The 2025 data presents a mixed picture. On one hand, stablecoins still lag significantly behind 🇺🇸 ACH ($33T vs $89T) and even more so behind 🇪🇺 SEPA ($259T projected for the full year).

On the other hand, they have already surpassed Visa, Mastercard, Amex, and PayPal combined: $33T vs $30.5T. For infrastructure that hasn’t even existed at scale for a decade, that’s a notable result.
It’s also worth understanding the context behind the numbers.
The total settlement volume of stablecoins includes a substantial share of on-chain activity that doesn’t qualify as “payments” in the traditional sense - DeFi operations, arbitrage, wallet-to-wallet transfers.
Real payment volume, by most estimates, hovers around $250B - which confirms that the market is still in its early stages.
That said, the trend is clear. Stablecoins are showing consistent year-over-year growth, and that trajectory matters more than current absolute figures. SEPA took decades to build. So did ACH. The question isn’t whether stablecoins will catch up, it’s how long that will take.