Where stablecoins are actually used

From trillions of transfers to billions of payments

Transfer volume is the total value of stablecoins moved from one address to another. It was about 33 to 35 tn USD in 2025, according to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and Visa with Artemis. The number is correct, and it measures something other than payments.

Most transfers are machinery. Deposits to and withdrawals from centralized exchanges made up about 36% of 2025 volume, according to Visa and Artemis, and removing them leaves about 21 tn USD. Much of the rest is trading between protocols, bots competing for arbitrage and wallets that belong to the same owner. Each hop counts again.

A real-economy payment is a transfer between two separate parties for goods, services or wages. McKinsey and Artemis estimated these at about 390 bn USD in 2025, roughly 0.02% of all payments worldwide. Business-to-business payments were the largest part, at about 226 bn USD.

Deep dive Three estimates, three methods

Other estimates of the same 2025 payments land in the same range but not on the same point. BCG and Allium, in a study for Ripple, counted 350 to 550 bn USD of payments between economically distinct parties, using a wider definition. Artemis, adding up volumes reported directly by payment companies in a survey, found a run rate of about 122 bn USD in August 2025, which is best read as a floor because it only covers firms that answered. The spread reflects a young category with no agreed definition: whether to count card spending funded by stablecoins, payment companies prefunding each other, or transfers between two payment providers.

The funnel matters for anyone reading a stablecoin pitch. A slide that sets 35 tn USD of stablecoin volume next to Visa's card volume compares traffic to purchases. The fair comparison is a few hundred billion, growing fast from a small base.

The first job is settlement for trading

Before stablecoins paid anyone's invoice, they were the cash leg of crypto markets, and that is still their largest use by volume.

Settlement is the final exchange of money for an asset. On a crypto exchange, bitcoin is priced and paid for in USDT or USDC because a dollar token can move in and out of wallets at any hour, while a bank dollar can only move during banking hours through the exchange's bank. In decentralized finance (DeFi), where lending and trading run as programs on a blockchain, stablecoins are the unit in which loans are measured and interest is paid. A loan of 100 ETH means something different every day as ETH moves. A loan of 100,000 USDC does not.

This job explains why supply and payments diverge so much. A trader's USDC can move dozens of times a day between an exchange, a lending protocol and a wallet without anyone buying a thing. The market snapshot turns this into a measure of velocity.

Cross-border payments: what the token removes

Sending money across borders is where stablecoins have the clearest advantage, and the advantage has a precise shape.

Correspondent banking is the chain of banks that pass an international payment along when the sender's bank has no account at the recipient's bank. SWIFT is the messaging network those banks use; it does not hold or move the money itself. A small international transfer through a bank costs more than 13% on average and takes one to four business days, according to the World Bank's Remittance Prices Worldwide.

That cost has four parts: the currency exchange spread, prefunding, a fee at each bank in the chain, and compliance checks against sanctions and money laundering. Prefunding is money a provider parks in advance in every country it serves so it can pay out locally. A stablecoin replaces the chain of banks with one transfer on a blockchain and removes the need to prefund the middle of the route. It does not remove the other two. An on-ramp is a service that turns local money into a stablecoin, and an off-ramp turns it back. The currency spread moves to these two ramps, and so do the compliance checks.

A stablecoin sandwich is the name for this structure: fiat in, stablecoin across, fiat out. The recipient usually never sees the token.

The chart holds a sobering detail. Wise, a money-transfer company, charges 0.5% to 1% with no blockchain at all. It holds local bank accounts in each country, collects pounds in London and pays out reais in Brazil from its own local balance, so no money crosses a border for each payment. Wise needed dozens of local licences to do it. A stablecoin service needs a licensed on-ramp and off-ramp in each country, which is the same licensing problem in another form.

Remittances, the money migrants send home, show the model working at scale. Felix Pago runs the US-to-Mexico sandwich over WhatsApp and had processed more than 8 bn USD across 11 Latin American countries by September 2026, at under 1% against 5% to 7% on traditional channels, according to Mizuho. Bitso, a Mexican exchange, handled about 6.5 bn USD of US-to-Mexico remittances in 2024, about a tenth of that corridor.

For businesses, the value lies in speed and hours. A 50,000 USD supplier payment that settles in minutes on a Sunday frees working capital that would otherwise sit in transit for days. That is why business-to-business payments are the largest slice of the 390 bn USD, and why fintechs such as Mastercard's newly acquired BVNK and Stripe's Bridge sell stablecoin payment APIs to payroll platforms, marketplaces and payment companies.

Where stablecoins lose

The usual comparison puts a stablecoin next to a bank wire or a card, the most expensive options available. In many countries the real alternative is a free local instant payment system.

An instant payment system is a national network that moves money between bank accounts in seconds, around the clock. India's UPI processed about 228 billion transactions in 2025, worth about 3.4 tn USD, according to the National Payments Corporation of India. Brazil's Pix moved about 6.5 tn USD over the same year, according to the Banco Central do Brasil. Each of them alone is many times the global estimate of stablecoin payments.

These systems are free or nearly free to the payer, because the state, the banks or the merchants carry the cost. A stablecoin adds two conversions that a domestic payment in rupees or reais does not need. Inside India, Brazil, the eurozone (with SEPA Instant) or Poland (with BLIK), stablecoins have little to offer an ordinary shopper.

Checkout is the second weak spot. A chargeback is a card network's reversal of a payment after a dispute, and it protects consumers against fraud and undelivered goods. A stablecoin transfer is final once the blockchain confirms it, and nobody in the protocol can reverse it. For a business settling an invoice, finality is a feature. For a shopper buying from an unknown online store, the missing chargeback is a real cost.

Cards, savings and payroll

Card settlement is the daily transfer of money between the banks behind a card network, and stablecoins are entering it quietly. Visa lets selected US banks settle their card obligations in USDC, and its stablecoin settlement reached an annualized 3.5 bn USD by 30 November 2025. Mastercard expanded stablecoin settlement in June 2026 to cover USDC, PYUSD, USDG, RLUSD and others across several blockchains, and completed its purchase of BVNK in August 2026. The cardholder sees none of this. On the consumer side, card spending funded by stablecoins reached about 4.5 bn USD in 2025, according to McKinsey and Artemis.

Merchants can also accept stablecoins directly. Stripe charges 1.5% for stablecoin payments against about 2.9% plus a fixed fee for cards, and PayPal lets its merchants accept PYUSD and receive dollars automatically. Both exist in production; neither is yet a large share of checkout.

Savings are the use that the payment statistics mostly miss. In countries with high inflation or capital controls, a dollar stablecoin is the easiest way for an ordinary person to hold dollars. In Argentina, stablecoins made up more than half of all crypto purchases with pesos on exchanges between July 2024 and June 2025, according to Chainalysis. Nobody spends these dollars, so they barely show up in payment estimates, yet they are one of the clearest cases of a stablecoin solving a problem that local banks do not.

Payroll is small but live. Deel, a global payroll company, launched stablecoin salary payments on Polygon on 20 May 2026. Rise, a payroll platform for remote teams, passed 1 bn USD of cumulative payroll by November 2025, with more than half of its users choosing to be paid in stablecoins. For a contractor in a country with a weak currency, being paid in USDC combines the payroll and savings cases into one.

What to watch next

• Payment estimates for 2026: if McKinsey, Artemis or BCG publish figures well above 390 bn USD, especially for business-to-business, the payments story is catching up with the supply story.
• Stablecoin settlement at Visa and Mastercard: the annualized run rates show whether card networks treat stablecoins as a side experiment or as a settlement rail for all banks.
• Links between instant payment systems: every new connection between systems like UPI, Pix and SEPA Instant removes a corridor where stablecoins would otherwise win.
• Licensed on-ramps and off-ramps in emerging markets: the cost of a stablecoin sandwich is set at its edges, so new local licences matter more than faster blockchains.
• Rules on stablecoin savings in high-inflation countries: governments that restrict dollar stablecoins could close the savings use faster than any market force.