Stablecoins "beat Visa" in 2025. Here are the honest numbers.

By Venly Finance | August 10, 2026

Stablecoins settled $33T in 2025 — more than Visa and Mastercard combined. Most of it isn't payments. Here are the numbers that actually matter for B2B money movement.

The headline is everywhere: stablecoins settled $33 trillion on-chain in 2025, more than Visa and Mastercard's roughly $25.5 trillion combined. It's true — and, for anyone deciding whether to move business payments onto stablecoin rails, it's mostly noise.

Boston Consulting Group's January 2026 whitepaper did the market a favor by deflating the figure: strip out trading, arbitrage, and bot flows, and genuine payment volume was about $390 billion in 2025. That's roughly 1% of the headline number.

Here's why we — a company whose business is stablecoin settlement — think you should prefer the small number.

The number that matters is the one growing 733%

Inside that $390 billion, B2B payments were approximately $226 billion — up 733% year over year. That's the signal: not that stablecoins out-settled card networks (they didn't, in any like-for-like sense), but that real businesses moved a quarter-trillion dollars of actual obligations — supplier payments, payouts, treasury — over these rails, and did so at seven times the prior year's rate.

Forecasts diverge on definitions — Juniper Research puts cross-border B2B stablecoin flows at $13.4 billion in 2026 growing to $5 trillion by 2035 under a narrower definition — but the direction is not in dispute. Neither is the infrastructure validation: Visa now settles USDC in production with US banking partners after a multi-billion-dollar annualized pilot, and Mastercard's Multi-Token Network supports six stablecoins including EURC.

What the honest numbers mean for an operator

The rails are proven at your scale. A $226B B2B base means your €5M/month payout flow is not an experiment; it's a rounding error on a proven system.

The advantage is specific, not universal. Stablecoins win where correspondent banking is slow or expensive — cross-border payouts, exotic corridors, weekend treasury. They don't beat SEPA Instant for domestic EUR. An honest provider will tell you which of your corridors benefit and which don't. (This is why our margin model asks for your corridors.)

Costs are real but layered. The on-chain transfer is cheap; the full cost is conversion spreads, off-ramp fees, and local taxes on the fiat legs. Evaluate all-in corridor cost — typically 0.3–0.8% at scale on our rails, against 1.5–3% for traditional cross-border — not the gas fee.

The takeaway

Distrust anyone selling you the $33 trillion. Trust the $226 billion — and the 733%. That's the number that says the correspondent-banking detour is ending for high-volume operators, one corridor at a time.

FAQ

Did stablecoins really process more than Visa? On raw on-chain settlement, yes. On actual payments, no — BCG puts real payment volume near $390B for 2025.

Is B2B the biggest stablecoin payment use case? It's the largest verified segment (~$226B in 2025) and the fastest-growing (+733% YoY).

Which stablecoins matter for EUR businesses? USDC for global corridors; EURC increasingly for EUR-native flows under MiCA's e-money token regime.