The Stablecoin Story

Plausible exaggeration is a core skill in finance.

In investment banking, it’s stretching a spreadsheet until the deal math works. In pitching investors, it’s getting creative with valuation metrics (community-adjusted EBITDA, for example). In accounting, it’s pumping up profits by calling recurring costs “non-recurring costs.”

None of it is a lie (lying is risky in finance). But the truth can be tortured until it confesses to almost any story.

In crypto, for example, the current story is that stablecoins have surpassed credit cards.

In the eagerness to claim a mainstream use case, many have cited the attention-getting statistic that stablecoins processed $33 trillion in transactions in 2025 — more than Visa and Mastercard’s combined total of $25.5 trillion.

Unfortunately, this is apples to oranges. Comparing stablecoin volumes to credit cards implies that people are using stablecoins to pay for things.

Not many do.

A recent Federal Reserve study found that just 0.7% of stablecoins are used for payments.

By contrast, the study finds that 48.8% of all stablecoins are used as a trading asset (the sum of the Exchanges, Finance, and Infrastructure categories above).

So the comparison to credit cards only works if you imagine Nasdaq settling its trades on Visa and NYSE on Mastercard. This would make it a lot less flattering. In 2024, the DTCC processed $3.7 quadrillion in transactions (imagine the reward points!). 

The Fed study estimates what share of the $315 billion stock of stablecoins is used for each purpose: 29% of stablecoins for transfers, 17% for finance, etc. 

Notably, 21.2% of stablecoins are not used for anything at all.

(In traditional finance, these might be deemed abandoned and seized by the government.)

By contrast, a McKinsey report measures stablecoin usage as a percentage of transactions.

The result is similar.

McKinsey finds that stablecoins are used almost entirely for “technical transfers” (in gray) and “trading and other nonpayment financial activity” (in blue).

Payments are represented by the tiny sliver of black all the way to the right: Just 0.39% of stablecoin transactions are attributable to people paying for things.

McKinsey puts this further into perspective by estimating stablecoins’ share of various markets. They find, for example, that stablecoins account for less than 1% of the market for remittances and less than 0.01% of global business-to-business transfers.

Those are two of the most-cited use cases for stablecoins, and they barely register.

That might, however, be starting to change.

As a16z documents in a series of helpful charts, the real-world usage of stablecoins may finally be hitting an inflection point.

They show, for example, that consumer-to-business transactions (aka “commerce”) were up 128% in 2025 versus 2024:

Growing even faster is the all-new use case of credit cards that use stablecoins as collateral — deposit USDC and spend them wherever Visa is accepted, basically. 

They seem popular: Monthly deposits to these cards rose from near zero in 2024 to over $300 million in 2026.

Another new-ish phenomenon is non-dollar stablecoins. A16z notes that transaction volume in Brazil’s real-backed BRLA stablecoin has surged to above $400 million per month in 2026.

The rise is attributed to the integration of BRLA with Brazil’s PIX network — which suggests that it’s being used in everyday payments.

The most telling statistic, however, may be the data on intra-country usage.

Citing data from Allium (based on “geo-labeled” wallets), a16z shows that intra-country transactions have grown from about half of payment volume in early 2024 to nearly three-quarters now. This, they say, is evidence that stablecoins are gaining traction as “a local payments medium that happens to run on global infrastructure.”

It should be noted that all these numbers are coming off of a low base, so the growth rates may exaggerate the story being told. 

But the markets stablecoins are starting to compete in are ginormous. So the flip side of having such a tiny market share now is that there’s still so much upside.

Chainalysis, for example, forecasts that annual stablecoin transactions could grow to as much as $1.5 quadrillion in 2035:

If so, DTCC volumes might come to be the only thing to compare them to.

The comparison to credit cards could happen even sooner: Chainalysis thinks stablecoin payment volumes might match Visa and Mastercard’s as early as 2031.

There might be an element of exaggeration in that story, I'm not sure.

But the comparisons to traditional finance are getting less torturous.

— Byron Gilliam