The number of active stablecoin projects has increased over the past 12 to 18 months. According to a new report by cryptocurrency firm – Blockchain, more than a dozen others are being planned for launch in the coming weeks/months. However, despite being two leading cryptocurrency trading locations, China and Japan do not have a stablecoin project team based inside their countries.

The research, which is based on the analysis of a new data set collected from 57 individual stablecoins – 23 (40%) live and 34 (60%) at the pre-launch phase, is the first major empirical study focused on the growing world of stablecoins. It shows that stablecoins are already an important part of the digital asset ecosystem, starting with Tether (USDT) as the second most actively-traded cryptocurrency (~60% of BTC daily trading volume) and one of the top 10 cryptoasset rankings by market value.

Tether continues to dominate with approximately 98% of total stablecoin daily trading volume, it says, adding that the total market value of all stablecoins is $3 bln – or 1.5% of the total market value of all cryptoassets – with Tether comprising 93% of all the stablecoin market value.

Designed to minimize price volatility, most stablecoins are meant to be equal to the US dollar, the world’s leading reserve currency. They can be more complementary than competitive with other cryptocurrencies like bitcoin or ether in the short term but stand in stark contrast with these cryptocurrencies which have no inbuilt mechanism to minimize exchange rate volatility.

In the long term, the study says stablecoins can “…help create a tipping point for much broader cryptoasset adoption by successfully addressing concerns around volatility, which are often cited as a key reason why many institutions and individuals have remained on the digital assets sidelines to date.”

Physical locations of stablecoin project teams (Credit Blockchain crypto firm)

While the leading home for stablecoin project teams is the U.S. (19) followed by Europe (13) – within Europe, Switzerland (5) leads, followed by the UK (3). With none in China and Japan, the Asian countries with stablecoin project teams are Singapore (HelloGold), Malaysia (Digix) and South Korea (Terra).