As USD-pegged stablecoins increasingly flood the marketplace competing for users, liquidity splinters across platforms and may prevent most from ever achieving operationally effective adoption. As a result, countless stablecoins, whether privately issued or state-backed, are coming face to face with a brutally simple business model challenge: if circulation doesn’t reach scale, issuers cannot generate enough revenue from their reserve assets to cover operational costs. For financial executives evaluating payment integrations or treasury strategies, this dynamic should set off alarms. The situation grows more precarious when yields fall, as they inevitably might. The fragmentation of the stablecoin market matters because liquidity is self-reinforcing. A coin that’s widely used in trading pairs, accepted across exchanges and integrated into payment rails attracts more users. The inverse is also true: illiquid stablecoins languish in obscurity, unable to build the velocity required for sustainable revenue. For CFOs and payment firms, this creates risk at the integration layer. Choosing to accept or settle in a subscale stablecoin exposes the firm to the possibility of abrupt issuer retrenchment, de-pegging events or simply a business model that fails quietly when reserves can no longer fund operations. Many firms are weighing whether to settle cross-border payments, manage treasury liquidity or offer customer accounts denominated in stablecoins. The irony is that the very attribute stablecoins promise around stability depends less on cryptography or regulatory oversight than on something far more mundane: scale economics. Without sufficient user base and circulation, the math simply doesn’t work. Even if reserves are fully collateralized, an issuer unable to fund compliance or security is a weak link. At the same time, holding multiple stablecoins might spread regulatory risk but can also dilute liquidity and expose firms to subscale issuers with fragile business models. The viability of a stablecoin can be as much a question of sustainable business modeling as it is of collateral management.