Stablecoins has been in the spotlight as one of the Crypto murders in 2025, causing an expansion of institutional adoption, but Codex founder Haonan Li vows to maintain Ethereum's position as the Stablecoins home.
Ethereum currently controls Stablecoin Supply Race with a Stablecoin market capitalization of $153 billion, followed by Tron, with Tron, with $81 billion. Ethereum and Tron will command more than 81% of the overall Stablecoin market, but upcoming competitors such as Plasma, Stable, Arc and Tempo are looking to challenge their advantage.
In particular, the Ethereum community has been armed since the announcement of Tempo, a Layer 1 Stablecoin blockchain developed by Stripe and Crypto Investment Fund Paradigm. Some people are upset that the paradigm has funded Ethereum-focused institutional arm, Ether Rise, and has since continued to build its own layer 1 blockchain to accommodate institutions.
In the controversy, Li published a strong language article about X, claiming that all new Stablecoin Chains are “an attempt to replace and attack Ethereum,” and that he said he is “sure that these competitors and Codex will “shatter these competitors.”
Lee went on to explain that Ethereum's history, lack of downtime and deep liquidity should be the preferred blockchain for Wall Street. He also mentions how the current format limits the flow of Stablecoin to rapid speeds and is bottlenecked by underlying banking transactions that can take several days.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared a story with Li, saying, “I'm excited to be joining Arena as L2 and see her clearly thinking about the synergy of Ethereum L1 from day one.”
Codex came out from Stealth in April. That was when they announced a $16 million funding round led by Dragonfly, with participation from other prominent investors such as Circle and Coinbase.
