Stablecoins vs Visa and Mastercard: the honest numbers

Every few months a chart goes round claiming that stablecoins now move more money than Visa and Mastercard. It is true, and it is also the least useful way to read the data.

Start with the card networks

Their numbers are clean because they report them. Visa’s total volume for its fiscal year to September 2025 was $16.7 trillion. Mastercard’s gross dollar volume for calendar 2025 was $10.6 trillion. Together that is about $27.3 trillion.

Then count stablecoins four ways

All on-chain stablecoin transfers (Artemis)

$33T

raw

“Economic” stablecoin volume (Chainalysis)

$28T

filtered

Visa + Mastercard combined

$27.3T

reported

Bot-adjusted transfers (Visa / Allium)

$11.6T

filtered

Actual stablecoin payments (McKinsey / Artemis)

$0.39T

payments

$0

$16.5T

$33T

The outlined bar is the card networks. Only the last row counts what a payments person would call a payment.

The raw $33 trillion counts every stablecoin transfer recorded on a blockchain in 2025, up 72% on 2024. That figure includes trading bots cycling the same dollars thousands of times, exchanges moving funds between their own wallets, and tokens being minted and burned. It measures activity on the rails, not commerce.

Analytics firms then filter. Chainalysis keeps most DeFi activity and lands near $28 trillion. Visa’s own on-chain dashboard, built with Allium, strips out labelled bots, exchanges, bridges and mint-and-burn activity and lands near $11.6 trillion.

The only count of actual payments

McKinsey and Artemis classified transactions one by one and found about $390 billion of real stablecoin payments in 2025: goods, services, payroll, remittances and invoices. That is roughly 1.4% of what Visa and Mastercard processed.

The part that matters

That $390 billion more than doubled in a year. Business-to-business payments were the largest slice, at about $226 billion, and grew by around 730%. Card-linked stablecoin spending grew fast too, but from a much smaller base.

So the honest summary has two halves. Stablecoins already carry more value on-chain than the card networks, but almost all of it is trading and treasury movement. Real payments are small, and they are growing fastest exactly where card rails are weakest: large, cross-border payments between businesses.

How to quote it

1. Say the raw number and what it includes: about $33 trillion of on-chain transfers in 2025, mostly trading.
2. Say the payments number next to it: about $390 billion, roughly 1.4% of Visa and Mastercard.
3. Say where it is growing: business payments, up around 730% year on year.

Sources: Visa Fiscal 2025 Annual Report; Mastercard full-year 2025 results; Artemis transfer data as reported by Bloomberg; Chainalysis; Visa Onchain Analytics with Allium; McKinsey & Company with Artemis Analytics, “Stablecoins in payments: what the raw transaction numbers miss”.