35 trillion stablecoins, only 1% has actually been spent

By Clow

In 1973, bankers from 15 countries sat in a meeting room in Brussels and decided to replace the chaotic cross-border remittance telexes with a standardized telegram protocol. The system later got a name: SWIFT.

The significance of this has never been about how advanced the technology is, but about a simple fact: whoever controls the settlement channels can take a cut from every single flow of money worldwide. For fifty years, there have been no traffic lights on this route—no detours, either.

Until someone decided not to take it anymore.

In 2025, the total value of stablecoin settlements on blockchains reached $35 trillion. That number is bigger than Mastercard’s annual processing volume. But a joint report by McKinsey and Artemis Analytics reveals an awkward truth: only about $380 billion—1% of the total—is actually used to pay for things.

Stablecoins haven’t upended payments yet. But they are redefining what “settlement” really means.

Where did the 99% go

$35 trillion sounds like stablecoins have eaten up a big chunk of global payments.

But once you break that number down, the picture looks completely different. In its 2025 on-chain analytics report, Visa directly labels these transactions as “noise”—arbitrage bots shuttling back and forth between different DEXs. One strategy, run a full loop, leaves millions of dollars’ worth of traces on-chain, but no real goods or services are exchanged. Exchanges move money back and forth between hot and cold wallets; when the market swings sharply, tens of billions of USDT run between different chains, purely as internal bookkeeping.

Move a piece of money from your left pocket to your right pocket, and then claim you created two transactions—that’s how a large part of the “prosperity” of the on-chain world happens.

For that, the industry invented a metric called “adjusted transaction volume,” designed specifically to filter out bots, internal transfers, and double counting. After filtering, the $35 trillion shrinks to about $9 trillion to $10 trillion. Go one step further: actual payments—where someone pays and someone receives—total only $380 billion to $390 billion, roughly 4% of adjusted transaction value.

Sounds like stablecoins are bragging? Not entirely. The year-over-year growth rate for this 4% is close to 100%. The issue isn’t that the number is small—it’s that the vast majority of on-chain activity is fundamentally machines talking to machines.

The people truly spending money: not you and me—businesses

In that real-payments 1%, more than 60% comes from businesses.

McKinsey’s data shows that in 2025, B2B stablecoin payments reached $261 billion, growing more than sixfold year over year. This isn’t the work of speculators—it’s real, cash-and-carry business.

This isn’t a one-off phenomenon. Cross-border supply-chain settlements hit $130 billion. Global payroll and remittance payments are about $90 billion (according to McKinsey’s Global Payments Map tracking data, representing less than 1% of the more than $1 trillion in total transactions in that area). Even purchases of AI computing power and cloud resources have begun settling with stablecoins, at roughly $11 billion.

Stablecoins have completed an identity shift on the B end: from speculative chips on exchanges to a productivity tool for corporate finance departments. For companies that have spent years paying tolls to SWIFT, this isn’t some “Web3 vision”—it’s simply saving money.

Why nobody uses them on the consumer end

After that surge on the B side, the C-side data looks especially bleak. Even if you add B2B and C2C together, all stablecoin payments account for only about 0.02% of total annual global payments—and of that, 60% is businesses paying. The remaining share for ordinary consumers, in a statistical sense, is almost nonexistent.

The reasons aren’t that complicated. In markets like the United States, stablecoins aren’t legal tender. If you use them to buy a cup of coffee, legally it counts as disposing of an asset. When you file taxes at year-end, you must precisely record the cost basis of those few dollars and the difference between market prices, then calculate capital gains tax. A $5 coffee might have compliance costs that are higher than the coffee itself. But if you pay with a Visa card? There’s no tax burden—and you get cash back.

The merchant side also wasn’t ready. Walmart and Amazon don’t accept stablecoin payments directly. For these retail giants, integrating a blockchain payment gateway means entirely new accounting, anti–money-laundering monitoring, and volatility risk management. The upside is unclear, and the trouble is definite.

But a roundabout tactic is quietly starting to work.

Visa and Mastercard have launched stablecoin-linked cards. Users hold stablecoins in their digital wallets. The moment they swipe the card, the gateway automatically converts the stablecoins into local fiat currency. Merchants still receive dollars or euros. In 2025, spending on these cards grew by 673%, reaching $4.5 billion.

Users don’t need to understand what a gas fee is, and they don’t need to know that they “used the blockchain” at all. Maybe this is how stablecoins truly break into the mainstream—not by convincing people to change how they pay, but by making the change feel nonexistent.

Efficiency tools in developed countries, lifelines in developing countries

The global footprint of stablecoins is highly uneven—and that unevenness exposes a deeper truth.

Stablecoin payment volumes initiated in Asia account for 60% of the global total—about $245 billion. The Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority established licensing regimes for stablecoin issuers in sequence, and Japan has followed suit. In these places, stablecoins are efficiency tools. Businesses use them to replace cumbersome correspondent banking networks to achieve faster, cheaper cross-border settlement. Everything runs within a compliance framework—clean, transparent, and traceable.

Then look south.

In Argentina, inflation runs into triple digits. In Nigeria, if you want to buy U.S. dollars in cash, you have to go through the black market. In Brazil, Chainalysis’s report shows that more than 90% of cryptocurrency flows are related to stablecoins. The main use isn’t trading or speculation—it’s precautionary savings and sending money back to families.

But when you open McKinsey’s “official payments” statistics, the combined share of Africa and Latin America totals less than $1 billion. Where did the data go? The answer is that a large amount of payments in these regions happens on off-platform exchanges and P2P markets, where compliant payment interfaces simply can’t capture it.

In developed markets, stablecoins are a tool to speed up settlement. In emerging markets, stablecoins are the only “digital dollars” you can actually touch. One is an efficiency upgrade; the other is a survival need. The same technology—two entirely different stories.

And from a technical perspective, low-fee public chains—whether Layer 2 solutions or high-performance chains—are making it possible to complete cross-border transfers for just a few cents. The adoption of account abstraction technology further removes the final barrier: users no longer need to hold native tokens to pay gas fees; merchants can pay on the user’s behalf; and even fees can be paid directly with stablecoins. Using a blockchain wallet starts to feel no different from using Alipay.

In summary

The “1%” in the McKinsey report isn’t stablecoins’ epitaph—it’s its coordinates.

That 1% plugs precisely into the most painful and lowest-efficiency segment of the global financial system: cross-border B2B settlement and survival finance in emerging markets. And as of July 2025, the U.S. “GENIUS Act,” the EU’s MiCA, and Hong Kong’s stablecoin regulations are laying down a legal high-speed highway for that 1%.

Maybe one day—maybe as soon as 2026—a Brazilian person sends their family $50 on WhatsApp. They don’t know that money went through a blockchain. They don’t need to know.

The best infrastructure is the kind you don’t notice.