The headline volume is enormous. The economic activity underneath it is much smaller - and far more interesting.
Central argument: Stablecoin transfer volume is not the same thing as payment volume. Gross on-chain totals capture trading, exchange movements, smart-contract operations and repeated transfers that can make the market look much larger than its current use in commerce. The strategic question is not whether the headline number is fake, but what survives after the economic noise is removed.
The $35 trillion number is real - and still misleading
Stablecoins generated one of the most arresting payments statistics of 2025. In an April 2026 speech, the Bank for International Settlements said stablecoin transaction volumes had reached about $35 trillion annually in 2025. In the same paragraph, however, the BIS estimated payment-related flows at only around $390 billion. That is barely more than one dollar of payment activity for every ninety dollars in the headline total.
The later BIS Annual Economic Report 2026 used an estimated $28 trillion for 2025 rather than $35 trillion and stressed that values fall sharply when transfers between wallets owned by the same party are removed. The difference between two authoritative BIS figures is not a contradiction so much as a warning about measurement: totals depend on chain coverage, wallet attribution, filtering rules and whether analysts count transfer events or economically distinct transactions.
That measurement problem is the core of the illusion. A blockchain records movement with extraordinary precision, but it does not automatically tell an analyst why the movement occurred. A transfer of $10 million in stablecoins may represent a corporate payment, a crypto exchange moving its own liquidity, a trader repositioning collateral, an automated smart contract, or the same underlying value moving through several addresses before reaching its economic destination.
A blockchain transfer is not the same thing as an economic transaction
The distinction has become important enough for the BIS to devote a 2026 working paper to it. The anatomy of stablecoin transactions separates stablecoin transfer events from the broader blockchain transactions in which those transfers are embedded. A single on-chain transaction can bundle several token transfers and other smart-contract actions. Counting each visible movement as if it were a separate payment can therefore exaggerate economic activity.
The same issue appears when addresses are treated as if they were people or companies. Exchanges, custodians, market makers and protocols often control many addresses. Funds may be swept between hot wallets, cold wallets, liquidity pools and internal treasury accounts without any new buyer, seller, employee or supplier entering the picture. Blockchain data is transparent at the address level but incomplete at the economic-identity level.
Inference: the stablecoin market is unusually easy to overstate because the ledger makes every technical movement visible. Traditional payment statistics are usually produced after institutions classify transactions by purpose and counterparty. Public blockchains expose the raw plumbing first and force researchers to reconstruct economic purpose afterwards.
Even adjusted stablecoin volume is not the same as real-economy payments
Visa has tried to narrow the gap with an adjusted methodology developed with Artemis, Allium Labs and Castle Island Ventures. Its stablecoin analytics framework filters activity such as high-frequency trading bots, exchange treasury rebalancing and repeated smart-contract transactions. The result is dramatically lower than unadjusted volume - but still much larger than a conventional measure of merchant, payroll or supplier payments.
Visa reports roughly $33 trillion of overall stablecoin volume over a recent twelve-month window versus about $10.2 trillion after adjustment. Yet the same analysis says 36% of adjusted volume in 2025 came from deposits and withdrawals at centralised exchanges. That is economically meaningful activity, but it is not the same as a consumer buying goods, a company paying a supplier, or a migrant sending money home.
The retail picture is smaller still. Visa has previously reported that retail-sized transactions represented less than 1% of adjusted stablecoin volume over the twelve months through March 2025. Size is an imperfect proxy - a small transfer can be investment-related and a very large transfer can be commercial - but it reinforces the central point: transaction volume should not be read as a direct measure of day-to-day economic adoption.
The $390 billion figure is small relative to the hype, not small in absolute terms
The BIS estimate of around $390 billion in payment-related stablecoin flows during 2025 is the more revealing number for the real economy. It suggests that actual payments remain a small minority of stablecoin activity, but $390 billion is not trivial. It is large enough to support specialised cross-border corridors, business-to-business settlement, treasury transfers, card-linked spending and dollar access in markets where traditional banking is expensive or constrained.
The Federal Reserve has shown how a payment stablecoin can shorten some cross-border chains by allowing users or smaller institutions to transfer a dollar-linked token directly while large international banks provide conversion liquidity. That model does not eliminate foreign-exchange costs, compliance, on- and off-ramp fees or the need for reliable liquidity. It changes where those functions sit.
A separate Federal Reserve review of stablecoins in 2025 noted growing links between stablecoin infrastructure and traditional payment providers, including partnerships that let businesses transact or hold payment balances in stablecoins. This is evidence of commercial experimentation. It is not evidence that stablecoins have already displaced cards, bank transfers or domestic instant-payment systems at scale.
Why crypto trading still dominates the ledger
Stablecoins solved a genuine problem inside crypto before they solved one in the wider economy: traders needed a dollar-like settlement asset that could move between exchanges and blockchains without relying on a bank transfer every time. That made stablecoins useful as quote currency, collateral, liquidity and a bridge between cryptoassets. The BIS describes them as a dominant medium of exchange within the crypto ecosystem, and its 2026 work shows how deeply stablecoin activity is intertwined with trading and programmable financial operations.
This explains why a token with a market capitalisation in the hundreds of billions can generate transfer volume many times larger than its outstanding supply. The same dollar-equivalent token can change hands repeatedly as traders rebalance, post collateral, arbitrage prices, move assets between chains and settle positions. High velocity is not a defect. It simply answers a different question from the one implied by a headline about payments adoption.
The BIS also noted in April 2026 that about 98% of stablecoins were denominated in US dollars. That dollar dominance helps explain another non-commercial use: stablecoins as offshore stores of value, especially in economies where access to dollars is limited or local currencies are volatile. Holding a dollar stablecoin can be economically important even when the holder never uses it to buy a product.
The counterargument: payment adoption can accelerate faster than current shares suggest
It would be equally misleading to conclude that stablecoins are irrelevant to payments because current real-economy use is a small share of on-chain volume. The infrastructure is being built precisely because companies expect payment use to grow. The United States enacted the GENIUS Act in July 2025, establishing a federal framework for payment stablecoins with one-to-one reserve requirements for permitted issuers. In Europe, MiCA has created a supervisory regime for relevant asset-referenced and e-money tokens. Regulation does not guarantee adoption, but it reduces one barrier to institutional use.
Financial markets appear to take the competitive threat seriously. An IMF working paper published in March 2026 estimated that US legislative developments supporting stablecoin payments reduced the market value of listed incumbent payment firms by 18%, or roughly $300 billion, in the authors' event-study framework. That is not a forecast of future market share, but it is evidence that investors believe stablecoins could reshape payment economics.
The Federal Reserve's July 2026 conference on the international role of the dollar likewise highlighted research suggesting that stablecoin rails may lower the cost of certain cross-border transactions and could reinforce the dollar's international reach. Federal Reserve conference summary. The plausible future is therefore not that today's $390 billion stays fixed, but that real-economy payment use grows from a comparatively small base.
Regulation will make the volume easier to trust - but not easier to interpret
As stablecoins move closer to regulated payments, data quality should improve. Permitted issuers and regulated intermediaries will have stronger customer-identification, reserve, reporting and compliance obligations. In June 2026, US regulators proposed customer identification program requirements for certain payment stablecoin issuers under the GENIUS Act framework. The European Banking Authority is similarly developing the supervisory architecture around significant tokens under MiCA.
But better regulation will not collapse all stablecoin activity into a single clean category called payments. A regulated stablecoin can still be used for exchange settlement, securities trading, collateral, tokenised assets, treasury transfers and cross-border liquidity management. The ecosystem may become more institutionally mature while remaining economically heterogeneous.
What the real-economy metric should measure
The most useful future measure will not be the largest possible on-chain number. It will be the volume that can be linked to economically distinct counterparties and identifiable payment purposes: merchant settlement, payroll, remittances, supplier payments, cross-border invoices, treasury disbursements and other transfers where the stablecoin is functioning as money rather than as trading infrastructure. Researchers will also need to avoid double counting when the same value passes through exchanges, bridges or several wallets before final settlement.
That is why the distinction between gross, adjusted and payment-related volume matters. Gross volume is useful for understanding blockchain load and liquidity. Adjusted volume is useful for approximating organic user activity. Payment-related volume is the metric that matters most when comparing stablecoins with cards, bank transfers, instant-payment systems or remittance networks. None of the three is inherently wrong; the mistake is using one as a substitute for another.
What the gap means for banks, fintechs, regulators and investors
For banks, the danger is reacting to the $35 trillion headline rather than the underlying use cases. Stablecoins are not yet processing $35 trillion of commerce, but they are proving that dollar-linked value can move continuously across programmable networks. Banks should focus on the segments where that functionality is genuinely superior - cross-border treasury, digital-asset settlement, after-hours liquidity and programmable workflows - while improving instant payments and tokenised deposit capabilities of their own.
For fintechs, the opportunity is similarly narrower and more practical than the headline suggests. The strongest products are likely to solve specific frictions in conversion, compliance, reconciliation and distribution rather than simply advertise blockchain throughput. A stablecoin payment is only competitive if the full journey from fiat into the token and back out again is cheaper, faster or more useful than the alternative.
For regulators, measurement is itself a policy issue. Gross transfer data can overstate retail adoption while underestimating the systemic importance of large institutional flows. Supervisors need transaction classifications that capture who ultimately bears risk, where reserves sit, how quickly redemption can occur and whether activity is concentrated in exchanges, payments, tokenised markets or offshore dollar demand.
For investors, the $35 trillion illusion cuts both ways. It can inflate narratives about immediate disruption, but dismissing stablecoins because only a small fraction of activity is currently commercial would also be a mistake. The important signals are growth in payment-specific volume, stable recurring users, corporate treasury adoption, regulated distribution, merchant settlement and the economics of converting between stablecoins and bank money.
Conclusion: the smaller number may matter more
Stablecoins did not process $35 trillion of real-economy payments in 2025. The BIS's own analysis makes that clear. The headline figure describes a high-velocity on-chain financial ecosystem in which the same tokens support trading, collateral, exchange operations, transfers and payments. Once analysts isolate payment-related flows, the number falls by almost two orders of magnitude.
But the correction should sharpen the debate, not end it. Roughly $390 billion of estimated payment flows already represents a meaningful market, especially given stablecoins' advantages in 24/7 settlement, programmability and access to dollar liquidity. The key question is no longer whether stablecoins move large amounts of value. They clearly do. It is whether a growing share of that movement escapes the crypto loop and becomes embedded in ordinary economic activity.
That is the number banks, payment companies, regulators and investors should watch. The future of stablecoins will be determined less by how impressive the blockchain ledger looks in aggregate and more by how often businesses and households choose stablecoins when they have a real invoice, wage, remittance or purchase to settle.
References
1. BIS - Stablecoins: framing the debate (20 April 2026)
3. BIS Working Paper No. 1359 - The anatomy of stablecoin transactions
4. Visa - Stablecoins and the future of onchain finance
5. Visa - Making sense of stablecoins
6. Federal Reserve - Stablecoins in 2025: Developments and Financial Stability Implications
8. IMF Working Paper 2026/052 - Stablecoins and the Future of Payments: Evidence from Financial Markets
9. U.S. Public Law 119-27 - GENIUS Act
11. European Banking Authority - Asset-referenced and e-money tokens under MiCA