliquid runs its own L1 for perpetuals settlement, with a stablecoin component, but the product is exchange-first; see Eco's existing explainer at /support/en/articles/11972709. Ink is Kraken's L2 and is documented at /support/en/articles/10370746; it leans general-purpose despite the exchange backing.
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Stablecoin supplies and chain TVLs are pulled from DeFiLlama (api.llama.fi/stablecoins, /protocols, /v2/chains) on May 4, 2026. Plasma and Stable details are sourced from the Plasma documentation at plasma.to and Bloomberg's September 2025 launch coverage. Tempo details come from Stripe's September 2025 announcement and Paradigm's accompanying post. Codex details come from the Codex documentation and Coinbase Ventures portfolio listings. Converge details come from the Securitize and Ethena joint announcement of March 2025. Monad details come from monad.xyz documentation and Paradigm's research posts. Status, gas-token mechanics, and EVM compatibility were re-checked against each project's official site in early May 2026.
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