We prove that the peakons are asymptotically H 1-stable, under the flow of the Degasperis-Procesi equation, in the class of functions with a momentum density that belongs to M + (R). The key argument is a rigidity result for uniformly in time exponentially decaying global solutions that is shared by the Holm-Staley b-family of equations for b ≥ 1. This extends previous results obtained for the Camassa-Holm equation (b = 2).