Stablecoins have gained significant attention as a new form of payment tool in recent years. Data indicates that over the past year, the global market capitalization of stablecoins surpassed a historic peak of $300 billion, with payment volumes potentially exceeding $45 trillion. However, the reality of stablecoin transaction activity is not as robust as these figures suggest.
According to the latest statistics from authoritative institutions, the on-chain transaction volume of global stablecoins in 2025, after removing duplicates and filtering out artificial transactions, was approximately $25 trillion. Within this total, transactions with a genuine payment background accounted for less than 1%. The vast majority of transactions were classified as "inflated transactions," including internal institutional transfers, on-chain protocol splitting and transfers, and speculative cryptocurrency exchanges. This data covers 36 major stablecoins across 16 leading public blockchains, including Ethereum, Tron, and Solana.
Industry experts point out that by analyzing factors such as the time intervals between stablecoin transfers, transaction frequency, and fund flows, it was discovered that most related transactions lack a real payment background. These are primarily composed of three types of inflated transactions.
"Internal institutional fund transfers refer to the movement of stablecoins between different wallets or protocols under the same institution or controlling entity. These are internal allocation activities rather than genuine market transactions," explained an industry expert. Examples include exchanges transferring funds from a spot wallet to a leveraged contract wallet, or moving funds in bulk from hot wallets to cold wallets for safekeeping.
The expert further described on-chain protocol splitting and transfers. During on-chain transactions, a single business operation can trigger multiple internal calls and fund movements, artificially inflating the recorded on-chain transaction volume. For instance, when exchanging stablecoins for other cryptocurrencies, protocols may split funds across multiple intermediate addresses to execute trades on different platforms seeking the best price. If prices change, funds may be repeatedly adjusted and transferred between addresses, leading to the same capital being counted multiple times.
Additionally, the expert highlighted that stablecoins often serve as an intermediary for cryptocurrency exchanges, primarily used for speculative trading. Speculators engage in high-frequency trades to capture price differences. A typical pattern involves converting one cryptocurrency into a stablecoin, then using that stablecoin to purchase another cryptocurrency. This process results in the same funds being counted twice as separate transactions.
"This indicates that the application of stablecoins in genuine payment scenarios is minimal," the expert stated. In real-world business contexts like trade and consumption, stablecoin payment services for businesses or consumers are mainly provided by cryptocurrency payment processors such as Coinbase, BVNK, Bitpay, and Binance Pay. In 2025, the top 15 cryptocurrency payment processors handled $132 billion in stablecoin transactions, while international card networks like Visa processed approximately $4.5 billion in stablecoin-related transactions. Even when including the use of stablecoins in illegal activities such as money laundering, telecom fraud, online gambling, extortion, and sanctions evasion, transactions with an actual payment background still account for less than 1% of the total.
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