Stablecoins Are Breaking Free From Crypto to Become the Next Generation of Global Payment Infrastructure

Author: Prathik Desai

Article Translation: Block unicorn

Preface

Everyone agrees that stablecoins are booming. Their circulating supply has more than doubled, and adjusted trading volume has grown more than twice over. All of this has happened in just two years. Last month, the monthly adjusted trading volume for stablecoins hit a record high. Some people dismiss these numbers, while the crypto Twitter community (CT) celebrates them.

But numbers alone don’t tell the full story of growth. Equally important is the context in which that growth occurs—who is using stablecoins, for what purposes, and whether usage patterns are changing. Allium generously shared their latest report on stablecoin infrastructure, titled Stablecoins: The Rise of New Payment Channels. This report is worth reading, as its charts show that stablecoin usage is shifting from low-cost cross-border remittances to supporting general commercial activities and inter-company vendor payments.

Most current debates about stablecoins focus on whether they are financial products (such as narrow banking, bond packaging, yield tools) or merely payment infrastructure. Policy discussions about their prospects often assume stablecoins are primarily financial instruments. But the data in the report suggests otherwise. Recently, stablecoin trading activity increasingly resembles a payment channel rather than a savings product.

This mirrors the development pattern of Automated Clearing House (ACH) networks: from replacing paper checks in payroll to becoming the backbone infrastructure for general business, B2B payments, and consumer bill payments.

In today’s deep dive, I will combine data from Allium’s stablecoin infrastructure report to explain how it has changed my perspective on the future direction of stablecoin development.

Speed Differentiation

Since January 2024, the circulating supply of stablecoins (calculated by subtracting non-circulating supply from total supply) has grown over 100%. During the same period, adjusted trading volume (excluding fake transactions, internal transfers, and round-trip transactions) has increased by 317%.

In any new asset’s accumulation phase, supply tends to grow faster than usage. As the asset matures, usage growth surpasses supply growth because holders use the asset more actively. Here, the fact that adjusted trading volume has outpaced circulating supply growth indicates that stablecoins have evolved from a store of value to a more ideal medium for value exchange or transfer.

This shift is also reflected in the velocity of stablecoins, calculated as adjusted trading volume divided by circulating supply.

Over the past two years, the velocity of stablecoins has increased from 2.6 times to over 6 times, meaning the turnover rate per dollar of stablecoin has increased 2.3 times since January. Compared to traditional payment systems, this shows that stablecoin applications are already quite mature.

Another indicator of stablecoin usage maturity is transaction count, which is less affected by large-value transaction fluctuations. When the growth rate of payment transaction counts exceeds that of total volume, it indicates that the average payment amount is decreasing. This phenomenon usually signals that the payment system is stabilizing rather than being an experimental tool being promoted across exchanges.

This raises a question: who is making all these payments, and what are they used for?

By 2025, consumer-to-consumer (C2C) channels will still be the largest, ahead of consumer-to-business (C2B), business-to-business (B2B), and business-to-consumer (B2C) channels. However, their growth rate is the slowest among the four.

The slowdown in C2C transaction growth highlights the maturity of stablecoin applications, as person-to-person transfers are the simplest use case. They require no merchant integration, invoicing tools, or APIs, and the barriers to adoption are minimal. Every new payment technology often starts this way.

Ten years ago, when India launched the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), retail users were the first to adopt, mainly due to cashback offers and other customer acquisition strategies. I remember people transferring between their two accounts using Google Pay (initially called Tez in India), which offered $1 cashback at the time. It wasn’t until business tools, reporting, and dedicated payment confirmation voice systems were introduced that stores and merchants began to join.

As infrastructure matures, commercial use cases start to take a larger share of the market. And this shift seems to be happening.

The rapid growth in C2B indicates more users are using stablecoins for general business activities, subscriptions, and merchant payments. Meanwhile, growth in B2B suggests commercial counterparties are applying stablecoins for invoicing, supply chain payments, and fund management. C2B and B2B growth rates are 131% and 87%, respectively, both exceeding the overall payment growth rate of 76%, indicating that commercial payments are gaining a larger share of total payments.

Combining the increasing C2B transaction volume with the decreasing average transaction size (from $456 to $256) suggests people are using stablecoins for recurring purchases—a clear trend.

While P2P remains dominant in absolute numbers, it is rapidly giving way to P2B and B2B.

Quarterly market share data makes this shift even clearer.

Since Q1 2025, when C2C payments fell below 50%, the share of P2P payments has never exceeded 50%.

It seems the world is moving beyond the experimental phase of using stablecoins for low-risk, infrequent P2P transfers, toward their continuous use for frequent payments.

However, the data shows a different picture. When I first started paying attention to stablecoin adoption, one mainstream view was that stablecoins could revolutionize cross-border remittances, allowing workers in developed economies to send money home without paying 7-8% intermediary fees. That story still exists, but perhaps it is no longer mainstream.

I find it interesting that domestic commercial applications are quietly surpassing all others. This is not widely discussed in crypto circles, but this indicator marks stablecoins’ transition from a crypto product to a financial infrastructure supporting consumer-to-business and business-to-business activities.

It’s also worth noting that Allium’s payment volume analysis is based on their covered, identified, and labeled wallet data. While this analysis shows that payments account for only 2-3% of adjusted total stablecoin transactions, this is only a lower bound, as many wallets likely remain untracked by Allium.

Looking ahead, I will closely monitor whether C2B and B2B shares continue to grow and whether the trend of decreasing average transaction size persists over the next few quarters. If these trends hold even during crypto market downturns, it would suggest that stablecoin payment infrastructure is beginning to decouple from speculative crypto activities.

That’s all for now. See you in the next article.

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