Stablecoin Payments in 2026: Where the Real $390B in Volume Comes From

The stablecoin industry has a credibility problem with its own statistics. Headlines quote trillions of dollars in transfers, but most of that is trading bots and money shuffling between exchange wallets. Strip it out and you are left with a smaller, more interesting number: the payments real businesses and people make. In 2026 that number is finally big enough, and growing fast enough, to take seriously.

Start with the honest number

The clearest measure comes from a joint analysis by McKinsey and Artemis Analytics, which counted about $390 billion of genuine stablecoin payments in 2025. That is roughly 0.02% of global payments. Tiny, in other words, but concentrated in exactly the places where existing rails are slowest and most expensive.

Two things stand out. Businesses dominate by value. But stablecoins have their deepest penetration in person-to-person transfers, where they already handle about 0.37% of the market, which is mostly cross-border family money. This year the pace picked up: identified stablecoin payments reached at least $401 billion between January and August 2026, up 42% on the year before.

Trend 1: B2B is the engine

An importer in Dhaka paying a supplier in Shenzhen does not care about blockchains. She cares that a wire takes three days, costs a fixed fee plus a currency spread, and sometimes gets stuck at an intermediary bank. A stablecoin transfer settles in minutes at any hour. Artemis and Stablecon estimated that B2B stablecoin payments grew more than 730% during 2025, led by small and mid-sized firms rather than multinationals.

The infrastructure behind this is consolidating into big hands. Stripe closed its $1.1 billion purchase of the stablecoin platform Bridge in February 2025, and Mastercard completed its acquisition of BVNK on 3 August 2026, describing cross-border B2B payments, payouts and treasury flows as the target, according to Mastercard's announcement. Background on why legacy rails are slow sits in our correspondent banking explainer.

Trend 2: card networks are settling in stablecoins

The most underrated shift is happening behind the card swipe. When a cardholder spends from a stablecoin balance, the merchant still gets paid in local currency, but the settlement between the card program and Visa can now happen in USDC. Visa's stablecoin settlement passed a $20 billion annualized run rate in September 2026, up more than fifteenfold in a year, with more than 160 stablecoin-linked card programs live, according to The Block. As recently as April the run rate was $7 billion.

Spending on crypto-linked cards has grown alongside. Artemis put it above $18 billion in early 2026, close to the volume of direct peer-to-peer stablecoin transfers. If you are new to these products, start with our guide to crypto cards.

Trend 3: checkout is opening up

Merchant acceptance moved from experiment to default in some places. Shopify began rolling out USDC payments in June 2025, built with Coinbase and Stripe on the Base network, switched on by default for eligible merchants and with up to 0.5% cash back for merchants who accept it. Stripe now uses Open USD as its default stablecoin for business transactions after the token's launch on 30 September 2026. Open USD is jointly owned by Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Shopify and Coinbase, and more than 200 companies signed up by launch day.

Will shoppers in Toronto start paying for groceries in stablecoins? Probably not soon. The real use is cross-border e-commerce, where a small brand selling to customers in 40 countries can avoid card fees and currency conversion on every order.

Stablecoins are winning where money crosses a border, not where it crosses a counter.

Trend 4: payroll and contractor payouts

Paying remote workers is a natural fit. Deel, which runs payroll in more than 150 countries, launched stablecoin salary payouts for full-time employees on 20 May 2026 on the Polygon network, starting in the US and the eurozone. Employees choose what share of their net pay arrives as stablecoins. Specialist platforms got there earlier: Rise passed $1 billion of payroll volume in November 2025, and a case study cited by BeInCrypto said more than half of its users opt for stablecoin payouts.

Picture a software contractor in Kathmandu paid by a startup in San Francisco. A dollar balance that arrives the same day, which she can hold or convert when the rate suits her, is a meaningful upgrade on a monthly wire.

Trend 5: remittance companies are issuing their own coins

The incumbents of family remittance have stopped waiting. MoneyGram launched its own MGUSD stablecoin on Stellar in June 2026 for its base of more than 60 million customers and nearly 500,000 locations, and Western Union announced its USDPT stablecoin on Solana, issued by Anchorage Digital Bank, for launch in 2026. Both still rely on cash agents and bank partners at the receiving end, which is where most of the cost of sending money still sits. Our cost of sending money home analysis covers that last mile.

What could slow it down

• Off-ramps. Converting stablecoins into rupees, pesos or shillings still runs through licensed local partners, and their spreads can wipe out the savings.
• Rules on rewards. US regulators are still writing GENIUS Act rules, including how far partners can share reserve income with users.
• Fragmentation. More issuers and more chains mean more conversion steps unless interoperability keeps improving.

There is also a measurement problem. Much of the volume that looks like payments is still a business moving its own money between accounts, and the line between a treasury transfer and a real purchase is blurry. Analysts at Artemis and elsewhere are getting better at separating the two, but readers should treat any single payments figure as an estimate with wide error bars.

None of these is a reason to doubt the direction. In 2026 stablecoins stopped being mainly a trading tool and became a quiet settlement layer for businesses, card networks and remittance firms. The next step, machines paying machines, is already being built; see our piece on agentic payments.

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 →