Author: Jae, PANews
Another stablecoin bearing the title of "Tether's own child" has been officially launched, but the market doesn't seem to be buying it.
On the evening of December 8th, Stable, the highly anticipated public blockchain dedicated to stablecoins, officially launched its mainnet and released the STABLE token. As a Layer 1 blockchain deeply incubated by the core teams of Bitfinex and Tether, Stable's "Tether's own child" narrative has attracted widespread market attention since its launch.
However, against the backdrop of tightening market liquidity, Stable did not have a strong start like its competitor Plasma. Not only did its price remain low, but it also faced a crisis of confidence due to allegations of insider trading. Is Stable's story a case of starting strong but then faltering, or will it continue its downward trend?
Prior to Stable's launch, market sentiment was quite optimistic. The project's two pre-deposits totaled over $1.3 billion, with approximately 25,000 participating addresses. The average deposit per address was about $52,000, demonstrating strong user interest. This was particularly noteworthy during a period of low market sentiment, indicating high confidence in the "Tether ecosystem" and raising expectations that Stable's launch would mirror Plasma's success.
Data from the prediction market Polymarket shows that the market once estimated that there was an 85% probability that the FDV (Fully Diluted Market Value) of the STABLE token would exceed $2 billion.
However, the law of "extreme heat will surely kill" has proven true once again.
STABLE token's performance on its first day on TGE was disappointing. The STABLE token opened at approximately $0.036, reaching a high of nearly $0.046 before plummeting by over 60%, hitting a low of $0.015. As of 9 PM on December 9th, the STABLE token's FDV had shrunk to $1.7 billion, indicating a lack of liquidity and a lack of buyers in the market.
It's worth noting that leading CEXs (centralized exchanges) such as Binance, Coinbase, and Upbit have not yet listed the STABLE token in their spot markets. Their absence limits STABLE's access to a larger retail investor base, further restricting its liquidity.
The sharp drop in the price of the STABLE token has also sparked heated discussions in the community.
DeFi researcher @cmdefi stated: "Expectations for Stable are relatively low. There were various amateurish practices during the early stages of the project's launch, and the serious attitude was worrying."
Crypto KOL @cryptocishanjia points out that communities are more willing to pay for new narratives. Once the market has produced a Plasma leader, the consensus among communities regarding a Stable leader will be greatly enhanced, leading to reduced profit margins.
Former VC practitioner @Michael_Liu93 bluntly stated: Stable's pre-market valuation of 3 billion and FDV are artificially inflated, making it a suitable target for long-term short selling. Tight control of the shares (no airdrops, no pre-sales, no KOL rounds) does not equate to a pump and dump, but precisely because it has not been listed on top CEXs, it may usher in a reversal.
In addition, many users also mentioned the controversy surrounding the pre-deposit period before the Stable mainnet launch. During the first round of pre-deposit activities, some whale wallets deposited hundreds of millions of US dollars in USDT before the official opening time, raising strong questions from the community about fairness and insider trading. The project team did not directly respond and instead launched the second round of pre-deposit.
This incident constitutes a paradox of the Stable narrative, whose value proposition is to provide transparent, reliable, and compliant infrastructure. The presence of suspected insider trading at the project's inception creates a trust deficit that will hinder active community participation and negatively impact its long-term narrative.
Stable's architecture is designed to maximize transaction efficiency and user-friendliness.
Stable is the first L1 blockchain to use USDT as its native gas fee, providing a near-gasless user experience. The significance of this design lies in minimizing user friction. Users can pay transaction fees using the medium of exchange itself (USDT) without managing or holding highly volatile governance tokens. This feature enables sub-second settlement and minimizes fees, making it particularly suitable for everyday trading and institutional payment scenarios with stringent requirements for price stability and predictability.
Stable employs the StableBFT consensus mechanism, a DPoS (Delegated Proof-of-Stake) model customized based on CometBFT (formerly Tendermint) and fully compatible with the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine). StableBFT guarantees transaction finality through Byzantine fault tolerance, meaning that once a transaction is confirmed, it is irreversible, which is crucial for payment and settlement scenarios. Furthermore, StableBFT supports parallel proposal processing by nodes, ensuring the network can achieve both high throughput and low latency, thus meeting the stringent requirements of payment networks.
Stable secured strong capital backing from its inception. The project raised $28 million in its seed round, led by Bitfinex and Hack VC. The presence of Tether/Bitfinex CEO Paolo Ardoino as an advisor has fueled speculation about a close strategic partnership between Stable and Tether, the leading stablecoin issuer.
Stable CEO Brian Mehler previously served as VP of Venture Capital at Block.one, the company that developed EOS, where he managed a $1 billion crypto fund and invested in industry giants such as Galaxy Digital and Securitize.
The CTO is Sam Kazemian, founder of the hybrid algorithmic stablecoin project Frax, who has been deeply involved in the DeFi field for many years and has provided advice on the US stablecoin bill.
However, Stable's initial CEO was Joshua Harding, the former head of investment at Block.one, and the project changed its leadership without any announcement or explanation, casting a shadow over Stable's transparency.
Stable's token economic model employs a strategy that separates network utility from governance value. The sole purpose of the STABLE token is governance and staking. It is not used to pay any transaction fees on the network, and all transactions are settled in USDT.
Token holders can stake STABLE to become validators and maintain network security. They can also participate in key decisions such as network upgrades, fee adjustments, or the introduction of new stablecoins through community voting. However, the inability to share in network profits limits the token's potential; before the ecosystem takes shape, the token lacks significant empowerment.
It's worth noting that 50% of the total token supply (100 billion) will be allocated to the team, investors, and advisors. While these tokens are subject to a one-year lock-up period (Cliff) before being released linearly, this significant allocation will have a potential long-term impact on the token price.
Stable faces extremely fierce market competition. In the current multi-chain landscape, Polygon and Tron have a large retail user base for low-cost remittances in Southeast Asia, South America, the Middle East and Africa, while Solana has also secured a place in the payment field thanks to its high throughput performance advantage.
More importantly, Stable also faces emerging vertical L1 competitors also focused on stablecoin payments. For example, Circle's Arc focuses on becoming the infrastructure for institutional-grade on-chain treasuries, global settlement, and tokenized assets. Additionally, Tempo, backed by Stripe and Paradigm, is also positioned as a payment-focused public chain and is a strong competitor targeting the same vertical market.
In the payment and settlement field, network effects will be a key winning factor. Stable's success will depend on its ability to quickly leverage the USDT ecosystem, attract developers and institutional users, and establish a first-mover advantage in large-scale settlements. If its execution and market penetration are insufficient, it may be overtaken by similar L1 platforms with stronger integration capabilities or deeper compliance backgrounds.
According to its roadmap, the most crucial timeframe is enterprise integration and developer ecosystem building from Q4 2025 to Q2 2026. Successfully achieving these goals will be key to validating Stable's value proposition and the feasibility of its vertically integrated L1 architecture. However, with only about six months between mainnet launch and pilot deployment, Stable must quickly overcome multiple challenges, including technical optimization, institutional integration, and ecosystem development. Any missteps in execution could further erode market confidence in its long-term potential.
The launch of Stable's mainnet marks a new phase in the competition for stablecoins, moving towards infrastructure development. Whether it can achieve its goal of reshaping payment networks will ultimately depend on execution rather than narrative.

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