By Varun Datta, Venture Capitalist and Founder of Truth Ventures
Ask most people what a stablecoin is for, and they will say trading. For a large share of activity, that is true. But that answer hides a more interesting and overlooked story: away from exchanges, stablecoins are quietly turning into financial plumbing.
The headline numbers are enormous, which is part of the problem. BCG and Allium Labs estimate that public blockchains recorded more than $62 trillion of stablecoin transfers in 2025. Once bots, protocol mechanics, trading flows, and routing between wallets are stripped out, only $4.2 trillion reflected genuine economic activity, or about 7% of the total. BCG says its estimates are conservative because they leave out card payments and activity settled off-chain, but the overall picture is still clear: the gap between raw onchain volume and real economic use is enormous. Coverage that quotes the trillions without that context can leave readers with the wrong impression.
Market share reveals the challenge. Stablecoins are growing fast, but they still account for only 1% of global payments, the same share reported in 2023 and 2024, according to OpenFX. That suggests the bottleneck is not the blockchain settlement layer alone. Blockchains can already move value quickly. The harder problems are compliance, payment ramps, liquidity, reconciliation, and the operational systems businesses need before they can use stablecoins at scale.
Real payments tell us more about lasting adoption than headline transfer volumes. BCG found that real-economy stablecoin payments grew by 60% between 2024 and 2025. That usage is expanding because traditional systems remain inefficient in many corridors. Businesses and finance teams use stablecoins for international settlements, trapped liquidity, and high costs. These are operational problems, not trading problems. The point is not the token’s name; it is whether the system solves a real payment need.
That changes how the growth story should be read. A market driven mostly by trading behaves very differently from one driven by payments. Businesses tend to stick with payment systems once those systems become embedded in their workflows. Payments grow through integration, reliability, and repeated use, not just because a technology is fashionable. That is a different proposition for anyone deciding where to build or which companies to back.
Incumbents have noticed. Visa said that, as of the end of November 2025, its monthly stablecoin settlement volume had passed a $3.5 billion annualized run rate. It has also launched USDC settlement for U.S. banks. Nothing about the consumer card experience has to change. The stablecoin sits underneath, doing the settlement work. That is what infrastructure looks like when it works.
The interesting question for the next year is not whether stablecoin volume keeps growing. It probably will. The more important question is who ends up owning the plumbing. Will crypto-native firms build the infrastructure, or will payments incumbents quietly absorb it? Early M&A data suggests incumbents are already moving. Mastercard agreed to acquire BVNK for up to $1.8 billion, while Payward agreed to acquire Reap for up to $600 million. Tiger Research found that these two deals together accounted for about 84% of all payments and stablecoin investment in the first half of 2026.
Founders and investors need to rethink success. Gross volume is a vanity metric when it hides the truth. The better questions are harder: Is the payment activity real? Do customers stay after incentives end? Does the company give customers a reason to stay beyond faster settlement or lower fees? These questions are harder to answer than looking at a chart, but they reveal a business’s true value.
Stablecoins are becoming the plumbing of the financial world. Plumbing rarely makes headlines, but it is where lasting value often sits. The race to own that infrastructure has already begun.
