Stablecoin supply hits $310B as Armstrong says Bitcoin missed Satoshi's goal

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said Bitcoin failed to become the peer-to-peer cash Satoshi Nakamoto envisioned, with stablecoins capturing the payments use case instead.

Bitcoin trades at $64,523, down 45% from its October 2025 peak of $126,080, as stablecoin supply hit a record $310 billion.

"It's fair to say at this point that Bitcoin has succeeded as a store of value, and I don't think it has become a medium of exchange," Brian Armstrong, chief executive officer of Coinbase, said in an interview with Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath on the People by WTF podcast.

Nakamoto's 2008 whitepaper envisioned electronic cash moving directly between parties without a bank. Seventeen years later, Bitcoin's capped supply and volatility have encouraged hoarding rather than spending, Armstrong said. "People think it's going to be worth more in the future, so they don't really want to spend it right now," he added. Attempts to fix this, such as the Lightning Network, "never really took off."

Meanwhile, stablecoins filled the gap. DefiLlama data shows total stablecoin supply near $310 billion, with Tether's USDT at $184 billion and Circle's USDC at $73 billion. Much of that activity now runs on Coinbase's Base and Solana, Armstrong said, crediting the GENIUS Act signed in July 2025 for giving the tokens legal clarity in the US.

The divergence carries implications for capital allocation across crypto markets. With Bitcoin cemented as digital gold and stablecoins processing an increasing share of on-chain payments, investors face a structural choice between the two use cases — one that Armstrong said the Bitcoin chain itself has accepted. "They're not intending it to be used for high volume payments," he said. "They're digital gold."

The shift also raises questions about Bitcoin's long-term value proposition relative to other networks. If stablecoins have captured the payments use case that anchored Bitcoin's original thesis, the primary remaining driver for BTC demand is its store-of-value narrative — a role that depends on continued institutional adoption and macro uncertainty. Bitcoin's market dominance has fluctuated as capital rotates between BTC, ETH, and stablecoin-denominated DeFi yields, with no clear trend emerging.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.