The honest numbers

If you’ve seen a stablecoin vendor pitch lately, you’ve probably encountered the eye-catching chart: on-chain transaction volumes soaring past $5 trillion a month — supposedly more than Visa. That number isn’t lying, exactly; it’s answering a different question than the one you’re asking. This episode explains what those numbers really mean, and shows you how to cut any headline volume figure down to the part that’s actually payments. Fair warning: only about 0.1% of it is sized like a consumer payment.

This is Episode 2 in a five-part series. Episode 1 explained the basics — what stablecoins are and how they work as digital money on a shared settlement ledger. Here, we dig into the size of the stablecoin market. You don’t need to have read Episode 1, but its mint/burn mechanics explain why raw volume figures overstate real payment activity.

The number in the deck

On-chain stablecoin transfers total about $5 trillion each month. This number accurately reflects every stablecoin movement on public blockchains — and that is precisely the problem, because most of these movements aren’t payments at all.

To put it in familiar terms: imagine counting every internal transfer, treasury sweep, and ledger shuffle at a bank as “payments volume.” No payments professional would accept that. But because blockchains are public, that is exactly what raw on-chain volume is — the bank’s entire general ledger, published, and then quoted as if it were customer payments.

Three main activities inflate the raw number:

• Trading and MEV. Automated bots rapidly move the same funds hundreds of times daily. One dollar cycled 200 times becomes $200 of “volume.”
• Exchange and treasury operations. Internal transfers between exchange wallets, minting or burning tokens, and rebalancing across chains aren’t payments — they’re the plumbing. (As covered in Episode 1: creating a token by depositing reserves is like topping up an e-money float — not a customer transaction.)
• Smart-contract activity. A single DeFi transaction might pass through several liquidity pools, with each step counted as a separate transfer. One economic action can look like five ledger entries.

None of this is dishonest. It’s simply what a settlement ledger looks like from the inside. The confusion begins only in the retelling — when the ledger’s entire contents are presented as payments.

What filtering does: $5T → $1T → $6B

The industry’s own data providers have converged on how to strip the noise, and — usefully for us — two independent efforts land in the same place.

Visa’s Onchain Analytics dashboard, built with Allium and with filters agreed jointly by Visa, Artemis, Allium and Castle Island Ventures, applies two main cuts. First, a single-directional volume filter: within any one transaction, only the largest stablecoin movement counts, killing the multi-hop double-counting. Second, an adjusted address filter: any address sending more than 1,000 transactions or $10 million in a 30-day window is excluded — which removes the bots and high-frequency trading wallets wholesale.

Artemis, in its empirical analysis of stablecoin payment usage, took a complementary approach — classifying wallet-to-wallet transfers as payments and labeling the counterparties — and confirmed the same magnitude of collapse.

The result, as of the most recent methodology-aligned readings:

Look at that bottom row. The volume that actually resembles what stablecoins claim to disrupt — a person sending a few hundred dollars — is about 0.1% of the headline figure. That’s not a little smaller. It’s a thousand times smaller.

Two caveats, because this series doesn’t get to be selective about skepticism:

1. The $6B retail cut is deliberately brutal. A $250 threshold excludes plenty of genuine payments — B2B settlement, payroll, larger remittances. The adjusted $1T/month contains real economic activity well beyond retail. The point of the retail cut isn’t “stablecoin payments are only $6B” — it’s that when a deck implies consumer-payments scale using the raw number, it’s overstating that specific claim by roughly three orders of magnitude.
2. Adjusted figures vary by methodology. Visa’s dashboard annualizes to roughly $10T adjusted; Artemis’s broader adjusted measure runs higher (~$26T/yr) because it filters differently. When two credible shops disagree by 2.5x after filtering, the takeaway is that adjusted volume is a range, not a point. Quote the methodology with the number, always.

The cross-border cut: from $1T a month to $135bn a year

Adjusted volume still answers “how much purposeful stablecoin movement is there?” — not the question a payments analyst actually cares about, which is: how much of the cross-border payments market runs on this?

In July 2026, FXC Intelligence and Allium published the first serious attempt to answer that question directly, aligning Allium’s labeled on-chain payments data (geotagged across Ethereum, Polygon, Base, Solana and Tron, with intermediary hops and non-payment activity classified out) against FXC’s corridor-level market sizing. The findings:

• Stablecoins moved an estimated $135bn of cross-border retail (non-wholesale) payments in 2025 — 0.31% of the $44.3tn total. Up from $82bn and 0.20% in 2024.
• The mix is tellingly consumer-tilted. B2B is 79% of fiat cross-border flows but only 49% of stablecoin flows; C2C over-indexes about 3x (15% of stablecoin volume vs 5% of fiat). By penetration, C2C leads at 0.95% and B2C at 0.89% — both plausibly crossing 1% in 2026 — while B2B sits at just 0.19%.
• Growth is fast but decelerating: 64% YoY in 2025 versus 9% for fiat; 2026 year-to-date is tracking around 23%.
• Adoption is corridor-concentrated and stress-driven: the top three corridors (Taiwan→Turkey, Taiwan→Indonesia, Turkey→Indonesia) alone were ~13% of all stablecoin cross-border payments, and the outbound leaders — Turkey, Ukraine, Mexico, Indonesia, plus crypto-native Taiwan and South Korea — are largely not the leading fiat send markets. Most strikingly, on Mexico↔US the dominant stablecoin direction runs opposite to traditional remittances — this isn’t remittance flow at all, it’s dollar demand from people the banking system doesn’t serve well.

Assemble the ladder and you get the sizing sentence that should replace the hockey-stick slide:

Stablecoins record ~$5T/month of raw ledger activity, of which ~$1T/month looks like purposeful transfers, of which ~$135bn/year is cross-border payments — about 0.3% of the market, growing fast, concentrated in corridors where the traditional system works worst.

That last clause matters more than the small percentage. The FXC/Allium data shows adoption sorting by corridor stress, not by cost — stablecoins are winning first where fiat friction, capital controls and FX volatility bite hardest. Hold that thought; it’s the entire subject of Episode 5.

The baseline: what 6.36% actually means

The other half of every vendor deck is the cost claim, and it’s always anchored to the same source: the World Bank’s Remittance Prices Worldwide series. So let’s read it properly.

As of the latest release (Q3 2025 data, published April 2026), the Global Average cost of sending $200 is 6.36%, down from 6.49% the prior reading. Sub-Saharan Africa remains the most expensive receiving region — 8.46% on average in the Q3 2025 reading — and of the 13 corridors worldwide costing over 20%, nine originate in Sub-Saharan Africa. Sending from South Africa averages 15.65% — among the worst of any G20 market.

But 6.36% is a simple average across surveyed services — it weights a Tanzanian bank wire the same as a Wise transfer to India. The same RPW release contains the numbers that complicate the disruption story:

The honest reading: the 6.36% baseline is propped up by banks and cash, and the digital fiat frontier is already at 3.3–3.5% — within sight of the UN SDG 3% target — without any blockchain involved. So when someone claims stablecoins beat “the 6.36% status quo,” the fair comparison is to the 3.5% digital frontier, not to old-fashioned bank transfers. Benchmarking against the global average while competing with digital MTOs means benchmarking against the past, not the real competition.

And in the corridors where the baseline genuinely is 9%+, ask why — the answer is usually thin liquidity, parallel exchange rates and regulatory cost, none of which a token abolishes. Which brings us to where the cost actually went.

The cost-stack inversion: the corridor economics didn’t disappear, they moved

Here is the one technical fact in this episode, and it’s genuinely impressive: moving a stablecoin on-chain now costs approximately nothing. A USDC transfer on Solana runs around $0.0004–$0.005; on Base, a fraction of a cent to a few cents.

One asterisk, in keeping with house rules: the dominant remittance rail isn’t the cheapest one. Roughly half of stablecoin volume moves as USDT on Tron, where a transfer costs about $0.20–$1.50 with rented “energy” and $2–4 without — Tron even halved its energy price in August 2025 to stay competitive. So “sub-cent” is true of the frontier, not the median remittance token movement. Either way, on a $200 send the on-chain leg is a rounding error on the cheap rails and 1–2% at the Tron worst case — still the smallest line in the stack.

Now do the arithmetic every deck skips. If the on-chain leg rounds to zero and the World Bank still measures all-in corridor costs at 3–9%, then the entire cost lives at the edges — and this is the episode’s core claim:

The all-in cost of a stablecoin corridor payment = on-ramp (fiat → token) + on-chain transfer (≈0) + off-ramp (token → fiat the recipient can spend).

And the edges are made of exactly the things that made correspondent banking expensive:

• FX spread at the off-ramp, especially in exotic currencies — the same thin-liquidity problem, now priced by a local exchange or OTC desk instead of a correspondent bank.
• Cash distribution, when recipients need physical cash — agent networks cost the same whether the money arrives by SWIFT or Solana.
• Compliance, because KYC/AML obligations attach to the fiat touchpoints regardless of what happened between them.
• Working capital, because the local off-ramp partner pre-positions local currency — prefunding didn’t vanish, it moved one hop outward and got renamed liquidity provision.

This is why the series keeps returning to one sentence: the corridor economics didn’t disappear, they moved. The blockchain compressed the middle of the cost stack to zero and left the two ends standing. A stablecoin provider’s real margin story is an on/off-ramp story — which is also why the cost advantage varies so wildly by corridor, and why the FXC/Allium adoption map lights up precisely where the fiat edges are most broken. (Episode 5 prices this corridor by corridor.)

The analyst’s filter: five questions for any stablecoin volume claim

Everything above compresses into a checklist. When a deck, a press release, or a research note quotes stablecoin numbers:

1. Raw or adjusted? If the figure is within shouting distance of $5T/month or $30T+/year, it’s raw ledger volume. Discount by ~80% for adjusted, and ask which methodology.
2. What share is payments? Adjusted volume ≠ payments. The only cross-border payments-specific estimate with disclosed methodology puts 2025 at $135bn — 0.31% of the market. Any claim implying materially more should come with a methodology you can read.
3. Which cost baseline? If the pitch benchmarks against 6.36% (or worse, the bank rate), ask why not against the 3.5% digital-MTO frontier — that’s the actual competitor.
4. Where’s the all-in price? An on-chain fee quote is not a corridor price. Demand the full stack: on-ramp, off-ramp, FX spread at both ends, and who carries the local-currency float.
5. Which corridors? Averages hide everything. The advantage is real in stressed corridors and thin elsewhere. If the deck quotes a global savings figure, ask for the corridor mix behind it.

None of this is to dismiss stablecoins. Moving $135 billion across borders at 64% annual growth, five years in, gaining traction precisely where traditional systems fail people — that’s a genuinely significant story. It doesn’t need a fake trillion in front of it. And an analyst who can tell real progress from hype is worth far more than one who believes either version uncritically.

Next — Episode 3: The players and the plays. Who issues, who rides on USDC, who’s building the ramps — and what each of them is actually betting on.