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Stablecoins recorded $35 trillion in blockchain transactions throughout 2025, yet approximately $380-$390 billion, roughly 1%, represented genuine payments for supplier settlements, remittances, or payroll, analysis by McKinsey and Artemis Analytics published in October 2025 revealed. The 99% overstatement stems from how blockchain architecture captures activity: it counts trading flows, internal fund movements, and automated protocol operations as separate transactions, thereby inflating volumes without reflecting actual payment adoption.
The measurement gap persists despite $300+ billion in circulating supply as of late January 2026. Understanding why blockchain data systematically overstates payment utility matters, for traditional institutions evaluating integration and policymakers assessing systemic implications. Comparing stablecoin transaction volumes to Visa or Mastercard payment flows fundamentally misrepresents market penetration, when 99% of volume comprises non-payment activity.
We just published the most accurate onchain estimate of stablecoin payments ever.
Everyone keeps quoting $10T–$30T “stablecoin payments.”
That number is wrong. By a lot.
Built with @McKinsey payments team, we used a bottom-up approach to isolate real payments.
This report… pic.twitter.com/BMpMzFPtVU
— Artemis (@artemis) January 23, 2026
Transaction counts inflate through activities unrelated to end-user payments. Exchange wallet movements between hot wallets and cold storage, automated smart contract executions, arbitrage cycles, liquidity pool rebalancing, and protocol-level mechanics that fragment single-user actions into multiple on-chain transactions generate massive volumes divorced from payment intent.
Centralized exchanges and custodians routinely shuffle funds internally for operational needs, creating transaction activity without economic substance. Decentralized finance protocols break transactions into multiple steps, swapping tokens through several liquidity pools, with each step recorded as a separate transaction. Maximal extractable value operations by automated bots further inflate counts.
Stablecoin reality check
$35 Trillion moved through stablecoins last year.
Only about 1% was actual real world payments like payroll or remittances.
Most volume is still trading, transfers, and onchain loops…. Adoption’s early, but the rails are clearly working. pic.twitter.com/vjG2KNQQwX
— gemsmorro (@gemsmorro) January 24, 2026
Public ledgers record transaction values and wallet addresses, but provide no insight into the underlying economic purpose. Distinguishing a $100,000 cross-border business payment from $100,000 cycling through DEX liquidity pools requires external context that blockchain data alone cannot provide. Machine learning models attempting to classify transactions achieve only 65% accuracy, according to International Monetary Fund research published in July 2025.
The pseudonymous nature of blockchain architecture removes personal identifiers from transaction records, further complicating analysis. Attempts at geographic attribution are systematically distorted by VPN usage, unreliable web traffic proxies, and flawed assumptions about uniform transaction sizes. IMF analysis demonstrated average transaction sizes varying from $11,493 in Asia-Pacific to $35,016 in North America, undermining methodologies that assume consistency across regions.
Payment categories such as business-to-business settlements and cross-border remittances cannot be directly identified from on-chain data, forcing researchers to rely on assumptions that introduce compounding errors. Historical top-down estimates derived from blockchain activity have proven incomplete, due to noise from trading flows and maximal-extractable-value transactions. Another Artemis study noted the absence of a standardized framework for filtering genuine payment activity from operational noise.
Academic research published in July 2025 identified additional methodological pitfalls: biases in large language models deployed for wallet classification, conflicting outputs across competing econometric frameworks, and oversimplified assumptions about transaction behavior across diverse user populations. Researchers acknowledge that stablecoin data remains fragmented and incomplete, with different methodologies sometimes producing contradictory results.
B2B is driving the market’s expansion.
Since February, B2B volume grew 113%, reaching $6.4B/month and representing nearly two-thirds of all stablecoin payments.
Consumer channels followed: Card (+36%), B2C (+32%), Prefunding (+61%), while P2P remained stable at $1.6B. pic.twitter.com/XYF0FYaW1o
— Artemis (@artemis) October 24, 2025
To circumvent such blockchain data limits, researchers surveyed 33 stablecoin payment firms, capturing $136 billion in verifiable settlements between January 2023 and August 2025. By August 2025, these firms processed a $122 billion annualized run rate, led by $76 billion in B2B payments, with peer-to-peer and card-linked activity at $19 billion and $18 billion. Though small relative to headline volumes, this bottom-up data confirms, measurable real-world stablecoin payment use beyond inflated on-chain metrics.
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