Research: Stablecoins with a $35 trillion annual transaction volume—how much of it is genuine payments?

Author: Stablecoin Insider / McKinsey×Artemis

Translation: Deep Tide TechFlow

Deep Tide Briefing: A joint report from McKinsey and Artemis did something that very few in the industry have tried: it broke down stablecoin trading-volume data. The conclusion is that, out of roughly $3.5 trillion in annual on-chain transaction volume, only about $390 billion (around 1%) represents real payment activity. Of that, 58% is B2B financial operations, with an annual growth rate of 733%. Consumer-side stablecoin usage is nearly negligible, and this isn’t a coincidence—the article outlines five structural reasons explaining why the gap between institutions and individuals isn’t just a temporary shortfall.

Full text is as follows:

The stablecoin industry has a headline-level problem.

On the one hand, raw on-chain data shows that hundreds of billions of dollars move on-chain every year; that number has fueled endless comparisons to Visa and Mastercard, along with predictions that SWIFT is about to be replaced.

On the other hand, a landmark report released by McKinsey and Artemis Analytics in February 2026 stripped all of that down and asked a more direct question: how much of it is actually real payments?

The answer is about 1%.

Out of roughly $3.5 trillion in annualized stablecoin transaction volume, only about $390 billion represents genuine end-user payments—such as supplier invoices, cross-border remittances, payroll, and card purchases. The rest is trading activity, internal fund transfers, arbitrage, and automated smart-contract loops.

The report concludes that the inflated headline numbers should be “a starting point for analysis, not a proxy for measuring payment adoption.”

But within that real baseline of $390 billion, there’s a story worth examining in depth—and it’s almost entirely about corporate finance rather than consumer wallets.

B2B dominates end to end: what the data actually says

Based on McKinsey/Artemis’s analysis (using activity data from December 2025 as the baseline), B2B transactions account for $226 billion of all real stablecoin payment volume—about 58%.

That figure represents a year-over-year growth of 733%, driven mainly by supply-chain payments, cross-border supplier settlement, and financial liquidity management. Asia leads in geographic activity, but adoption in Latin America and Europe is also accelerating.

The remainder of real payments is distributed across payroll and remittances ($90 billion), capital markets settlement ($8 billion), and linked-card spending ($4.5 billion).

According to McKinsey data, the amount of card spending associated with stablecoins grew an astonishing 673% year over year, but in absolute terms it’s still only a small slice of B2B flow.

As a reference point: that $390 billion total volume is only 0.02% of McKinsey’s estimate of the global annual payments total of over $20 quadrillion. Specifically, B2B stablecoin flow is about 0.01% of the global $160 trillion B2B payments market.

Those numbers are large in the stablecoin context, but in the context of the global financial system they are still minuscule.

Monthly turnover-rate data makes the momentum more intuitive. Citing BVNK’s data based on the McKinsey/Artemis report, in January 2024, stablecoin monthly payment volume was only $5 billion; by early 2026, it had surpassed $30 billion—sixfold growth in under two years, with the steepest acceleration appearing in the second half of 2025.

On an annualized basis, that turnover rate now exceeds $390 billion.

“Real stablecoin payments are far below conventional estimates. This doesn’t weaken stablecoins’ long-term potential as a payment rail—it simply establishes a clearer baseline for where the market currently stands.” — McKinsey/Artemis Analytics, February 2026

Why the gap exists: five structural forces that exclude retail

The divergence between the explosive adoption of B2B and the near-trivial level of consumer usage isn’t a coincidence. It’s the product of structural asymmetries that favor enterprise use cases over retail use cases.

Here are the five key forces driving the institutional gap:

1) Financial efficiency beats consumer convenience

Corporate treasurers are driven by concrete, measurable pain points: SWIFT correspondent chains that can take one to five business days to settle; the currency-exchange windows tied up in liquidity; and intermediary fees layered at every transaction step.

Stablecoins solve all three issues at once. For a company paying suppliers across fifteen countries, the economics are clear; for a consumer buying coffee, they aren’t. The switching incentives on the enterprise side are orders of magnitude stronger than for individual users.

2) Programmability has no equivalent value on the retail side

The B2B breakout is partly a story of programmable payments. Smart contracts enable conditional logic—invoice triggers, delivery confirmations, escrow releases—which can automate the entire accounts payable workflow at scale.

That naturally fits enterprise financial operations, because high-value, structured, repetitive payment processes benefit enormously from automation. Retail payments lack comparable trigger use cases at any scale.

Consumers don’t need programmable conditions to buy groceries—they need something that works like a card. The cognitive complexity of blockchain-native payments remains a barrier on the retail side, and programmability does nothing to help.

3) The regulatory framework favors institutions

After the GENIUS Act, institutional operators had already completed compliance-framework adaptations for anti-money-laundering/anti-terrorist financing, travel rules, license requirements, and more—and built the legal infrastructure to operate with confidence.

Enterprise finance teams have dedicated compliance functions that can absorb entry friction; individual consumers cannot. As a result, in most jurisdictions, the stablecoin funding rails for retail users remain operationally complex, while the merchant-acceptance gap persists globally.

Every frictionless B2B payment today is a data point that institutions use to justify further investment. Meanwhile, the consumer ecosystem is waiting for a compliance and user-experience entry point that hasn’t yet emerged at large scale.

4) The advantage of closed-loop systems

B2B stablecoin payments succeed precisely because they’re closed loops: companies send to other companies; both sides have wallets; both have compliant infrastructure; and neither needs a universal merchant network.

Consumer payments face the classic chicken-and-egg problem: before consumers have demand, merchants won’t invest in building stablecoin acceptance infrastructure; and before stablecoins can be used broadly, consumers won’t enable wallets.

The institutional world bypasses this problem entirely by operating in bilateral or consortium environments—without any need for an open merchant network.

5) Institutional incentives point upstream

Corporate treasurers who hold stablecoins gain yield, reduce foreign-exchange exposure, and improve liquidity management—advantages that accumulate internally. Sharing them downstream introduces complexity or competitive fragility.

Promoting stablecoin usage to a supplier’s suppliers, employees, or terminal consumers requires building a network that enables those downstream parties to benefit. That may not align with the payoff for the originating finance team.

Without a clear ROI-driven rationale pushing the network outward, companies rationally choose to consolidate internal gains.

Market background

BVNK’s own infrastructure data, from an operator perspective, confirms B2B dominance. The company processed $30 billion in annualized stablecoin payments in 2025, up 2.3x year over year, with one-third of the volume coming from the US market.

Its customer roster (Worldpay, Deel, Flywire, Rapyd, Thunes) consists of leaders in cross-border B2B and payroll infrastructure—not consumer applications.

As BVNK pointed out in its 2025 year-end review:

“An initial assumption was that remittances and consumer transfers would lead stablecoin growth—but they didn’t become the main driver; B2B took that role instead.”

When will retail catch up—if it ever can?

McKinsey/Artemis’s baseline makes the current situation clear. What it can’t answer is whether the institutional gap will narrow, widen, or become permanently entrenched.

Here are three possible scenarios for the next 18 months:

Early 2026—gap widens further

There’s no sign of slowing momentum in B2B. With a monthly turnover rate of more than $30 billion continuing as more companies use the stablecoin rail for cross-border accounts payable and financial operations. Retail stablecoin card spending rises modestly, but in absolute terms it remains tiny compared with B2B flow. Even if retail adoption inches forward in percentage terms, the gap will still expand in dollar absolute values.

End of 2026 through 2027—turning point begins to appear

A number of catalysts could start to close the gap: bank-issued multi-currency stablecoins reduce friction for retail funding; programmability through AI Agents extends payment delegation into consumer applications; and gig-economy wages paid in stablecoins create spendable balances for employees downstream.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent predicts that the stablecoin supply could reach $3 trillion by 2030—this trajectory implies that consumer network effects will eventually emerge.

Counterpoint—retail may never “catch up,” and that might be the key

The most honest interpretation of the McKinsey data is that stablecoins may be evolving into what the report subtly suggests: an interconnected, machine- and finance-department/enterprise programmable settlement layer. Consumer adoption would then be an indirect, embedded beneficiary rather than the primary use case.

If this framework holds, then the institutional gap isn’t a failure of adoption—it’s a feature of the technology’s natural architecture. Enterprise payroll paid in stablecoins could eventually create downstream consumer spending, but the path from B2B infrastructure to retail wallets is long and circuitous, and it depends on user-experience breakthroughs that have not yet emerged at large scale.

An honest baseline

The McKinsey/Artemis report did something more valuable than simply recording stablecoin growth: it established an honest baseline that the industry has clearly lacked.

By stripping away transaction noise, internal transfers, and automated smart-contract loops, it reveals a payment market that’s truly growing—real payment volume more than doubled from 2024 to 2025—but it’s highly concentrated on the institutional side in structural, non-random ways.

B2B’s 733% growth isn’t a delayed consumer story—it’s a financial story that’s maturing.

Enterprises building on the stablecoin rail today are solving real operational problems—cross-border friction, correspondent banking inefficiencies, and working-capital delays. Those issues have nothing to do with whether consumers hold stablecoin wallets. Either way, they will keep building.