B2B Stablecoin Settlement Case Studies: 6 Documented Uses in 2026

In mid-2025 a story spread across crypto media that traders in Yiwu, the Chinese wholesale city that ships everything from Christmas lights to phone cases, had settled more than $10 billion in stablecoins since 2023. Reporters at Yicai went to the market and asked. The general manager of one trading group told them almost no factories or foreign trade firms around him used stablecoins at all. The $10 billion figure was attributed to a Chainalysis report that Yicai could not find. That gap between the story and the ledger is why this piece only counts cases a company, regulator or network has put on the record.

Our test for a documented case

Stablecoin B2B payments are real and growing, but the evidence is unusually noisy. Vendors publish customer logos without volumes, social posts recycle unsourced numbers, and on-chain data cannot tell a supplier payment from a trader moving funds between exchanges. We included a case only if at least one of these applied:

• the company itself, or its named payments provider, described the flow publicly;
• a central bank, regulator or card network disclosed it with figures;
• a major news organisation reported it with named, on-record sources.

Scale is reported where disclosed. Where it is not, we say so. For context, total stablecoin supply was about $306 billion as of October 2026, and genuine stablecoin payments were estimated at around $390 billion in 2025 by McKinsey and Artemis, a small fraction of global B2B flows but no longer a rounding error. Our guide to stablecoin payments for business covers the mechanics.

Case 1: Starlink's treasury collections in emerging markets

The best-known corporate case is SpaceX. As Starlink expanded to more than 100 countries, it ran into slow, unreliable and sometimes blocked banking in developing markets, and turned to stablecoin payments platform Bridge to accept local-currency payments and convert them into stablecoins for its global treasury, TechCrunch reported in January 2025, drawing on Bridge's account of its customers. Stripe acquired Bridge for more than $1 billion.

What makes this case instructive is the direction of the flow. Starlink was not paying suppliers in stablecoins; it was solving a collection and repatriation problem. Money arrives in dozens of local currencies through local rails, and the stablecoin is the bridge into a dollar treasury that does not depend on a correspondent bank in each country. No volume has been disclosed, so treat it as proof of use rather than proof of scale.

Case 2: Visa settling with banks in USDC

Card networks settle daily with issuing and acquiring banks, a pure B2B flow. On 16 December 2025 Visa announced that Cross River Bank and Lead Bank had begun settling with it in USDC over Solana in the US, with broader availability planned through 2026. Its monthly stablecoin settlement volume had passed a $3.5 billion annualised run rate as of 30 November 2025. Settlement windows run seven days a week rather than five business days.

Compared with Visa's roughly $14 trillion of annual payments volume, $3.5 billion is tiny. The significance is that a systemically important network is willing to accept a stablecoin as final settlement with regulated banks, which is the step most corporate treasurers wait for. We cover the network angle in our piece on Visa, Mastercard and stablecoin settlement.

Cases 3 and 4: Remote and Deel pay contractors in dollar tokens

Business-to-contractor payments sit at the edge of B2B, but they are where documented corporate use is most concrete.

Remote. The HR platform lets contractors in more than 60 countries, including Argentina, Mexico, Colombia and Ghana, withdraw earnings in USDC to their own wallet through Stripe, according to Stripe's case study. Remote estimates contractors save more than 1% of the withdrawal amount by avoiding FX conversion and are paid two to three days sooner on average. Funds arrive within minutes.

Deel. On 3 June 2026 Stripe announced that Deel had launched a stablecoin wallet holding DLUSD, a custom dollar token issued through Bridge, starting in Argentina, with the rest of Latin America to follow and Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa later. Deel says 85% of its contractors in Argentina wanted to be paid in dollars in 2025. The platform serves more than 40,000 businesses and 1.5 million workers.

Both cases point the same way: the employer still pays in fiat, and the conversion to a stablecoin happens at the last mile, at the recipient's choice.

Cases 5 and 6: importers in Latin America and Africa

Brazil and Latin America

The strongest official evidence of stablecoins in trade payments comes from Brazil's central bank. Governor Gabriel Galipolo said in February 2025 that around 90% of crypto flow in Brazil was linked to stablecoins, and that much of it was used to buy goods from abroad, Reuters reported. He flagged concerns about tax visibility and money laundering.

The regulator's response is itself evidence of scale. In 2026 the central bank issued Resolution No. 561, amending its eFX framework so that regulated cross-border payments must run through traditional FX transactions or regulated real accounts held by foreign counterparties, and removing digital assets, including stablecoins, from those permitted channels, The Block reported on 1 May 2026. The rule does not ban crypto transfers outright. Regulators rarely write rules for flows that do not exist. Our Brazil Pix and Drex explainer covers the domestic side.

The clearest evidence that importers use stablecoins is a central bank writing rules to stop them.

African import-export businesses

In Africa, documentation comes mostly from the payment firms that serve importers, which disclose aggregate volumes rather than named clients. TechCrunch's January 2025 reporting gave three data points: Conduit, which handles stablecoin payments for import-export businesses in Africa and Latin America, said its annualised payment volume had doubled from $5 billion to $10 billion; Yellow Card, a fiat-to-stablecoin conversion platform, said annual volume doubled from $1.5 billion in 2023 to $3 billion in 2024; and Lagos-based Juicyway said it had processed $1.3 billion in cross-border payments.

The regional context comes from Chainalysis. Sub-Saharan Africa received more than $205 billion in crypto value between July 2024 and June 2025, with stablecoins about 43% of transaction volume and frequent multi-million-dollar stablecoin transfers linking Africa, the Middle East and Asia, as Mariblock reported. Those large transfers are consistent with trade settlement, though Chainalysis does not label them as such. Our Africa remittances piece covers why dollar access is so expensive in many of these markets.

Asia, and the claims that did not check out

Asia is where the gap between narrative and evidence is widest. The Yiwu story is the clearest example. Yicai's July 2025 reporting found that the market sells about CNY800 million ($111.6 million) of goods a day, that merchants mostly use telegraphic transfers, letters of credit and licensed payment platforms, and that converting stablecoins to fiat can trigger anti-money-laundering reviews. Mainland China bans issuing, trading and exchanging cryptocurrencies and stablecoins. Some pioneering merchants use them, a blockchain exchange source said, but the $10 billion figure is unsupported.

Two other widely repeated cases also fall short of our test. Bolivia's state energy company YPFB said in March 2025 it would use crypto to pay for fuel imports, but a government spokesperson said at the time it had not yet done so, Reuters reported. We found no disclosure confirming completed transactions or their size. And on-chain "B2B volume" estimates that do not separate trading from payments should be treated with caution.

The six cases side by side

Worked example: what "over 1%" means in practice

Remote's estimate gives a usable benchmark. Take a software contractor in Bogota billing $4,000 a month. If a USDC withdrawal saves just over 1% compared with converting dollars to pesos through the default route, that is at least $40 a month, or $480 a year, before any value from receiving funds two to three days earlier.

Scale that to a company. A Mexican distributor paying a US supplier $250,000 a month would, at the same 1% gap, be looking at $2,500 a month, or $30,000 a year. That is an assumption, not a measured result: business FX pricing is usually tighter than retail, on-ramp and off-ramp fees vary, and the supplier must be able to accept stablecoins or have a partner convert them. The point of the exercise is to show why finance teams bother. Companies should take advice from a qualified adviser on tax and FX rules before changing how they settle.

What to watch next

• Visa's US rollout through 2026: whether more issuers and acquirers sign up, and whether Visa discloses an updated run rate.
• Deel's expansion: the planned move from Argentina into the rest of Latin America, then Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa.
• Brazil's enforcement of Resolution 561: whether importer flows move back into the formal FX market or shift to offshore structures.
• GENIUS Act effective date: the US framework takes effect by January 2027 at the latest, which will make it easier for US suppliers to accept and hold permitted stablecoins.

The documented record shows a clear pattern. Stablecoins win where dollar access is hard, where banking hours and correspondent chains slow things down, or at the last mile where the recipient wants dollars. They have not yet replaced the wire for routine trade between companies with good banks. For more on that broader shift, see our coverage of cross-border B2B payments in 2026.

About this researchMuffinPay InsightsIndependent analysis of stablecoins, CBDCs, cross-border payments and digital public infrastructure. Every figure is linked to its source. Read our editorial standards →