Stablecoin Reality Check: Real Payments Hit Just $400B Annually

Forget the hype—the actual utility of stablecoins tells a different story.

The $400 Billion Ceiling

While market caps soar into the trillions, the hard data on real-world transactions paints a more sobering picture. The total annual volume for genuine payments—actual goods, services, and remittances—barely scratches $400 billion. That's a rounding error for traditional payment giants, a stark reminder that speculation still drives the vast majority of on-chain volume.

Infrastructure Grows, Adoption Lags

Merchant gateways proliferate and cross-border rails get faster every quarter. Yet, mass consumer adoption for everyday spending remains elusive. The tech is there, but the behavioral shift? Still in its infancy. It turns out convincing people to pay for coffee with digital dollars is harder than convincing them to gamble on memecoins.

The Speculation Shadow

This gap highlights the industry's open secret: crypto's primary use case is still financial alchemy, not commerce. The ecosystem is built on trading, lending, and yield farming—a closed loop of capital chasing more capital. Real economic activity is the side show, for now.

A cynical take? The traditional finance old guard will smirk at that $400B figure. They move that much before lunch. But that's the point—this is where the real battle begins. Building a parallel financial system means actually being useful, not just being volatile. The race is on to turn digital money from a casino chip into a true currency. The trillion-dollar question is who gets there first.

Stablecoin payments doubled in the past year

Even with filtered and adjusted transactions, the latest data shows stablecoin payments doubled in the past 12 months. 

In total, payments reached $400B, coinciding with the constant growth of active wallets. 

Artemis filtered for payment-like behaviors, showing a more detailed breakdown of the usage of stablecoins. The report discovered wider adoption in several use cases. 

B2B payments made up $230B, or 60% of all transfers. Remittances reached $90B in the past year. Stablecoins were also used to settle capital market trades, with around $8B in volumes. 

The biggest sector growth came from stablecoin cards. For now, the cards handled $4.5B, but the sum represented an 800% year-on-year growth. Overall, crypto card usage spiked in the past year, driven by improved regulations. 

Regional adoption of stablecoin payments remains uneven

Stablecoin payments are regionally clustered, linked either to local economies or to specific regional crypto activity. Most of the real stablecoin traffic is concentrated in Asia, with Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan emerging as leaders.

Payment usage depends on local merchant adoption and culture. The spread of apps using Tether among merchants is one of the payment drivers. 

While stablecoin adoption increased in the USA and Europe, the tokens were more rarely used for payment purposes. However, global usage remained strong, boosting the adoption of USDT. In the past year, USDT and USDC were also among the most active contracts on Ethereum. 

Non-payment stablecoin activity remained strong

Artemis discovered earlier that smart contract activity made up 49.66% of all stablecoin transfers. The exact ratio may depend on the period observed, but overall, smart contracts for trading, loans, and other DeFi activities are key to stablecoin adoption and demand. 

Simple transactions between wallets made up just over 50% of all transfers. Payment activity is clustered in smaller sum transfers, while smart contracts usually MOVE whale-sized stablecoin orders. 

As stablecoin markets matured, app producers and platforms started to differentiate the potential activity of assets. Several apps and chains are starting to focus on payments through stablecoins, choosing the least risky regulated assets. At the same time, synthetic, asset-backed, or DeFi-focused stablecoins rely on contract activity, vaults, and staking, showing a different activity profile.

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