Stablecoins have seen $35 trillion in trading volume, 99% of which is internal transfers; McKinsey states that real payments are supported by B2B transactions.

Author: Stablecoin Insider / McKinsey×Artemis

Article compiled and sourced from Shenchao TechFlow

Overview: The joint report by McKinsey and Artemis has done something rare in the industry: broken down stablecoin transaction volume data. The conclusion is that out of approximately $35 trillion in on-chain transaction volume annually, only about $390 billion (roughly 1%) represents actual payment activity, with 58% of that being business-to-business financial operations, growing by 733% year over year. Consumer use of stablecoins is nearly negligible—and this is no accident. The article identifies five structural reasons explaining why the gap between institutions and individuals is not merely a temporary disparity.

The full text is as follows:

The stablecoin industry has a headline-level issue.

On one hand, on-chain data shows that tens of trillions of dollars flow on-chain annually, fueling endless comparisons with Visa and Mastercard, as well as predictions that SWIFT will soon be replaced.

On the other hand, a landmark report released in February 2026 by McKinsey and Artemis Analytics stripped away all of this and asked a more direct question: How much of it is actual payment?

The answer is approximately 1%.

Of the 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 transactions. The remainder consists of trading activity, internal fund transfers, arbitrage, and automated smart contract loops.

The report summary states that inflated headline numbers should be "a starting point for analysis, not a proxy for measuring payment adoption."

But within this real $390 billion baseline lies a story worth examining closely—one that revolves almost entirely around corporate finance, not consumer wallets.

B2B Dominates the Scene: What the Data Actually Reveals

According to McKinsey/Artemis analysis (based on activity data as of December 2025), business-to-business transactions account for $226 billion, or approximately 58%, of all real-world stablecoin payments.

This figure represents a 733% year-over-year increase, primarily driven by supply chain payments, cross-border vendor settlements, and financial liquidity management. Asia leads in geographic activity, but adoption is accelerating in Latin America and Europe.

The rest of the real-world payments market is distributed across payroll and remittances ($90 billion), capital markets settlement ($8 billion), and linked card spending ($4.5 billion).

According to McKinsey, the amount spent via cards linked to stablecoins increased by an astonishing 673% year-over-year, but in absolute terms, it still represents only a small fraction of B2B traffic.

For reference, this total of $390 billion represents only 0.02% of McKinsey’s estimated global annual payment volume of over $20 trillion. Specifically, B2B stablecoin flows account for approximately 0.01% of the global $160 trillion B2B payments market.

These figures are substantial in the context of stablecoins, but still negligible within the global financial system.

Monthly velocity data more clearly illustrates the momentum. According to BVNK’s citation of the McKinsey/Artemis report, stablecoin monthly payment volume was just $5 billion in January 2024; by early 2026, it had surpassed $30 billion—a sixfold increase in less than two years, with the steepest acceleration occurring in the second half of 2025.

Annualized, this turnover rate has now exceeded $390 billion.

Real-world stablecoin payments are far below conventional estimates, but this does not diminish the long-term potential of stablecoins 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 Excluding Retail

The disparity between explosive B2B adoption and negligible consumer usage is no coincidence—it is the result of structural asymmetries that systematically favor enterprise use cases over retail ones.

Here are the five forces driving the institutional gap:

Corporate finance officers are driven by specific, measurable pain points: SWIFT correspondent banking chains that take one to five business days to settle, currency conversion windows that tie up working capital, and intermediary fees stacked at each transaction step.

Stablecoins solve all three of these problems simultaneously. For a company making payments to suppliers in fifteen countries, the financial case is clear; for a consumer buying coffee, it is not. The incentive to switch on the enterprise side is orders of magnitude greater than for individual users.

The B2B boom is partly a story of programmable payments. Smart contracts enable conditional logic—invoice triggering, delivery confirmation, escrow release—that can automate the entire accounts payable process at scale.

This is naturally suited for corporate financial operations, as high-value, structured, repetitive payment processes benefit significantly from automation. Retail payments lack similar triggering use cases at any scale.

Consumers buying groceries don’t need programmable conditions—they need something as easy to use as swiping a card. The cognitive complexity of blockchain-native payments remains a barrier at the retail level, and programmability does nothing to help.

Following the GENIUS Act, institutional operators have adapted their compliance frameworks to meet anti-money laundering/counter-terrorist financing, travel rule, and licensing requirements, establishing a legal infrastructure that enables confident operations.

Corporate finance teams have dedicated compliance functions that can absorb onboarding friction; individual consumers cannot. As a result, in most jurisdictions, deposit channels for stablecoins remain operationally complex for retail users, while the merchant acceptance gap persists globally.

Every frictionless B2B payment today serves as a data point for institutions to justify further investment; meanwhile, the consumer ecosystem awaits a compliant, seamless user experience entry point that has yet to emerge at scale.

B2B stablecoin payments succeed precisely because they operate within a closed loop: businesses send payments to other businesses, both parties have wallets and compliant infrastructure, and neither requires a general merchant network.

Consumers face the classic chicken-and-egg problem: merchants won’t invest in stablecoin acceptance infrastructure until there is consumer demand, and consumers won’t activate their wallets until they can spend widely.

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

Corporate treasurers holding stablecoins can earn yield, reduce foreign exchange exposure, and improve liquidity management—advantages that accumulate internally but introduce complexity or competitive vulnerability when shared downstream.

Expanding the use of stablecoins to suppliers’ suppliers, employees, or end consumers requires building a network that benefits those downstream parties, which may not necessarily align with the financial team’s objectives.

In the absence of a clear ROI driving network expansion, businesses rationally chose to consolidate internal gains.

Market context

BVNK's own infrastructure data confirms the dominance of B2B from an operator perspective. The company processed $30 billion in annualized stablecoin payments in 2025, a 2.3-fold year-over-year increase, with one-third of this volume coming from the U.S. market.

Its client list—including Worldpay, Deel, Flywire, Rapyd, and Thunes—are leaders in cross-border B2B and payroll infrastructure, not consumer applications.

As BVNK noted in its 2025 year-end review:

The initial assumption that remittances and consumer transfers would drive the growth of stablecoins has not materialized; instead, B2B has taken on this role.

When will retail catch up—if it ever does

McKinsey/Artemis’s 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:

The B2B momentum shows no signs of slowing. With a monthly volume exceeding $30 billion, this trajectory continues as more enterprises adopt stablecoins for cross-border accounts payable and financial operations. Consumer stablecoin spending via card transactions has seen modest growth, but the absolute volume remains negligible compared to B2B flows. Even as retail adoption progresses slowly in percentage terms, the gap in absolute dollar value continues to widen.

Several catalysts may begin to close the gap: bank-issued multi-currency stablecoins reduce friction for retail deposits; programmable features extend payment delegation to consumer applications via AI agents; and gig economy wages paid in stablecoins create downstream spending balances for workers.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent predicts that the supply of stablecoins could reach $3 trillion by 2030, a trajectory that implies the eventual emergence of consumer network effects.

The most honest interpretation of McKinsey’s data is that stablecoins may be evolving into what the report subtly suggests: a programmable settlement layer on the internet for machines, finance departments, and institutions, with consumer adoption serving as an indirect, embedded benefit rather than the primary use case.

If this framework holds, the institutional gap is not a failure of adoption, but rather a feature of the technology’s natural architecture. Corporate payroll disbursements in stablecoins may eventually generate downstream consumer spending, but the path from B2B infrastructure to retail wallets is long and circuitous, relying on user experience breakthroughs that have not yet emerged at scale.

Honest baseline

The McKinsey/Artemis report did more than document the growth of stablecoins: it established an honest baseline that the industry has clearly been missing.

By filtering out transaction noise, internal transfers, and automated smart contract loops, a genuinely growing payments market emerges—real payment volume doubled from 2024 to 2025—but it is highly concentrated at the institutional level in a structural, non-random manner.

The 733% growth in B2B is not a delayed consumer story, but a maturing financial story.

Companies building on the stablecoin rail today are solving real operational problems—cross-border friction, correspondent bank inefficiencies, working capital delays—that have nothing to do with whether consumers hold stablecoin wallets. Regardless, they will continue to build.