How Crypto Trades Use Stabull — Even Though We Only List Stablecoins and RWAs

By Jamie McCormick, Co-CMO, Stabull Labs

The tenth article in the 15 part “Deconstructing DeFi” Series.

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And yet, when we traced non-UI transactions flowing through Stabull on Base, a surprising pattern emerged: many of these trades originated in crypto assets and settled back into crypto assets.

Stabull was neither the starting point nor the destination. It was the bridge in between.

The misconception: “If you don’t list ETH, you don’t touch ETH volume”

A common assumption in DeFi is that a protocol only benefits from the assets it explicitly lists. If a DEX doesn’t support ETH pairs, it can’t participate in ETH-denominated trading activity.

This assumption is increasingly wrong.

Modern DeFi execution is composable. Trades are stitched together from multiple specialised venues, each selected for a specific leg of the transaction.

Stabull’s specialisation — reliable pricing for stablecoins and RWAs — turns out to be exactly what many crypto trades need.

A typical multi-leg crypto execution

A simplified version of a trade we observed looks something like this:

• The trade begins in ETH or WETH
• ETH is swapped into USDC on a venue optimised for volatile assets
• USDC is routed through a Stabull pool to access a stable or FX-anchored price
• The trade continues elsewhere, potentially returning to ETH or another crypto asset

From the perspective of the trader or protocol executing the transaction, this is a single atomic swap. From the perspective of the chain, it is a carefully sequenced interaction between specialised liquidity sources.

Stabull’s role is clear: provide a dependable, low-risk execution step for the stable or FX portion of the trade.

Why crypto trades need stable and FX legs

Many crypto strategies require temporary exposure to stable assets.

This can include:

• arbitrage between venues denominated in different currencies
• hedging or neutralising exposure mid-transaction
• converting between fiat-anchored assets before final settlement
• executing treasury or risk-managed strategies

In these cases, the quality of the stable or FX leg matters just as much as the crypto leg. Slippage, stale pricing, or unexpected price movement in the middle of a transaction can cause the entire atomic swap to fail.

That is why protocols like Stabull are being pulled into execution paths that ultimately have nothing to do with “stablecoin trading” in the retail sense.

Oracle pricing as an execution primitive

The key enabler here is oracle-anchored pricing.

When execution systems route through Stabull, they are not just accessing liquidity — they are accessing price certainty. The oracle anchor ensures that prices remain aligned with off-chain reality during the transaction.

For solvers and arbitrage systems constructing atomic swaps, this predictability reduces failure risk. It allows Stabull to function as a stable reference point inside otherwise volatile execution paths.

In effect, Stabull is being used as an FX engine embedded within crypto trades.

What this means for volume and fees

Because Stabull is used mid-path rather than at the edges, it benefits from activity that would otherwise be invisible.

Every time a crypto trade routes through a Stabull pool:

• swap fees are paid
• LPs earn yield
• protocol fees accrue

None of this requires users to intentionally trade “on Stabull.” It happens because Stabull solves a specific problem better than alternatives.

This helps explain why pools with relatively modest TVL can support meaningful trading volume: they are being used as part of larger flows rather than as standalone destinations.

A broader demand surface

This dynamic dramatically expands the effective demand for Stabull liquidity.

Instead of depending solely on:

• stablecoin users
• issuer communities
• retail FX activity

Stabull pools now sit on execution paths that include:

• ETH-denominated trades
• cross-venue arbitrage
• solver-driven routing
• protocol treasury operations

The protocol benefits from crypto activity without taking on the risks associated with listing volatile assets directly.

Why this matters going into 2026

As DeFi execution becomes more modular and more automated, protocols that specialise well tend to be reused more often.

Stabull’s role as a stable, oracle-anchored execution leg positions it to benefit from growth across the entire ecosystem — not just within its own UI or asset list.

The transactions we traced suggest this process has already begun.

In the next article, we’ll move from theory to evidence and look at a concrete case study: how a pool with relatively small TVL supported over $1 million in trading volume, and what that reveals about how liquidity is actually being used.

About the Author

Jamie McCormick is Co-Chief Marketing Officer at Stabull Finance, where he has been working for over two years on positioning the protocol within the evolving DeFi ecosystem.

He is also the founder of Bitcoin Marketing Team, established in 2014 and recognised as Europe’s oldest specialist crypto marketing agency. Over the past decade, the agency has worked with a wide range of projects across the digital asset and Web3 landscape.

Jamie first became involved in crypto in 2013 and has a long-standing interest in Bitcoin and Ethereum. Over the last two years, his focus has increasingly shifted toward understanding the mechanics of decentralised finance, particularly how on-chain infrastructure is used in practice rather than in theory.