Las marcas de stablecoin acaban de obtener su primer verdadero manual de marketing

Cuando 5W abrió nuestra división especializada en criptomonedas y NFT en 2021, la conversación con cada fundador de cripto comenzaba de la misma manera. ¿Necesitamos relaciones públicas ya? ¿Los reguladores nos matarán antes de que podamos construir? ¿Qué hacemos si la prensa convencional sigue escribiendo sobre nosotros como si fuéramos un esquema Ponzi?

Cuatro años y medio después, la conversación ha cambiado. El mercado de stablecoins cerró 2025 en aproximadamente $306 mil millones, un 49 % más que el año anterior. El Secretario del Tesoro, Scott Bessent, ha dicho públicamente que el mercado podría alcanzar los $3,7 billones para finales de la década. Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, Fidelity, JPMorgan y Citigroup están integrando stablecoins existentes o lanzando los suyos propios. Fidelity lanzó su stablecoin FIDD el otoño pasado. Se informa que Walmart y Amazon están explorando. La pregunta de los fundadores no es si pueden sobrevivir a la regulación. Es cómo destacan en el momento más ruidoso, más saturado y más competitivo institucionalmente que esta categoría haya tenido jamás.

That is a marketing problem, not a compliance problem. And the marketing problem is the one the category is collectively worse at solving.

Qué cambió realmente la Ley GENIUS para los mercadólogos

Most of the GENIUS Act coverage focuses on the legal mechanics – who can issue, what reserves are required, what kind of audits matter. Those mechanics matter. But from a marketing perspective, the ley de julio de 2025 did three things that actually reshape the positioning environment.

It made compliance a brand asset. For most of this category’s history, compliance was a cost center – legal overhead that slowed down product and annoyed growth teams. Under the GENIUS Act, compliance is the product story. Institutional customers – the Visa, Mastercard, BlackRock tier – will not touch a stablecoin that cannot prove its licensing pathway, its reserve composition, and its audit cadence. Marketing that leads with compliance specifics is now marketing that lands enterprise deals.

It opened the institutional floodgates. La capitalización del mercado de stablecoins alcanzó un máximo histórico de $314 mil millones en octubre de 2025, y el motor no fue la especulación minorista. Fue la adopción institucional. Cada CFO de Fortune 500 con flujos de pagos transfronterizos ahora está haciendo los cálculos con stablecoins. Cada RIA con un producto de mercado monetario tokenizado está mirando USDC o RLUSD para liquidaciones. La audiencia direccionable para el marketing de stablecoins pasó de “usuarios nativos de cripto” a “tesoreros corporativos, traders institucionales y equipos de operaciones de pago en instituciones financieras reguladas”. Eso es un movimiento de marketing completamente diferente.

It created new winners. USDC de Circle creció 73 % en 2025 a $75 mil millones mientras USDT de Tether creció 36 %. RLUSD de Ripple obtuvo una aprobación provisional de carta bancaria de la OCC. USDe de Ethena superó los $14 mil millones. El USD1 respaldado por Trump alcanzó el top 5 en cuestión de meses después del lanzamiento. El duopolio que existía a principios de 2025 se ha fracturado en una carrera de seis o siete jugadores, y los entrantes de segundo nivel están haciendo movimientos de marketing que los incumbentes no han tenido que hacer. El mercado es más interesante para los mercadólogos que en años anteriores.

El error que veo cada semana

The single most common mistake I see from stablecoin teams right now is marketing to crypto Twitter when their actual buyer is a corporate treasurer.

The content reads like 2021 crypto content. Memes. Roadmap threads. Airdrop speculation. Chain partnerships announced with emoji. That content builds a retail Telegram community. It does not close a Stripe integration, a Visa partnership, or a treasury mandate from a Fortune 1000 company.

The teams that are winning in 2026 are running what looks like fintech B2B marketing — case studies with named enterprise customers, integration documentation that reads like API docs should read, attestation reports published on a public dashboard, CFO-focused webinars, analyst relations with S&P and Moody’s, content that shows up when a treasurer searches for “cross-border settlement options 2026.” It is less exciting than the meme-driven content. It is the content that moves actual money.

Lo que le diría a los emisores de stablecoins ahora mismo

Stop pitching your origin story. Every stablecoin issuer has a founder story, a technical breakthrough, a community moment. These were useful in 2021. They are played out in 2026. The press you are pitching has heard the origin story 400 times. What they have not heard is what specific use case you dominate, who actually uses you at scale, and what the next 12 months of integration look like. Specificity is the story now. Narrative is not.

Publish your reserves like a public company publishes earnings. Los analistas de JPMorgan han citado públicamente la transparencia as the primary reason institutional capital has rotated from USDT to USDC. Transparency is not a compliance line. It is a marketing asset. A clean public dashboard, regular attestation reports, accessible audit summaries – these outperform every press release you will write this year. Circle turned quarterly transparency reports into a category-defining differentiator. Every competitor in this market should be copying that playbook.

Own one vertical, then expand. The stablecoin market is too competitive for generalist positioning. Pick cross-border remittances. Pick merchant acceptance. Pick institutional settlement. Pick B2B payments. Pick treasury management for crypto-native companies. The issuers that are growing fastest have a dominant vertical story before they broaden. The ones that are stuck are still trying to be everything to everyone.

Make your executives accessible. The single highest-leverage press asset most stablecoin companies have is a compelling CEO or CFO who will actually do interviews. Jeremy Allaire at Circle built a substantial part of USDC’s institutional credibility by being consistently available to mainstream business press. Brad Garlinghouse did the same for Ripple and RLUSD. The CEOs who hide from press during regulatory moments lose narrative ground. The CEOs who lean in, on camera, in print, at conferences, at congressional hearings when it matters – they define the category. Marketing departments that restrict their CEO’s media availability are trading a short-term communications headache for a long-term positioning loss.

Lo que le diría a los exchanges y fintechs que manejan stablecoins

Your story is not the tokens you support. It is the flows you enable.

Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, and the custody providers (BitGo, Fireblocks, Anchorage) all need to make the same marketing pivot. The 2022 marketing motion was about which assets you listed. The 2026 marketing motion is about which institutional flows you clear, which enterprise customers trust you, and which compliance certifications you hold that your competitors do not.

For consumer-facing fintechs integrating stablecoins – payment apps, remittance services, B2B payments platforms – the marketing moment is enormous and mostly unclaimed.

Stablecoin rails are now faster, cheaper, and more transparent than legacy alternatives for a lot of use cases. The fintechs that explain this clearly to their consumer and SMB customers will grow. The fintechs that bury stablecoin use in the backend and never mention it in marketing will leave growth on the table. This is a rare moment where a genuine product advantage is also a compelling marketing story.

Lo que me ha enseñado siete años en relaciones públicas de cripto

When we took on NFTfi as a client in 2021, the job was to make a peer-to-peer NFT lending marketplace legible to mainstream press that had no framework for it. It was hard. Mainstream reporters did not know what a collateralized NFT loan was, did not know why it mattered, did not know how to write about it for their general audience. The marketing challenge was not positioning against a competitor. It was educating an audience into the existence of the category at all.

The stablecoin moment right now is the opposite problem. The audience understands the category. The audience is evaluating seven to ten competitors simultaneously. The audience has specific, technical, financially sophisticated questions. Generic positioning does not survive that environment. What survives is specific, continuous, confident communication about what makes your issuer or your exchange or your payment platform different from the five others competing for the same enterprise mandate.

The firms that are going to define the next five years of this category are the ones that have accepted that marketing matters again. Not compliance theater. Not meme marketing. Real B2B-grade marketing infrastructure – analyst relations, enterprise case studies, executive visibility, transparency dashboards, regulatory engagement, and tier-one business press presence. The firms that build this now will own the category narrative for the decade.

The firms that are still running 2021 crypto-Twitter marketing playbooks while the el mercado se duplica a $2 billones para 2028 will be the firms everyone forgets.