Stablecoins Just Outpaced Visa’s Transaction Volume—And Wall Street Didn’t See It Coming

Move over, legacy finance—stablecoins just lapped Visa’s annual payment volume. $11 trillion in transactions settled on-chain last year, dwarfing the card giant’s $9.8 trillion. No chargebacks, no middlemen, just code moving value at the speed of the internet.

How? DeFi’s dirty little secret: stablecoins became the grease for everything from crypto trades to remittances. Tether and USDC now handle more daily transactions than PayPal ever did at its peak.

The kicker? Traditional banks still treat them like speculative toys—even as their own clients quietly use them to bypass SWIFT delays. Guess that’s what happens when your innovation budget goes to stock buybacks instead of infrastructure.

Bitwise report shows that stablecoin transactions surpassed Visa payments

Transaction volume difference using data from Visa and Coin Metrics (January 1st, 2018, to December 31st, 2024). Source: Bitwise

Bitwise reported that stablecoins had outpaced Visa in volume, with the trend clearly showing that TradeFi is getting disrupted. It is also estimated that they will settle roughly $27.6 trillion in total transaction volume in 2024, with most of it running on Ethereum. 

The CEO of Social Capital, Chamath Palihapitiya, also confirmed that the average weekly stablecoin transaction volume in Q4 of 2024 reached $464 billion against Visa’s $316 billion. Citigroup even projected that the market could reach $3.8 trillion by 2030. 

However, experts like Dan Smith (Data Expert at Blockworks Research) and Joe Coll (Advisor at Maven 11 Capital) warned that the stablecoin volume might be inflated or manipulated, arguing that it does not reflect real economic activity, and it can not be directly compared with traditional financial systems like Visa. 

Coll pointed out that professional traders could generate hundreds of millions in volume using very little initial capital. Smith agreed with Coll’s view that volume manipulation for these U.S. dollar-backed tokens could be achieved without requiring large capital, casting doubt on the figures cited by Palihapitiya. Rajiv Patel-O’Connor, the Principal at Framework Ventures, even referred to the metric as “useless.”

Last year, Visa’s dashboard also reported that only about 10% of stablecoin transactions were genuine, sharply contrasting with Visa, where each transaction represented a real payment or purchase.

Visa partners with Bridge to offer stablecoin-linked cards in Latin America 

Visa announced that it was partnering with Bridge to offer Visa cards linked to fiat-pegged tokens to its Latin American customers. 

Zach Abrams, CEO of Bridge, said that for consumers to use stablecoins on a large scale, “they will have to be interoperable with existing tools and services that customers and businesses are accustomed to.”

Abrams also said interoperability “enabled folks to use and take advantage of these programmable digital currencies wherever they were in the world, but remain wholly connected with the financial tools that folks used.” 

“We feel like the moment is now to take some of the things that we’ve already been doing on a more experimental, pilot basis and start to expose them to the world as capabilities that we anticipate will really start to become big and meaningful and globally scalable.”

–Jack Forestell, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Visa.

Visa and Bridge also made a joint statement claiming that people will be able to use the stablecoin-linked cards at any merchant that accepts Visa. The new card programs will be introduced in Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Chile. The statement also revealed that the product will become available in Europe, Africa, and Asia in the coming months.

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