Prefunding is the part of stablecoin payments nobody charts. So I did. Every time a fintech lets a customer send money, someone has already paid for it. The fiat lands in the recipient's country before the stablecoin leg settles, and the fintech carries that gap out of its own balance sheet. @artemis calls this category "prefunding" in their Stablecoin Payments report, and it is the smallest one in the sample. It is also one of the fastest-growing. The numbers from the report and my own estimates: prefunding volume was about $400M in 2023, $1B in 2024 and roughly $3.2B in 2025. That is 3.3x year over year. My base case, with growth decaying to 3.0x, 2.0x and 1.5x, puts it at $9.7B in 2026, $19B in 2027 and $29B in 2028. A top-down cross-check, prefunding at ~3% of total stablecoin payments against @McKinsey, @artemis and @keyrock market projections, lands in the same $25 -30B range. Here is what the chart doesn't show. Almost all of that $29B has to be borrowed. Prefunding is working capital, and today it is financed mostly by a handful of specialist lenders and by founders' equity. Every dollar of growth in the bar is a dollar a fintech needs to find before it can move its customer's dollar. That's why I'll be keeping an eye on projects like @usesugar that are growing in this sector.