Turkey swapped $38bn of lira for stablecoins, which is 14% of the whole market

Cointelegraph Magazine has gone through what stablecoins do to banks and currencies, and two of its findings pull against each other. One says money can leave a country at software speed. The other says most of the measured volume belongs to companies that convert back to dollars the same day.

“Two clocks matter. One is slow: currency substitution, deposit erosion, and weakening policy transmission building over months or years. One is fast: a depeg, issuer shock, or banking event that can move capital at software speed within hours.”

— Anthony Vassallo, Silicon Valley Bank

Anthony Vassallo, director of crypto at Silicon Valley Bank, now a division of First Citizens Bank

The slow clock, with numbers attached

A September report from Sphere Labs and SVB puts Argentina, Nigeria and Turkey at the centre of the currency story. Convert the Turkish figure: $38bn of lira went into stablecoins over a year, 14% of the $271bn held across the seven largest dollar and euro tokens.

Argentina pulls the same way for a different reason. We counted it on Tuesday: 94% of crypto bought with pesos was in stablecoins, in a year when monthly inflation fell twelvefold. The Bank for International Settlements looked at 130 economies in July and found stablecoin flows and conventional foreign-currency deposits both rising during currency pressure, with stablecoin flows less sensitive to capital controls. A second BIS study in March ran four dollar tokens against 27 currencies from 2021 to 2025: rising stablecoin demand pushes local currencies down and makes dollars costlier through FX swaps.

Colombians gave the cleanest illustration in January 2025, during a dispute with the United States: banks and bureaux shut for the weekend, so the flow went to the venue that never shuts.

The fast clock is partly written into the rulebook

The ECB's worry is specific: stablecoin reserves parked in bank deposits could trigger cascading withdrawals if redemptions surge, because reserve assets settle on banking time while the tokens settle around the clock. Europe saw it work in March 2023, when $3.3bn of USDC reserves stuck at Silicon Valley Bank turned a bank failure into a stablecoin crisis inside two days.

Read the next sentence with that one. MiCA requires issuers to hold at least 30% of reserves in bank deposits, and up to 60% for significant asset-referenced tokens. The European System of Central Banks proposed this month to replace those fixed percentages with requirements based on how fast reserves can be made available. MiCA puts the reserves where the ECB says they are dangerous, and Europe's own central bankers have started saying so.

The other dataset

• Close to half of MELD's business-to-business stablecoin offramp volume sits in North America
• Supplier payments make up roughly a third of business use, invoice settlement about a quarter
• The vast majority of corporate users convert back to fiat as soon as the transaction settles
• Turkey's $38bn a year works out at $104m a day, against $271bn of stablecoins in existence
• MiCA requires 30% of reserves in bank deposits, and up to 60% for significant asset-referenced tokens

Pankaj Bengani, a former Block executive who co-founded the payments firm MELD, told Cointelegraph that corporates take no crypto position: they use the rail instead of SWIFT and go straight back to dollars. What gets displaced, by his read, is a correspondent layer that exists because banks historically needed each other to cross borders.

Both halves are true because they describe different people. A saver in Istanbul leaving lira and an importer in Toronto settling an invoice touch the same token, and only one is leaving a currency. The drain story is about households in currencies under pressure; the volume story is about companies in the richest market on the list, holding the token for minutes.

Banks keep what nobody has replaced: custody, compliance, liquidity, local settlement and the deposits the reserves sit in. SWIFT has been building its own round-the-clock ledger for tokenised deposits since the summer. The friction moves rather than disappears. Sphere's Arnold Lee puts the useful question at the end: whether a country manages the shift or gets overtaken by it.

Informational material, not investment advice. Stablecoin totals were taken on 1 October 2026 and change daily.