USDT on Tron dominates the rails, while card-linked consumer spend is scaling alongside payroll and payout use cases.
Stablecoins are moving further into the financial mainstream, with real-economy payments now running at an annualised $122bn, according to a new dataset compiled by analytics firm Artemis. The study attributes $136bn of identifiable payments between January 2023 and August 2025 after stripping out trading, DeFi and other non-payment activity.
The report finds business-to-business transfers are now the largest use case, followed by peer-to-peer, card-linked spend and business-to-consumer payouts. Artemis puts B2B at a $76bn run rate, with peer-to-peer at $19bn, card-linked at $18bn, B2C at $3.3bn and prefunding at $3.6bn as of August 2025.
Rail choice hardens around USDT on Tron
Tether’s USDT accounts for roughly 85% of volumes in the sample, with Circle’s USDC a distant second. On the settlement layer, Tron carries the largest share, ahead of Ethereum, with BSC and Polygon present but smaller.
Average B2B ticket sizes on Tron and Ethereum both exceed $219,000, suggesting firms use those rails for higher value transfers, while BSC and Polygon skew to smaller, higher-frequency activity.
Consumer usage looks more like everyday spend
Card-linked payments funded by stablecoins have grown from about $250m a month at the start of 2023 to more than $1.5bn a month by mid-2024. Artemis says transaction sizes reported by Exa and Gnosis Pay are broadly in line with traditional cards, indicating everyday spending patterns rather than speculative flows.
Peer-to-peer payments, an early driver of adoption, have flattened at a $19bn run rate. Case studies include MiniPay on Celo, which disclosed about $80m in Q4 2024, and Sling Money on Solana using USDP, which lifted monthly transfers above $10m after launch.
Corridors cluster around Asia and the US
The Singapore–China route emerged as the most active corridor in the dataset. The next seven largest corridors all involve the US, underscoring the country’s central role in global stablecoin flows. Top sending countries include the US, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and the UK.
Regionally, Tron leads in much of Africa and Latin America, with Ethereum stronger in markets such as Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Argentina. USDT dominates across both regions, while USDC captures a meaningful minority in several African markets and nearly half of volume in Argentina, an outlier in the sample.
The findings point to stablecoins becoming a parallel settlement layer for cross-border commerce. Artemis says the payments it tracks represent about 1% of its adjusted estimate of $26tn in annual on-chain stablecoin settlement, most of which relates to trading or other non-payment activity. In other words, the real-economy slice is still small in the context of on-chain flows, but already material at triple-digit billions.
Large payments networks have begun weaving stablecoins into their systems, but Artemis argues bottom-up evidence of enterprise use is catching up with the narrative.
