Bitcoin Dominates US Crypto Payments While Stablecoins Reign Supreme in Asia: 2025 Market Report

Crypto's payment landscape splits down geographic lines—again. Bitcoin flexes as America's transactional heavyweight while Asia doubles down on dollar-pegged stability.

The Western Front: BTC's Retail Reign

No surprises here—volatility-loving US merchants still prefer the OG crypto for settlements. Forget 'digital gold' narratives; Bitcoin's real utility shines in cross-border commerce dodging traditional banking bottlenecks.

Eastern Playbook: Stablecoin Supremacy

Asian markets aren't gambling with price swings. Tether and its clones dominate regional P2P flows, proving that when push comes to shove, traders just want a crypto-fied version of the very fiat they claim to escape. (Some revolutions never start.)

The takeaway? Crypto's killer app isn't DeFi or NFTs—it's moving money faster than legacy finance can charge fees for doing it wrong. Banks, consider this your disruption wake-up call—again.

USDT Most Used Crypto On CoinGate Overall, Bitcoin Second

Cryptocurrency payments processor CoinGate has shared new data breaking down digital asset payments preferences around the world. First, below is a table showing how the composition of overall cryptocurrency orders has changed during the last few years.

It would appear that bitcoin was leading in payments on CoinGate back in 2023, with 35.4% of all orders involving it. In 2024, however, the original cryptocurrency lost dominance as its share dropped to just 21%, while Tether‘s stablecoin grew from 25.5% to 39.7% and became the top choice on the platform.

In the first half of 2025, though, USDT shed its gains with its payment share plunging back to 24.8%. That said, the stablecoin still kept the first place, as Bitcoin only recovered to 23.3%.

One cryptocurrency that has shown consistent growth through the years is Litecoin. From the table, it’s visible that LTC has tightly held onto its third-place spot, with its share rising from 9.3% in 2023 to 13.6% in 2025. Thus, it seems the blockchain’s cheap and fast transactions are slowly attracting a consistent user base.

Now, here is an infographic that shows the top 10 countries in terms of crypto payment usage in 2025:

As displayed above, the US is the number one nation in terms of digital asset payments, with 23.28% of the world’s CoinGate orders occurring within it. Germany is second at 6.57% and the UK third at 4.88%.

While this chart highlights the overall transaction share for each country, it doesn’t answer one important question: which cryptocurrencies are being used in these countries? According to CoinGate data, the distribution is different between the various regions.

Bitcoin is the top choice of American users, finding use in 40% of transfers. “The U.S. is also the global leader in Lightning Network usage — more than half (54%) of all Lightning transactions come from American shoppers,” says CoinGate.

Europe is more mixed in usage, with no coin in particular dominating and preferences varying across countries. When it comes to Asia, however, there is indeed a strong preference: stablecoins. USDT occupies 50% of all orders in Hong Kong and 43% in India.

In terms of altcoin usage, one country that stands out is the African nation of Nigeria, making up for 8% and 7% of global BNB and shiba inu orders, respectively. Over in Latin America, Solana used to dominate Brazil in 2024, but the asset’s popularity plummeted this year, with global share going from 14% to just 2%.

BTC Price

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading around $119,100, down 1% over the last 24 hours.