The real economics of stablecoin payments – and where the math actually works

The future of stablecoins will be defined not by speculation, but by their ability to modernise the infrastructure behind global money movement.

Stablecoins are increasingly being adopted not because of interest in crypto as an asset class, but because they address operational challenges that traditional payment infrastructure continues to struggle with. Based on extensive research and discussions with industry experts from Circle, BVNK, Triple-A, Natixis, and ClearBank Europe, stablecoins are evolving from a speculative asset into a practical settlement layer for cross-border payments, treasury management, remittances, and liquidity optimisation.

While adoption remains small relative to overall global payment volumes, growth is concentrated in use cases where traditional banking infrastructure is slow, costly, or difficult to access. This is particularly evident in emerging markets and underserved payment corridors, where stablecoins can offer faster settlement, improved liquidity management, and broader financial access.

The market in 2025–2026: from experiment to operating model

For years, US banks largely stayed out of crypto, stablecoins, and anything blockchain-adjacent. Not because they couldn't, but because regulators made it painful to try. The OCC and FDIC, from 2022 onward, built in enough friction that most banks decided the compliance headache wasn't worth it. You needed advance supervisory sign-off before touching certain digital asset activities. The FDIC's FIL-16-2022 required banks to notify regulators before doing anything crypto-related. In practice, that meant a lot of waiting, a lot of uncertainty, and a lot of banks deciding to just watch from the sidelines.
March 2025 changed the math. The OCC pulled the advance approval requirement. The FDIC withdrew FIL-16-2022. The new message, reading between the lines: if the activity is permissible and you're managing risk properly, do it. No advance permission needed.

Banks noticed. According to Keith Vander Leest, US General Manager at BVNK, the effect was immediate: banks that had been observing from a distance began showing genuine interest in on-chain settlement for the first time.

Regulatory progress in the US, including the OCC and FDIC easing their earlier guidance on bank involvement in digital assets and the passage of the GENIUS Act, which created the first federal framework for payment stablecoins, plus Stripe's acquisition of Bridge and a wave of product launches across banks, fintechs, and payment processors have pushed stablecoins from the edge of cross-border payments into a more central place in strategic planning. Interest is no longer limited to crypto-native companies. In markets such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, Southeast Asia, and parts of Latin America, stablecoins are being used as practical tools for faster transfers, lower friction, and workarounds to some of the constraints of legacy correspondent banking.

Europe followed a parallel trajectory driven by MiCA, the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation. Speaking on the “Stablecoins & Infrastructure” panel at FIBE Berlin (April 2026), Patrick Hansen, Senior Director, EU Strategy and Policy at Circle, describes the framework as the moment that moved stablecoins from a crypto niche into real-world and traditional finance, bringing the institutionalisation and professionalisation that regulated counterparties required before engaging. Euro stablecoins remain nascent relative to their dollar-denominated counterparts, but they represent the only non-US stablecoin category currently growing in earnest, with cross-border payments and corporate treasury flows as the primary use cases gaining traction.

By early 2026, that institutional interest had started converting into deals.

In March 2026, Mastercard agreed to acquire BVNK for up to USD 1.8 billion, and it is worth being clear about what that signals: not an experiment, but a legacy payments incumbent making a direct bet that stablecoin settlement will be a permanent part of the infrastructure stack.

Firms are already using stablecoins across multiple operating functions, including cross-border merchant payouts, treasury rebalancing, remittances, and B2B settlement in markets where traditional rails are slow or expensive. In Latin America, stablecoins serve as both a hedge against FX volatility and a faster mechanism for moving money across borders, while in Africa, they fill gaps where card infrastructure is thin and local currency risk is real. In Asia, they are being folded into broader digital payments stacks for high-volume corridors where friction carries a measurable cost.

What is driving all of this is not speculative interest in crypto as an asset class, but demand for better infrastructure around settlement, liquidity management, and cross-border working capital, which are operational problems that existing rails have not adequately solved.

The volume reality: large TAM, small base

The market context requires precision. The total addressable market for stablecoin cross-border payments is estimated at upwards of USD 17.9 trillion, according to FXC Intelligence. Current penetration is a fraction of that, with McKinsey, working with blockchain analytics firm Artemis Analytics, estimating actual stablecoin payments volume at approximately USD 390 billion annually, roughly 0.02 percent of global payments volumes. Stablecoins account for less than 1 percent of global cross-border payments volume today.

The gap between TAM and current penetration gets read in different ways: some see it as evidence of massive upside, others as evidence of structural limitations. What the numbers actually point to is that the composition of current volume matters as much as the size. The vast majority of stablecoin usage is still driven by speculative and financial market activity rather than real-economy payments. Strip out crypto trading, DeFi activity, and intra-ecosystem transfers, and the remaining base of genuine commercial use, remittances, trade settlement, savings substitution, merchant payouts, is meaningful but still early.

That base is growing, and it is growing in precisely the corridors and populations that traditional financial infrastructure has never adequately served. That concentration is the signal. Volume in markets with functioning alternatives is less interesting than volume in markets with no viable alternative.

Dante Disparte, Chief Strategy Officer at Circle, points to USDC's trajectory as evidence that the composition of stablecoin usage is shifting: growth is concentrated in cross-border payments, capital markets collateral, and what he describes as agentic commerce, meaning automated, programmable payment flows that have no equivalent in legacy infrastructure.  

The speculative base still dominates in aggregate, but the real-economy layer beneath it is the one expanding.

The geographic distribution of that real-economy base is itself informative. According to McKinsey and Artemis Analytics' February 2026 analysis, Asia accounts for USD 245 billion, roughly 60 percent of total global stablecoin payment volume, driven almost entirely by Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan – the same markets where regulatory clarity arrived earliest and where corporate treasury operations already route substantial cross-border volume through regional hubs. North America accounts for USD 95 billion of global stablecoin payment volume and Europe USD 50 billion, regions where regulatory clarity arrived later and adoption has been more cautious as a result. Latin America and Africa together represent a smaller share of current volume, but the base that does exist is driven by necessity rather than preference, and that distinction matters: adoption built around necessity tends to stick in ways that adoption built around convenience does not.

Where the numbers actually matter: cost, corridors, and liquidity

The cost comparison between traditional and stablecoin rails is real, but it is not uniform. It varies sharply by transaction type, corridor, and value, and conflating remittance economics with institutional B2B economics produces a misleading picture in both directions.

On consumer remittances, the gap is large and independently verified. The World Bank's Remittance Prices Worldwide database, which tracks 358 corridors globally, recorded a global average remittance cost of 6.49% of transfer value in Q1 2025. Banks are the most expensive provider type at 14.55% on average. Digital remittance services have improved on this, averaging 4.85%, but the UN Sustainable Development Goal target of 3% remains out of reach for the vast majority of corridors. Costs in more than 65% of corridors exceed 5%, with 14% topping 10%. Sending $200 to Sub-Saharan Africa averaged 8.78% in the same period.

Against that baseline, stablecoin transfers on the same corridors consistently cost under 1% all-in and settle in minutes rather than days. Mizuho notes that in the US-Mexico corridor specifically, stablecoins already account for an estimated 5 to 10% of flows and that transfer fees via stablecoin rails run under 1%, against traditional channel fees that can exceed 6%. Bitso, which processed USD 6.5 billion on that corridor in 2024, representing roughly 10% of its total volume, reports cost reductions of up to 50% versus traditional methods. That figure comes from an operator with live volume on one of the world's highest-traffic remittance corridors, not a technology projection.

The cost differential is structural, not incidental. Wenxin Du, Catherine Huang, and David Scharfstein's February 2026 working paper “Competing Rails for Cross-Border Payments: Banks, Fintechs and Stablecoins” (Harvard Business School) identifies the core issue: traditional bank rails involve FX markups of 200 to 400 basis points in retail settings, against wholesale FX bid-ask spreads that are typically only a few basis points for major currencies. The gap reflects correspondent liquidity costs, capital usage, compliance overhead, and pricing power, not underlying currency illiquidity. Stablecoin rails do not eliminate all of these costs, but they remove the intermediary layers that compound them.

The B2B picture is more nuanced and more corridor-dependent. For large-value transfers between well-covered counterparties in major markets, SWIFT GPI has made genuine improvements. Around 90% of GPI payments now reach the beneficiary bank within one hour on major corridors,  though this measures arrival at the bank, not crediting to the end customer's account, and settlement delays at the beneficiary leg remain a live issue. On these flows, modern payment banking infrastructure competes effectively on both cost and speed. Stablecoins offer a less decisive advantage here.

The picture changes materially on multi-hop chains, emerging market corridors, and any flow that crosses banking hours or jurisdictions with limited correspondent relationships. Bank-published fee schedules place the headline wire initiation fee at USD 25 to USD 50 per transfer, but that figure captures only the sending bank's charge. FX spread, correspondent deductions mid-flight, and float cost during a one-to-five-day settlement chain push the all-in cost substantially higher. By contrast, on-chain stablecoin transfer costs vary by network: a USDC transfer on Base runs under USD 0.01, while the same transfer on Tron costs roughly USD 0.30 to USD 1.00, with sub-minute settlement on both. For B2B flows requiring corridor diversity, those unit economics compound: EY's 2025 stablecoin survey found 41% of current business users reporting cost savings of at least 10%, with mid-size firms reporting 10 to 20% savings when accounting for transaction fees, FX spread, float cost, and intermediary deductions. That figure comes from a pool of early adopters for whom the economics already work — it should be read as directional, not representative of the average business.

The liquidity mechanics matter as much as the transaction cost. Traditional cross-border payment infrastructure requires pre-funded nostro accounts, which means capital sitting idle in the right jurisdiction at the right time to cover settlement. It is expensive, operationally complex, and scales poorly with corridor diversity. Stablecoin infrastructure allows a shift toward just-in-time liquidity, where value moves when the transaction occurs rather than being pre-positioned in anticipation of it. For fintechs and corporates managing multi-corridor payment flows, that capital efficiency difference is material.

Eric Barbier, Founder and CEO of Triple-A, frames it well: “Traditionally, you must park capital across multiple markets and prefund local partners. When banks close for holidays or operations slow down, flows get stuck. Stablecoins allow liquidity to move and rebalance in near real time.”

The cost argument is strongest where the traditional system is weakest: small-value transfers, underserved corridors, and flows that cross banking hours or require multiple correspondent hops. On well-served institutional corridors between major financial centres, the advantage narrows considerably. Any business case for stablecoin adoption needs to be built corridor by corridor, not on aggregate averages.

Where the gap is visible

Hyperinflationary economies

In several markets across Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Southeast Asia, local currencies have lost substantial value against the dollar over sustained periods. Populations in these markets have a rational and urgent demand for dollar-denominated savings. The banking system, both local and international, has largely been unable or unwilling to provide it at scale. Dollar-pegged stablecoins held in self-custodied wallets have become a de facto savings mechanism for millions of people who cannot easily access a US dollar account through a licensed bank.

Keith Vander Leest from BVNK identifies this as one of the primary drivers of real economy stablecoin adoption going forward: the unbanked and underbanked outside the US. Obtaining a US dollar checking or savings account as a non-US resident is expensive, operationally difficult, and in many cases practically impossible without a US address and Social Security number. For individuals in high-inflation geographies, the choice is not between a stablecoin and a bank account; it is between a stablecoin and watching their savings erode in local currency. That is a straightforward economic decision.

Industry experts increasingly describe stablecoins as an inflation hedge rather than a crypto asset in these markets. Speaking on the “Stablecoins & Infrastructure” panel at FIBE Berlin (April 2026), Ramzi Amairi, Director, Tech Coverage – Fintech & Digital Assets at Natixis Corporate & Investment Banking, made a similar point: consumers in these geographies are often using dollar-backed stablecoins because they offer a meaningfully more stable store of value than local currencies. In this context, stablecoins function less as an investment vehicle and more as a practical savings mechanism.

Consumer adoption in the US, by contrast, lacks this same structural push. Without comparable currency instability, retail demand is likely to grow more gradually, even as institutional and settlement-driven volume continues to scale

Africa is where this dynamic is most acute. The continent now leads the world in stablecoin ownership among crypto-active users at 79%, according to BVNK's Stablecoin Utility Report 2026, outpacing other emerging regions at approximately 60% and high-income markets at roughly 45%. The infrastructure investment following that adoption is now substantial. In October 2025, Flutterwave, a payments infrastructure provider operating across more than 30 African countries, selected Polygon as its default blockchain for a new stablecoin-based cross-border payments product, targeting enterprise clients including Uber and Audiomack in its first phase and consumer remittances through its Send App from 2026. Olugbenga Agboola, Flutterwave's founder and CEO, described the initiative as the largest stablecoin deployment in Africa. In June 2025, Visa expanded its stablecoin settlement solution across the CEMEA region and announced a partnership with Yellow Card, a pan-African fintech operating across 20 licensed markets, to pilot USDC-denominated settlement. Godfrey Sullivan, Visa's Senior Vice President for CEMEA, stated that by 2025, every institution that moves money will need a stablecoin strategy.

The logic across all of these deployments is consistent. Sub-Saharan African remittances averaged 8.78% of transfer value in Q1 2025, the world's most expensive corridor, Stablecoin-based remittances can reduce those costs substantially, in some cases to below 1% depending on the corridor and conversion requirements. For the approximately USD 56 billion sent into Sub-Saharan Africa annually by diaspora workers, and roughly USD 95 to USD 100 billion across the continent as a whole, it represents billions of dollars in savings that currently sit with intermediaries.

Remittance corridors the banking system has abandoned

Correspondent banks follow volume and margin. When a corridor carries heavy compliance costs, thin local infrastructure, or currency risk that is difficult to price, banks tend to withdraw rather than compete for share. Fewer banks competing for the same flow means the people sending money absorb the cost. That is the basic mechanic behind Sub-Saharan Africa, a region that carries some of the largest remittance volumes in the world and remains the most expensive to send money into: 8.78% on a USD 200 transfer in Q1 2025, against a global average of 6.49%, according to the World Bank's own remittance pricing data. Stablecoin rails bypass that problem entirely because there is no licensed intermediary in the middle that needs to take a cut to stay in business.

The corridor that proves this out at scale, however, is not in Africa. It is the largest single remittance flow on the planet: US to Mexico. Bitso, the largest stablecoin payments operator in Latin America, moved USD 6.5 billion through that corridor in 2024, more than 10% of the entire flow, settling same day and undercutting the corridor's roughly 5% average fee, a figure the Dallas Fed independently confirmed using Q1 2025 World Bank data. By December 2025, Bitso Business was processing more than USD 80 billion a year in payment volume across Latin America, for over 1,900 institutional clients. As Felipe Vallejo, Bitso's Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, put it, crossing the USD 80 billion mark signals that the global financial system is undergoing a structural shift toward stablecoin-based infrastructure.

None of that volume is speculative trading. It is payroll, supplier payments, and customer funds moving through a border where the existing banking rails are too slow, too expensive, or too thin on competition to keep doing the job.

Cross-border B2B payments, where the real adoption is

International payments remain one of the most stubborn inefficiencies in corporate finance. Supplier payments, contractor payouts, marketplace settlements, and intercompany treasury transfers still route through a chain of correspondent banks, and every intermediary in that chain adds settlement delay, FX cost, and a loss of real time visibility into where the money actually is. The friction is worse in emerging markets, where consistent access to dollar liquidity through licensed banking channels cannot be taken for granted.
The case for stablecoins here is operational, not ideological. They let businesses move dollar-denominated value directly between counterparties, settle in minutes instead of days, and cut out the intermediary banks that slow everything down. The benefits are not complicated: faster settlement, lower transaction cost, and tighter control over working capital.

Patrick Hansen, who leads EU strategy and policy at Circle, frames this as a shift in how stablecoins should be understood. They are not a new monetary instrument competing with the dollar or the euro. They are a settlement layer running underneath existing currencies. He separates two use cases that get conflated too often. The first is crypto capital markets, where stablecoins function mainly as a store of value for trading and decentralised finance activity. The second, smaller today but growing faster, is cross-border B2B payments. In Europe specifically, he points to treasury payments and capital markets settlement as the segments with the strongest growth trajectory.

Ramzi Amairi at Natixis is more measured about where demand actually sits right now. His read is that there is no strong demand for stablecoins yet at the level of corporate and investment banking, but clients are increasingly thinking about it and looking at ways to optimise flows, cut costs, and move faster. What has changed is the buyer base. Fintechs, startups, and a growing number of traditional banks are now evaluating stablecoin infrastructure for cross-border payments and cash pooling, which is a meaningfully wider set of institutions than existed two or three years ago.

Ezequiel Canestrari, former Chief Operating Officer of ClearBank Europe, views current adoption as just the top of the iceberg, with new use cases still to emerge over the next two to three years rather than incremental fixes to existing ones. He points to a concrete pain point behind that view: for corporates, wiring money to Argentina currently takes up to ten days. That is the kind of delay stablecoin settlement is built to eliminate.

The transaction data needs a more careful reading than the headline numbers usually get. Stablecoins are commonly cited as having processed roughly USD 35 trillion in transaction volume annualized through December 2025, a figure from McKinsey's joint analysis with Artemis Analytics. That number is real, but most of it reflects trading and exchange activity, not payments. After filtering out trading, internal transfers, and automated contract activity, McKinsey finds that actual payment volume, meaning commercial transfers, payroll, and remittances, was only about USD 390 billion in 2025, more than double the prior year. Partner Matt Higginson and coauthors break that USD 390 billion down by counterparty type: B2B accounts for USD 226 billion, close to 60% of the total, followed by consumer-to-consumer at USD 77 billion, consumer-to-business at USD 76 billion, and business-to-consumer at USD 11 billion. That counterparty breakdown is the one that actually tells you something about commercial adoption. The USD 35 trillion headline does not. It is worth noting that this USD 226 billion spans B2B activity broadly, not the large corporate and investment banking flows Amairi describes, so his caution about that tier and the size of this figure are not in tension.

Capital allocation by major payment infrastructure providers backs up that narrower read. Stripe announced its USD 1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge in October 2024, which was its largest acquisition ever and, at the time, the largest acquisition in crypto history. The deal closed in February 2025, a direct bet on stablecoin payment infrastructure rather than a speculative side project. That is not what you see around an experimental or speculative initiative. That is capital committed to infrastructure a company expects to still be running in five years.

Expanding ecommerce into harder to reach markets

Some markets have real, growing consumer demand, but card networks won't touch them. The fraud risk, regulatory complexity, or chargeback exposure is too high for processors to operate there profitably. Merchants in these markets who want to sell internationally hit a wall. 

Stablecoins solve this because they settle with finality and have no chargeback mechanism. A purchase that a card processor refuses can still go through on a stablecoin rail.

Triple-A has seen this play out with major brands selling into emerging markets, especially in categories like luxury goods, where shoppers want to buy but traditional card providers won't support the transactions because the risk looks too high.

Eric Barbier, founder and CEO of Triple-A, explains on The Paypers: in certain markets, fraud and disputes from card payments are a constant burden for merchants, and with blockchain-based payments, once a transaction is confirmed, it can't be reversed, which changes the risk equation entirely.

Conclusion

Stablecoins remain a small part of global payments today, and many of the headline volume figures still reflect trading activity rather than commercial use. Yet the direction of travel is becoming clearer. Regulatory frameworks are taking shape, institutional investment is increasing, and businesses are beginning to deploy stablecoins where traditional payment infrastructure remains slow, costly, or operationally complex.

The most important shift is that the conversation is no longer centred on crypto speculation. It is increasingly focused on payments, settlement, liquidity, and capital efficiency. Stablecoins will not replace existing financial infrastructure overnight, nor are they likely to be the best solution for every payment flow. But where legacy rails continue to create friction, they are emerging as a credible alternative.

That is the actual signal underneath the volume debate: not whether stablecoins will overtake SWIFT, but whether the corridors and use cases where banks have already pulled back will keep finding a faster, cheaper rail to fill the gap. On that narrower question, the infrastructure is already being built, the capital is already being committed, and the answer is no longer hypothetical.

About the author

Oana Ifrim is Lead Writer at The Paypers, keeping a close pulse on the banking and fintech sectors. She brings passion for content strategy and narrative design, along with rigorous trend analysis and industry research, to fintech, banking, and payments coverage, delivering clarity, depth, and strategic insight. Oana conducts expert interviews and thought leadership content, moderates webinars and conference panels, leads research projects and industry reports, and represents The Paypers at key industry events.

She can be reached at oana@thepaypers.com or on LinkedIn.