- Yes — for now, stablecoins are still mostly a crypto-trading tool. Roughly half of all stablecoin value sits in trading, exchange and collateral roles. Genuine "payments" are under 1% of supply, and the IMF estimates ~80% of on-chain transactions are bots doing arbitrage.
- But the "other" uses are real and growing fast. Dollar savings in high-inflation countries, B2B cross-border settlement, remittances and card spending are all climbing — real-world stablecoin payments more than doubled to ~$390 billion in 2025.
- The headline volume numbers are wildly inflated. The "$46 trillion" figure drops to about $9 trillion once you strip out bots and double-counting. Trust the adjusted numbers, not the headlines.
- The real shift is payments. Stablecoins are quietly becoming payment infrastructure — and the missing piece has always been a wallet ordinary people and merchants can actually use. That's the gap MyFriendlyWallet is built for.
01 — The boom is realA market that doubled its way to $300 billion
The growth is not hype. Total stablecoin market capitalization rose about 49% in 2025 — from roughly $205 billion in January to around $306 billion by November, an all-time high and the 25th consecutive month of expansion. The Federal Reserve pegged the year's growth at "about 50 percent."
Two coins dominate. Tether (USDT) sits around $185 billion — roughly 60% of the market — while Circle's USDC holds about $74 billion. Together they make up nearly 90% of all stablecoins in circulation.
Here's a number that reframes the whole conversation: a16z's State of Crypto 2025 report found that stablecoins are now collectively the 17th-largest holder of US Treasuries on Earth, holding over $150 billion — more than many sovereign nations. This is no longer a crypto-casino sideshow. It's becoming financial plumbing.
02 — The honest answerSo… is it all just trading?
The cleanest breakdown comes from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, which estimated how the entire ~$300 billion supply is actually being held. The result is the single most useful chart in this whole debate:
So the honest answer to the question is yes, for now. Half of all stablecoin value is doing crypto-finance work: it's the dollar leg of trading pairs, collateral for derivatives, liquidity in DeFi, and "dry powder" parked between trades. The IMF, the BIS and the Fed all reached this same conclusion independently.
"Approximately 80 percent of stablecoin transactions are conducted by bots and automated systems for arbitrage and rebalancing."— International Monetary Fund, Understanding Stablecoins, December 2025
03 — The number everyone quotes is wrongWhy "$46 trillion" is mostly noise
You'll see enormous figures thrown around — $33 trillion, $46 trillion a year in stablecoin volume. They're technically true and almost completely misleading. Most of that "volume" is automated activity: MEV bots, market-makers, exchange rebalancing, and double-counting (swap $100 of USDC for PYUSD on a DEX and it registers as $200 of "volume").
When researchers filter for genuine economic activity, the picture shrinks dramatically:
- a16z: $46 trillion headline volume → about $9 trillion once adjusted. Roughly 80% was inorganic.
- Visa & Allium: ~$3.9 trillion in a 30-day window adjusts down to about $818 billion of real activity.
- McKinsey & Artemis: actual stablecoin payments in 2025 totalled ~$390 billion — only about 0.02% of global payments — but that more than doubled from 2024.
The lesson for reading any stablecoin headline: mentally divide the big number by about ten. What's left is still impressive, and it's growing in the right direction.
That 0.7% "payments" slice is exactly the problem I set out to solve
Stablecoins are stuck in crypto-finance for one stubborn reason: actually paying someone with them is hard. You need the right chain, native gas tokens, a 42-character address, and the nerve to hope you got it right. Most people — and almost every merchant — never get past that wall.
MyFriendlyWallet removes the wall. Send USDC to a @username instead of a hex address. Pay gasless on Base and Solana — no separate gas token to buy, no failed transactions. It's the difference between "crypto for traders" and money that behaves like money.
Try the app →04 — The interesting partWhat stablecoins do beyond trading
Dollar savings where the local currency is failing
This is the strongest non-trading story, and it's not speculation — it's survival. In a survey of 2,500 crypto users across Brazil, Nigeria, Turkey, Indonesia and India, 47% said they used stablecoins to save in US dollars, 43% for better exchange rates, and 39% to earn yield. Nearly 70% had converted local currency into stablecoins.
Argentina is the clearest case. With the peso losing roughly 95% of its value against the dollar over five years, stablecoins have become grassroots dollarization: they're ~62% of all crypto volume there, and three out of four crypto-paid workers say they'd rather be paid in stablecoins. For these users, a "digital dollar" isn't a bet — it's a bank account that doesn't melt.
B2B and cross-border settlement
Business-to-business is the largest genuine payment category at about $226 billion (~60% of payment volume), and it grew an eye-watering ~733% year-over-year. Monthly B2B volume went from under $100 million in early 2023 to over $6 billion by mid-2025. Settling a supplier invoice across borders in minutes instead of days is a real, boring, valuable use case — the kind that lasts.
Cards, remittances and everyday spend
Stablecoin-linked card spending hit about $4.5 billion in 2025, up roughly 673%. Consumer-to-business transactions more than doubled. Remittances via stablecoins undercut both Zelle and traditional money-transfer services on cost, which matters most for the small, frequent transfers that legacy rails make uneconomical.
If stablecoins were purely a trading vehicle, their volume would rise and fall with crypto prices. In 2025, it didn't — adjusted volume kept growing through downturns. That decoupling is the clearest sign the asset class is graduating into real payments.
05 — The mapWho's actually using them
Geography tells the story. In absolute terms Asia-Pacific and North America lead, but relative to the size of their economies, Latin America and Africa stand out — exactly the regions where the dollar is scarce and local currencies are shaky. North America is the net source of stablecoins, effectively exporting dollars to meet global demand.
Chainalysis ranks India first in grassroots adoption, followed by the US, Pakistan, Vietnam and Brazil. In Latin America, stablecoins are over 90% of crypto activity. And usage skews young: 18–24 year-olds hold more of their balance in stablecoins and transact more often, citing dollar savings and yield as their top reasons.
One quiet but important shift: payments are increasingly local, not just cross-border. Intra-country stablecoin transactions have grown from about half to nearly three-quarters of payment volume. Stablecoins are starting to behave like everyday local money that happens to run on global rails.
06 — The green lightRegulation is finally catching up
The single biggest catalyst is legal clarity. The US GENIUS Act, signed in July 2025, is the first federal framework: it requires 1:1 high-quality reserves, monthly disclosures, and — notably — bars issuers from paying interest to holders. In the EU, MiCA is rolling out with a July 2026 authorization deadline, already reshaping which coins are listed where.
Meanwhile the incumbents are moving in: Stripe bought stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge for ~$1.1 billion, Visa and Mastercard now settle in stablecoins, and PayPal expanded its PYUSD coin to 68 countries. The BIS remains skeptical — it argues stablecoins fail its "triple test" for sound money and may only ever play a supporting role — but even the skeptics now treat them as permanent infrastructure rather than a passing fad.
Gasless USDC + pay widgets = the payments chapter the data is pointing at
Every trend in this report converges on one thing: stablecoins becoming spendable, not just tradable. That requires two things ordinary finance takes for granted — free, instant sending and a checkout a merchant can drop into a page.
MyFriendlyWallet ships both. Gasless USDC and EURC on Base, USDT on Solana, usernames instead of addresses, and merchant pay widgets for the businesses traditional processors leave behind — the freelancers, the cross-border sellers, the markets "where Stripe doesn't go." The widgets are created and pasted onto your own platform in seconds — no integration project, no approval queue. Businesses receive 100% of every payment — there's no cut taken on the receiving side. The flat 0.25% is a sender-side fee only, it's non-custodial, and it's a PWA that installs like any app.
The market just told us where it's heading. I built the wallet for that destination.
Open MyFriendlyWallet →07 — How to read the dataFive takeaways for anyone watching this space
- Anchor on adjusted numbers, not headlines. Treat any multi-trillion figure as roughly 10× inflated.
- Watch the decoupling. The key forward signal is whether real volume keeps growing when crypto prices fall. So far, it does.
- B2B and cards are the leading edge. These organic segments are growing fastest — watch for payments rising above ~5% of adjusted volume.
- Regulation is the swing factor. The GENIUS Act and MiCA will decide whether stablecoins scale into mainstream money or stay crypto-bound.
- The store-of-value case is the most durable. Dollar-saving in unstable economies is demand-driven and doesn't depend on crypto prices at all.
A word of caution on the data
- This market is genuinely hard to measure — estimates vary widely by method and source, and figures across reports aren't directly comparable.
- "Organic volume" filters are contested; they may exclude some real institutional use, or miss real activity entirely.
- Survey data skews toward existing crypto users, overstating penetration in the general public.
- Some sources (Visa, a16z, Circle) have an interest in emphasizing adoption; the IMF, BIS and Fed are the most independent — and the most cautious.
- Forward projections ("$2 trillion by 2028") are forecasts, not facts. Treat them with healthy skepticism.
The bottom lineA trading backbone, becoming a payments network
So, are stablecoins mainly used to buy other cryptos? Today, yes. The bulk of the value still does crypto-finance work, and the headline volumes are heavily padded by bots. But the trajectory is unmistakable: real-world payments are doubling, dollar-savings demand is structural, businesses are settling in stablecoins, and regulators have switched the light from red to green.
The asset is ready. What's been missing is a wallet that makes spending a stablecoin as easy as sending a message — and a checkout that lets a small business accept one without a finance department. That's the chapter being written now, and it's the one I care about most.
Sources: IMF, Understanding Stablecoins (Dec 2025) & Working Paper 2025/141; BIS Annual Economic Report 2025 (Ch. III) & Bulletin 108; Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, What Are Stablecoins Used For Today? (2026); a16z, State of Crypto 2025; Visa/Allium stablecoin dashboard; McKinsey & Artemis (Feb 2026); Castle Island Ventures / Brevan Howard / Visa emerging-markets survey; Chainalysis 2025 Geography of Crypto; CoinDesk, J.P. Morgan, DeFiLlama.
Nothing here is financial advice. Crypteria AS builds software, not investment recommendations.