Methodology

For this study, we aggregate transaction data from 20 payment service providers¹ and other firms facilitating stablecoin payments, supplemented with estimates derived from on-chain data and other ancillary data sources for an additional 11 firms², for a total of 31 stablecoin payments companies. All the data, with the exception of Binance Pay, which settles transactions directly between users with accounts on the exchange, pertains to stablecoin transactions settling onchain. Generally speaking, these payments are made on behalf of end users (consumer or enterprise) for card transactions, business-to-consumer payments, business-to-business payments, or p2p payments. The exception is Lending, which refers to loans made in stablecoin terms to other stablecoin-based payment processors. Other forms of lending were not considered (even if associated transactions are all settled in stablecoins), since these do not pertain to payments. Some of the firms listed are service providers for other firms in the dataset; therefore, some duplication in volumes is possible, although we tried to de-duplicate whenever we had flow-through data. For certain providers, we opted to use only a subset of data, such as with Binance Pay, where we excluded intra-country transfers (which we felt had a higher probability of being 'non-economic' transactions). Generally, we opted for conservative estimates wherever possible.

For the study, we aimed to limit our data collection exclusively to transactions that involved some sort of payment reflecting genuine payment activity (excluding flows pertaining to investment). There are trillions of dollars worth of stablecoin transactions on-chain every year, but we were only interested in a bottom-up analysis of firms settling payments for known individuals and businesses. As of publication date, Artemis estimates $26 trillion dollars of onchain stablecoin settlement per year (adjusted to remove known sources of noise), but a large percentage of these are transactions associated with trading (on exchanges and DeFi), MEV, and other non-payment type transactions. In our study we were able to characterize approximately one percent of all of the nominal stablecoin settlement activity on blockchains. While this figure seems small, it amounts to $72.3 billion worth of known stablecoin-based payments on an annualized basis for our most recent month of data (February 2025). The firms represented are a subset of all stablecoin-based payment service providers and do not exhaustively represent the sector, but we believe that we have captured a meaningful share of transaction volume. We expect to grow our coverage in future iterations of the study.

The data request was made for monthly transaction data broken down by user type (b2b, b2c, p2p, etc), blockchain, sending and receiving countries (where available), and specific stablecoin employed. In some cases, charts are derived from a subset of firms (as not all contributing firms provided exhaustive breakdowns). Data was collected in May 2025 and dates to 2020. Naturally, some firms only started operating recently, so the growth in some charts reflects both growth in payment volumes on a per-firm basis, but also the emergence of more firms in the sector. Data is aggregated by transaction type and anonymized at the company level.