Hello,
Everyone agrees that stablecoins are growing. Their supply in circulation has more than doubled, while the adjusted volume has more than tripled. All in just two years. Last month, stablecoins recorded a new all-time high in monthly adjusted volume. Some dismiss these figures, while Crypto Twitter (CT) celebrates them in real time.
But numbers alone tell us little about growth. What also matters is the context in which the growth is occurring, like who is using stablecoins, for what purposes, and whether the pattern of usage is changing. Allium was kind enough to give us an early glimpse of their latest report on stablecoin infrastructure, ‘Stablecoins: The emergence of a new payment rail’. It’s an important read because the charts show that stablecoin usage is shifting from enabling low-cost cross-border remittances to supporting general commerce and vendor payments across businesses.
Most of the debate around stablecoins today centres on whether they are financial products, such as narrow banks, Treasury-bill wrappers, yield vehicles, or simply payment infrastructure. The policy-level arguments over stablecoin interest assume that stablecoins are primarily financial instruments. But the data in the report suggests otherwise. The recent composition of stablecoin activity increasingly resembles a payment rail rather than a savings product.
It’s the same pattern we saw with the evolution of the Automated Clearing House (ACH) network: from replacing paper cheques in payroll to becoming a foundational backbone for general commerce, B2B payments, and consumer bill payments.
In today’s deep dive, I will weave together data from Allium’s stablecoin infrastructure report to show why it changed how I think about where stablecoins are heading.
The Velocity Divergence
Since January 2024, the stablecoin supply in circulation (calculated by deducting non-circulating supply from total supply) has grown by over 100%. Over the same period, adjusted volume (calculated by removing wash trading, entity-internal flows, and round-trip transfers) grew by 317%.
In the accumulation stage of any new asset, supply typically grows faster than usage. As the asset matures, usage grows faster than supply. That’s because asset holders are spending more of the asset. Here, as adjusted volume grows much faster than the circulating supply of stablecoins, it shows the maturity of stablecoins from store-of-value assets to a preferable medium of exchange or transfer of value.
This shift is reflected in stablecoin velocity, calculated as adjusted volume divided by circulating supply.
Stablecoin velocity has increased from 2.6x to over 6x in the past two years, reflecting that each dollar of stablecoin supply is now turning over 2.3 times more actively than it was in January. If you benchmark this against traditional payment rails, it shows how mature stablecoin usage has become.
Another metric that establishes the maturity of stablecoin usage is transaction count. It’s least susceptible to large-value noise. So, when the payment transaction count grows faster than the volume, it indicates that the average payment amount is decreasing. This behaviour is typical of a payment rail finding its footing, rather than of an experimental tool being shuttled between exchanges.
This raises the question of who is making all these payments and what they are paying for.
In 2025, the consumer-to-consumer (C2C) category remained the largest channel, ahead of consumer-to-business (C2B), business-to-business (B2B), and business-to-consumer (B2C). But its growth rate was the slowest among the four.
The slower growth in C2C reinforces the maturity of stablecoin usage, since person-to-person transfers are the simplest use case. They require no merchant integration, no invoicing tools, no API and face few procedural barriers to adoption. This is how every new payment technology typically begins.
In India, when the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) was launched a decade ago, retail users were the first to jump on board, driven by cashbacks and other customer acquisition strategies. I recall how I used to make transfers between my two accounts using Google Pay, initially launched as Tez in India, when it offered me a dollar in cashback. Shops and establishments joined the party only when business tools, reports, and a dedicated payment-confirmation audio device system were rolled out.
As infrastructure matures, commercial use cases begin to absorb market share. And that transition appears to be happening now.
High growth in C2B suggests that more users are using stablecoins for general commerce, subscriptions, and merchant payments. Meanwhile, B2B growth indicates adoption among commercial counterparties for invoicing, supply chain payments, and treasury operations. Both growth rates (131% for C2B and 87% for B2B) are outpacing the 76% overall payment growth, indicating that the commercial share of payment volume is expanding.
When you pair the growing C2B volume with the average ticket size of C2B transactions, which fell from $456 to $256, it suggests a trend of people paying for recurring purchases using stablecoins.
Although the peer-to-peer category remains dominant in absolute terms, it is soon ceding ground.
The quarterly share data makes this rotation even harder to miss.
The share of C2C as a percentage of total payment volume has never crossed 50% after dropping below the halfway mark in Q1 of 2025.
The world appears to be moving beyond experimenting with stablecoins for low-risk, less frequent peer-to-peer transfers to consistently using them for frequent payments.
When I first started tracking stablecoin adoption, one of the dominant narratives in favour of stablecoins was about how it enables cross-border remittances and could disrupt the Western Union thesis by allowing workers in developed economies to send money home. But the data says something different.
About three-quarters of stablecoin payment volume now occurs domestically. Over the past year, cross-border volume at the country level has dropped from 44% of total payments to roughly 25-29%. At the regional level, 84% of payment flows remain within the same geographic region.
Based on all our earlier charts, it’s clear that stablecoins aren’t competing with SWIFT for international settlement. Instead, the B2B metrics, including 74% domestic dominance, a falling average transaction size, payroll, and growing invoicing use cases, point to stablecoins competing with domestic payment rails like ACH.
For context, ACH B2B payments grew about 10% in 2025, while stablecoin B2B payments grew 87% over the same period. I am aware that the absolute scale isn’t even comparable, and we have to consider the low-base effect of stablecoins. Yet, the growth is hard to ignore.
The Path Ahead
For a long time, I viewed cross-border remittances and peer-to-peer transfers as the primary drivers of stablecoin adoption. The idea that someone in India could receive dollars from a family member in Dubai without losing 7-8% to an intermediary on a bank holiday is a compelling narrative. This story still exists, but perhaps no longer the main story.
I find it interesting how quietly and quickly the domestic commerce thesis has overtaken everything else. The fact that the C2C category has not reclaimed 50% market share for over a year now has not been a metric I have seen go viral in any of the CT chatter. But it’s the metric where stablecoins pivot from being a crypto product to financial infrastructure that enables commerce between a consumer and a business, or between two businesses.
It’s also worth noting that Allium’s labelled payment volume is an analysis built on the wallets they managed to cover, identify and label. While that analysis shows payment volume to be just 2-3% of the total adjusted stablecoin volume, that can only be a lower bound, considering that there will most likely be so many more wallets that Allium couldn’t include in its coverage.
Going forward, I will be closely watching whether C2B and B2B shares continue to gain ground and whether the average ticket-size compression holds in the upcoming quarters. If both trends persist even through a crypto market downturn, it would confirm that stablecoin payment infrastructure has begun to decouple from speculative crypto activity on a sustained basis.
That’s it for this week’s piece. I will be back with the next one.
Until then, stay curious,
Prathik
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