Cathie Wood admits stablecoins beat Bitcoin to payments — but says institutions handed BTC a better seat.

ARK Invest&#x27;s Cathie Wood has revised her long-standing Bitcoin thesis, acknowledging in a recent interview with The Rollup that stablecoins have absorbed the emerging-market payments role ARK once assigned to <a class="ticker-mention" href="/en-US/token/btc">BTC</a>. The data backs her concession: annualised stablecoin payment volume runs at roughly $390 billion per McKinsey and Artemis, <a class="ticker-mention" href="/en-US/token/usdt">USDT</a> accounts for 90.2% of crypto activity in Venezuela and 66% in Brazil, and the stablecoin market cap has surpassed $320.6 billion — up 56% since early 2025.

What stablecoins left behind, Wood argues, is arguably the stronger position. Bitcoin is consolidating around scarcity, macro reserve allocation, and institutional accumulation. CoinShares logged $933 million in BTC investment product inflows last week — the fourth straight positive week above $1 billion — while US spot ETFs posted nine consecutive inflow sessions from Apr. 14-24, totalling over…