Stablecoins, as a major form of virtual currency, are posing challenges to financial order due to their technical characteristics and problematic application practices. Recent statistics from authoritative market experts indicate that the global on-chain transaction volume for stablecoins in 2025, after removing duplicates and inflated data, is approximately $25 trillion. Among these, transactions with actual payment backgrounds account for less than 1%. The vast majority of transactions consist of "inflated activities" such as internal fund transfers within institutions, on-chain protocol split transfers, and speculative exchanges involving virtual currencies. The data covers 36 major stablecoins across 16 leading public blockchains, including Ethereum, Tron, and Solana.
According to the experts, analysis of factors such as transfer time intervals, transaction frequency, and fund flows reveals that most related transactions lack genuine payment backgrounds and are primarily composed of three types of inflated transactions. These include internal fund transfers within institutions, on-chain protocol split transfers, and the use of stablecoins as intermediary currencies for virtual currency exchanges.
Specifically, internal fund transfers refer to movements of stablecoins between different wallets or protocols under the same institution or controlling entity, constituting internal adjustments rather than authentic market transactions. Examples include exchanges transferring funds from spot wallets to leveraged contract wallets, or批量 moving assets from hot wallets to cold wallets for custody purposes.
On-chain protocol split transfers occur when a single business operation triggers multiple internal calls and fund movements during on-chain transactions, artificially inflating the recorded transaction volume. For instance, when exchanging stablecoins for other virtual currencies, protocols may split funds across multiple intermediate addresses to execute trades on different platforms for optimal pricing. If prices change, repeated adjustments between addresses can lead to the same capital being counted multiple times.
The use of stablecoins as intermediary currencies primarily serves virtual currency speculation. Traders engage in high-frequency exchanges to capture price differences, first converting one virtual currency to stablecoins before purchasing another virtual currency. This process splits a single capital flow into two separately recorded transactions.
The experts emphasized that stablecoins see minimal application in real payment scenarios. In genuine business contexts like trade and consumption, virtual currency payment providers such as Coinbase Global, Inc., BVNK, Bitpay, and Binance Pay offer stablecoin payment services to businesses and consumers. In 2025, 15 leading virtual currency payment institutions processed $132 billion in stablecoin transactions, while international card networks like Visa handled $4.5 billion in related transactions. Even when including stablecoin usage in illegal activities such as money laundering, telecom fraud, online gambling, extortion, and sanctions evasion, transactions with actual payment backgrounds still constitute less than 1% of the total.
Late last year, the People's Bank of China led a coordination meeting involving 13 national regulatory bodies including the Ministry of Public Security, the Cyberspace Administration of China, and the Central Financial Commission, formally bringing stablecoins under virtual currency regulatory oversight. On February 6 this year, eight departments including the PBOC and the China Securities Regulatory Commission jointly issued a notice further defining virtual currency-related business activities as illegal financial operations.
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