2025: The Year Stablecoins Leave the Crypto Bubble

When I first noticed stablecoins back in 2020, they felt like a side-note in crypto—handy for traders, invisible to everyone else. Today they’re elbowing into the same sentence as Visa, Stripe, and cross-border bank wires. The numbers below show why.

A clearer lens on volume — three data sets

• Visa + Allium** strip out spam, arbitrage hops, and MEV bots. Their May-2025 dashboard shows USD 9.04 trillion in adjusted, annualised stablecoin settlements.

• Fireblocks, the custody platform trusted by banks and cloud giants, breaks its flow into USD 232 billion in payments and USD 2.12 trillion in trading transfers. Because every wallet on Fireblocks is KYC-linked, these figures come with high confidence.

• An Artemis / CIV / Dragonfly survey of 31 payment processors (Binance Pay, BVNK, Conduit…) finds a payment run-rate of USD 72.3 billion. This is a lower-bound—many direct wallet-to-wallet transfers never touch a PSP.

Together, they bracket real, attributed payments somewhere between USD 70 billion and USD 230 billion. Apply Fireblocks’ 10 % payments-to-trading ratio to Visa’s top-down view and you infer a possible USD 900 billion payment run-rate. Even the low end already rivals mid-tier card networks.

What’s the TAM we are talking about

Total Addressable Market (TAM) = the most money that could flow through stablecoins if all good use-cases switch over.

• Cross-border B2B payments – USD $23 trn / year

• E-commerce checkout fees – USD $5 trn / year spend

• Remittances – USD $800 bn / year

• On-chain trading & DeFi – already > USD $1 trn / year

Even a 5 % share of the first two lines adds up to USD $1.4 trn of payment flow.

What I see on the trading desk

I trade stablecoin pairs most mornings. At 09:00 UTC, USDC/USDT typically shows a ±0.01 % spread on USD 120–150 million of depth. Two years ago that spread was seven times wider. Tighter spreads mean deeper liquidity—and deeper liquidity is exactly what merchants and CFOs need before they’ll route real payments through a new rail.

**“Stablecoins have become the liquidity layer of the internet.” — Cuy Sheffield, Head of Crypto, Visa (On-Chain Report 2025)

Three pain points stablecoins attack

• Cross-border B2B.** Banks charge 1–3 % on USD 23 trillion in annual flows (McKinsey). Tokenised dollars clear in minutes for cents.

• E-commerce margins. Online sellers will book USD 6.9 trillion this year (eMarketer). Shaving 50 bps can be the line between profit and loss.

• Family remittances. Migrant workers send home USD 860 billion (World Bank) at a 6 % fee. Cheaper rails put cash straight in kitchen budgets.

The Stripe signal

Stripe just confirmed plans to support stablecoin settlement. The company rarely picks up new rails for marketing buzz alone—think Apple Pay, BNPL, “Tap to Pay.” History says that once Stripe turns the key, mainstream merchants follow quickly.

Why 2025 feels different

• Regulation adds clarity, not drag. Europe’s MiCA, Dubai’s VARA, and Hong Kong’s new licensing rules demand full-reserve audits, making stablecoins easier for corporate treasuries to trust.

• Layer-2 fees keep falling. Average transfer cost on Base or zkSync sits well under a dollar.

• Liquidity begets adoption. The tighter trading spreads cited above didn’t happen by magic; they reflect growing demand on both sides of the trade.

Closing thought

Stablecoins are still tiny next to ACH and card rails—but they’ve jumped from curiosity to contender in five short years. Whether the “real” payment number is USD 70 billion or USD 900 billion, every credible data set points up and to the right. If you move money for a living, waiting for “proof it’s real” might already be yesterday’s playbook.

*Have thoughts of yours — good, bad, or messy? Drop it in the comments. *

Sources

• Visa / Allium — On-Chain Analytics Dashboard, May 2025

• Fortune — “Fireblocks Reveals Client Stablecoin Flows,” 6 Jun 2025

• Artemis, CIV, Dragonfly — Stablecoin Payments Study, Feb 2025

• McKinsey — Global Payments Report 2024

• eMarketer — Global Ecommerce Forecast 2024

• World Bank — Migration and Development Brief 41, Dec 2024

Views are personal, not financial advice.