Research: Stablecoins have a trading volume of 35 trillion a year, how much of it is real payment?

Author: Stablecoin Insider / McKinsey×Artemis

Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow

Deep Tide Introduction: The joint report by McKinsey and Artemis has done something few in the industry have done: it has broken down the trading volume data of stablecoins. The conclusion is that out of approximately $35 trillion in on-chain transaction volume each year, only about $390 billion (around 1%) represents real payment activity, with 58% being business-to-business financial operations, growing at an annual rate of 733%. The use of stablecoins on the consumer side is almost negligible, and this is not coincidental— the article summarizes five structural reasons explaining why the gap between institutions and individuals is not just a temporary discrepancy.

The full text is as follows:

The stablecoin industry has a headline-level issue.

On one hand, the original on-chain data shows that hundreds of trillions of dollars flow on-chain each year, a figure that has led to endless comparisons with Visa and Mastercard, as well as predictions of SWIFT being replaced.

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

The answer is about 1%.

Out of approximately $35 trillion in annualized stablecoin trading volume, only about $390 billion represents actual end-user payments, such as vendor invoices, cross-border remittances, payroll, and card transactions. The rest consists of trading activities, internal fund transfers, arbitrage, and automated smart contract loops.

The report summarizes that the exaggerated headline numbers should be "the starting point for analysis, not a proxy for measuring payment adoption."

But within this real baseline of $390 billion, there is a story worth examining, and it revolves almost entirely around corporate finance rather than consumer wallets.

B2B Dominates the Scene: What the Data Actually Indicates

According to the McKinsey/Artemis analysis (based on activity data from December 2025), business-to-business transactions account for $226 billion of all real stablecoin payment volume, approximately 58%.

This figure represents a year-on-year growth of 733%, primarily driven by supply chain payments, cross-border vendor settlements, and financial liquidity management. Asia leads in geographic activity, but adoption in Latin America and Europe is also accelerating.

The remaining portion of real payments is distributed among payroll and remittances ($90 billion), capital market settlements ($8 billion), and related card spending ($4.5 billion).

According to McKinsey's data, the card spending associated with stablecoins has grown an astonishing 673% year-on-year, but in absolute terms, it remains a small part of B2B flow.

For reference: this total of $390 billion accounts for only 0.02% of McKinsey's estimated global annual payment total of over $200 trillion. Specifically, B2B stablecoin flow accounts for about 0.01% of the global $160 trillion B2B payment market.

These numbers are significant in the context of stablecoins, but remain minuscule in the context of the global financial system.

Monthly turnover rate data presents the momentum more intuitively. According to data from BVNK citing the McKinsey/Artemis report, in January 2024, the monthly payment volume for stablecoins was only $5 billion; by early 2026, this figure had exceeded $30 billion—growing sixfold in less than two years, with the steepest acceleration occurring in the second half of 2025.

Annualized, this turnover rate now exceeds $390 billion.

"Real stablecoin payments are far below conventional estimates, which does not diminish the long-term potential of stablecoins as a payment rail; it merely establishes a clearer baseline for assessing the market's position."—McKinsey/Artemis Analytics, February 2026

Why the Gap Exists: Five Structural Forces Excluding Retail

The divergence between the explosive adoption of B2B and the negligible consumer usage is not coincidental; it is a product of structural asymmetries that systematically favor business use cases over retail use cases.

Here are the five forces driving the institutional gap:

1) Financial Efficiency Beats Consumer Convenience

Corporate CFOs are driven by specific, quantifiable pain points: the SWIFT intermediary chain that takes one to five business days to settle, currency exchange windows that tie up liquidity, and the intermediary fees that accumulate at each transaction step.

Stablecoins simultaneously address all three issues. For a company paying vendors in fifteen countries, the economic rationale is clear; for a consumer buying coffee, it is not. The switching incentives on the corporate side are magnitudes larger than for individual users.

2) Programmability Lacks Equivalent Value on the Retail Side

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

This is naturally suited to corporate financial operations, as high-value, structured, repetitive payment processes benefit greatly from automation. Retail payments lack similar trigger application scenarios at any scale.

Consumers buying groceries do not need programmable conditions; they need something that works like swiping a card. The cognitive complexity of blockchain-native payments remains a barrier on the retail side, and programmability does not help with this.

3) Regulatory Frameworks Favor Institutions

After the GENIUS Act, institutional operators have adapted to compliance frameworks for anti-money laundering/anti-terrorist financing, travel rules, licensing requirements, and have established legal infrastructures that allow them to operate with confidence.

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

Every frictionless B2B payment today is a data point for institutions to justify further investment; meanwhile, the consumer ecosystem is waiting for a compliant, user-friendly entry point that has yet to emerge on a large scale.

4) Closed Loop Advantages

The success of B2B stablecoin payments is precisely because they are closed-loop: businesses send to businesses, both parties have wallets, both have compliance infrastructure, and neither needs a universal merchant network.

Consumer payments face the classic chicken-and-egg problem: merchants will not invest in building stablecoin acceptance infrastructure before there is consumer demand; and consumers will not activate wallets before they can spend widely.

The institutional world completely bypasses this issue by operating in bilateral or consortium environments, without needing any open merchant network.

5) Institutional Incentives Point Upstream

CFOs holding stablecoins can earn yields, reduce foreign exchange exposure, and improve liquidity management—these advantages accumulate internally, and sharing downstream would introduce complexity or competitive vulnerability.

Promoting stablecoin use to suppliers' suppliers, employees, or end consumers requires building a network that benefits those downstream, which may not align with the financial team's interests.

In the absence of clear ROI driving the network's outward expansion, businesses rationally choose to consolidate internal gains.

Market Context

BVNK's own infrastructure data corroborates the dominance of B2B from the operator's perspective. The company processed an annualized stablecoin payment volume of $30 billion in 2025, a year-on-year increase of 2.3 times, with one-third of the volume coming from the U.S. market.

Its client list (Worldpay, Deel, Flywire, Rapyd, Thunes) consists of leaders in cross-border B2B and payroll infrastructure, rather than consumer applications.

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

"The initial assumption that remittances and consumer transfers would lead stablecoin growth has not become the main driver; B2B has taken on that role instead."

When Will the Retail Side Catch Up—If Ever

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

Here are three possible scenarios for the next 18 months:

Near Term 2026—Gap Further Widens

There are no signs of a slowdown in B2B momentum. The monthly turnover rate exceeding $30 billion is expected to continue as more businesses use stablecoin rails for cross-border accounts payable and financial operations. Consumer stablecoin card spending sees slight growth, but the absolute volume remains negligible compared to B2B flow. Even if retail adoption progresses slowly in percentage terms, the gap in absolute dollar value continues to widen.

Mid-Term Late 2026 to 2027—Turning Points Begin to Appear

Several catalysts may begin to bridge the gap: multi-currency stablecoins issued by banks reduce retail entry friction; programmable features extend to consumer applications through AI Agent payment delegation; gig economy wages paid in stablecoins create downstream consumer balances.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent predicts that stablecoin supply could reach $3 trillion by 2030, a trajectory that suggests eventual consumer network effects will emerge.

Counterpoint—The Retail Side May Never "Catch Up," and That May Be Key

The most honest interpretation of McKinsey's data is that stablecoins may be evolving into what the report subtly suggests: a programmable settlement layer for machines, finance departments, and institutions on the internet, with consumer adoption being an indirect, embedded benefit rather than a primary use case.

If this framework holds, then the institutional gap is not a failure of adoption but a feature of the natural architecture of technology. Wages paid in stablecoins may ultimately create downstream consumer spending, but the path from B2B infrastructure to retail wallets is long and winding, relying on user experience breakthroughs that have yet to emerge on a large scale.

An Honest Baseline

The McKinsey/Artemis report has done something more valuable than simply recording the growth of stablecoins: it has established an honest baseline that has been conspicuously missing in the industry.

By stripping away transaction noise, internal transfers, and automated smart contract loops, it reveals a genuinely growing payment market—real payment volume doubled from 2024 to 2025—but it is highly concentrated on the institutional side in a structural, non-coincidental manner.

The 733% growth in B2B is not a delayed consumer story but a financial story that is maturing.

Today, businesses building on stablecoin rails are solving real operational issues—cross-border friction, inefficiencies in intermediary banks, delays in working capital—that have nothing to do with whether consumers hold stablecoin wallets. Regardless, they will continue to build.