Research: Stablecoins with a $35 trillion annual transaction volume—how much of it is genuine payments?

Author | Stablecoin Insider / McKinsey×Artemis

Compiled by | Deep Tide TechFlow

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Intro: The McKinsey and Artemis joint report did something that very few people in the industry have done—break down stablecoin transaction-volume data. The conclusion is that out of roughly $35 trillion in annual on-chain transaction volume, only about $390 billion (about 1%) represents real payment activity, of which 58% is B2B financial operations, growing 733% year over year. Consumer-side stablecoin usage is almost negligible, and that’s not a coincidence. — — The article summarizes five structural reasons that explain why the gap between institutions and individuals is not just a temporary shortfall.

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The stablecoin industry has a problem at the “headline” level.

On the one hand, the original on-chain data shows that hundreds of billions of dollars flow on-chain every year. This figure has spawned endless comparisons to Visa and Mastercard, as well as predictions that SWIFT is about to be replaced.

On the other hand, a landmark report released by McKinsey and Artemis Analytics in February 2026 strips all of that away and asks a more direct question: Of that, how much is actually real payments?

The answer is about 1%.

Out of approximately $35 trillion in annualized stablecoin transaction volume, only about $390 billion represents genuine end-user payments, such as supplier invoices, cross-border remittances, payroll disbursements, and card-based spending. The rest consists of trading activity, internal funds transfers, arbitrage behavior, and automated smart contract loops.

The report concludes that the inflated headline numbers should be “the starting point for analysis, not a proxy indicator for measuring payment adoption.”

But within that real $390 billion baseline, there is a story worth digging into—one that almost entirely revolves around corporate finance rather than consumer wallets.

B2B dominates: what the data actually says

Based on McKinsey/Artemis analysis (using event data from December 2025 as the baseline), B2B transactions account for $226 billion of all real stablecoin payment volume—about 58%.

This figure represents 733% year-over-year growth, driven mainly by supply-chain payments, cross-border supplier settlement, 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 across payroll disbursements and remittances ($90 billion), capital market settlement ($8 billion), and associated card spending ($4.5 billion).

According to McKinsey data, card spend associated with stablecoins is up an astonishing 673% year over year, but in absolute terms it still represents only a small fraction of B2B flow.

For reference: This total $390 billion amount is only 0.02% of McKinsey’s estimated global annual payments volume of over $20 trillion. Specifically, B2B stablecoin flow makes up about 0.01% of the $160 trillion global B2B payments market.

These numbers are large in the stablecoin context, but they remain minuscule in the context of the global financial system.

Monthly turnover-rate data makes the momentum more intuitive. Citing BVNK’s data from the McKinsey/Artemis report, in January 2024, stablecoin monthly payment volume was only $5 billion; by early 2026, it had exceeded $30 billion. — — It grew sixfold in less than two years, with the steepest acceleration occurring in the second half of 2025.

On an annualized basis, this turnover rate now exceeds $390 billion.

“Real stablecoin payments are far below conventional estimates. This does not undermine stablecoins’ long-term potential as a payment rail—it simply establishes a clearer baseline for assessing where the market stands.” — — McKinsey/Artemis Analytics, February 2026

Why the gap exists: five structural forces that exclude retail

The divergence between B2B’s explosive adoption and consumers’ near-irrelevance is not a coincidence. It is the product of structural asymmetries that favor enterprise use cases over retail use cases.

Here are the five forces driving the institutional gap:

1. Financial efficiency beats consumer convenience

Corporate treasurers are driven by specific, measurable pain points: SWIFT’s agent chain that can take one to five business days to settle, currency-exchange windows that tie up liquidity, and intermediary fees stacked at every transaction step.

Stablecoins solve all three problems at once. For a company paying suppliers across fifteen countries, the economics are straightforward; for a consumer buying coffee, they are not. The switching incentives on the enterprise side are orders of magnitude larger than for individual users.

2. Programmability has no equivalent value on the retail side

Part of B2B’s explosion is a story of programmable payments. Smart contracts enable conditional logic—invoice triggers, delivery confirmation, escrow release—automating entire accounts payable workflows at scale.

This naturally fits enterprise finance operations, because high-value, structured, and repetitive payment processes benefit massively from automation. Retail payments lack similarly scalable trigger applications at any size.

Consumers buying groceries don’t 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 provides no help.

3. The regulatory architecture favors institutions

After the GENIUS Act, institutional operators have completed the adaptation of compliance frameworks such as anti–money laundering/anti–terrorist financing, travel rules, and licensing requirements, and built the legal infrastructure to operate with confidence.

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

Every frictionless B2B payment today is a data point that institutions use to justify further investment. Meanwhile, the consumer ecosystem is waiting for a compliant, seamless user-experience entry point that has not yet emerged at scale.

4. The advantage of closed-loop systems

B2B stablecoin payments succeed precisely because they are closed-loop: enterprises send to enterprises; both sides have wallets; both have compliance infrastructure; and neither side needs a universal merchant network.

Consumer payments face the classic chicken-and-egg problem: before consumers have demand, merchants won’t invest in building stablecoin acceptance infrastructure; and before consumers can spend widely, consumers won’t activate wallets.

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

5. Institutional incentives point upstream

For institutional treasurers holding stablecoins, the benefits include yield, reduced FX exposure, and improved liquidity management—advantages that accumulate internally. Sharing them downstream introduces complexity or exposes competitive fragility.

Rolling stablecoin usage out to suppliers’ suppliers, employees, or end consumers requires building a network that makes those downstream parties benefit—and that may not align with the originating finance team’s incentives.

In the absence of a clear ROI that compels networks to expand outward, enterprises rationally choose to consolidate internal gains.

Market context

BVNK’s infrastructure data itself confirms B2B’s dominance from an operator perspective. The company processed $30 billion in annualized stablecoin payments in 2025, up 2.3x year over year, with one-third of the volume coming from the U.S. market.

Its customer roster (Worldpay, Deel, Flywire, Rapyd, Thunes) consists of leaders in cross-border B2B and payroll infrastructure—not consumer applications.

As BVNK noted in its 2025 year-end review:

“The initial assumption was that remittances and consumer transfers would lead stablecoin growth, but they did not become the main driver; B2B instead played that role.”

When will retail catch up—or if it can

The McKinsey/Artemis baseline makes the current situation clearly visible. 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:

Early 2026 — — the gap widens further

There are no signs that B2B momentum is slowing. The monthly turnover rate above $30 billion continues as more enterprises use stablecoin rails for cross-border accounts payable and financial operations. Consumer stablecoin card spending grows slightly, but in absolute terms it remains negligible relative to B2B flow. Even if retail adoption gradually advances in percentage terms, the gap still expands in dollar absolute value.

End of 2026 to 2027 — — a turning point begins to appear

Several catalysts may start to close the gap: multi-currency stablecoins issued by banks reduce retail on-ramp friction; programmable features delegated through AI agents extend to consumer applications; and gig-economy wages paid in stablecoins create downstream consumer balances.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent predicts that the stablecoin supply could reach $3 trillion by 2030. This trajectory implies that consumer network effects will eventually emerge.

The counterpoint — — retail may never “catch up,” and that may be the key

The most honest interpretation of the McKinsey 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, where consumer adoption is 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 technology’s natural architecture. Enterprise payroll paid in stablecoins may ultimately create downstream spending, but the path from B2B infrastructure to retail wallets is long and circuitous—and depends on user-experience breakthroughs that have not yet emerged at scale.

An honest baseline

The McKinsey/Artemis report does something more valuable than simply recording stablecoin growth: it establishes an honest baseline that the industry has long been clearly missing.

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

B2B’s 733% growth is not a delayed consumer story; it is a finance story that is already maturing.

Enterprises building on the stablecoin rails today are solving real operational problems—cross-border frictions, agent-bank inefficiencies, and working-capital delays—issues that have nothing to do with whether consumers hold stablecoin wallets. Either way, they will keep building.