Let's start with the numbers, because they're genuinely remarkable.
In 2025, annualized onchain stablecoin transaction volume surpassed $46 trillion, now rivaling the throughput of major card networks. Total supply has crossed $305 billion, more than doubling between January 2023 and January 2026, and Visa's stablecoin-linked card spend reached a $3.5 billion annualized run rate in Q4 of 2025, marking 460% year-over-year growth. Stripe, Visa, PayPal, Payoneer, and JPMorgan all moved from evaluation to production. The GENIUS Act was passed in the US. MiCA moved to enforcement in Europe. The frameworks that institutions needed to act with confidence finally arrived.
This is real progress. But if you're waiting for me to declare that we've solved crypto payments, you'll be disappointed. The infrastructure story is only half of it, and in some ways, the easier half.
Here's what the headline numbers obscure: merchant payments account for roughly 5% of stablecoin usage. B2B stablecoin payments totalled about $226 billion in 2026, approximately 0.01% of global B2B payment volume. The rails exist. The commerce hasn't followed. That's the gap we need to talk about.
The demand is unambiguous
Before I get to what's missing, let me be clear about what the data tells us about user intent.
Our research at WalletConnect found that 96% of active crypto holders want to pay with crypto but can't find enough places to do so. That's not a technology problem. That's a distribution problem.
A recent BVNK study found that 42% of crypto holders want to spend on major or lifestyle purchases, while only 28% actually do so today. The gap between intent and behaviour is entirely explained by one thing: merchant acceptance is a critical blocker, desire to spend exceeds actual spending in every spend category tested.
What's striking about this demand signal is what it reveals about motivation. The top reasons people choose stablecoins are practical: 30% cited lower fees as their main motivation, 28% pointed to security, and 27% to global access. These aren't ideological crypto believers. They're people who want a better payment experience and see stablecoins as the mechanism to get it.
More than half of crypto holders reported buying something specifically because a merchant accepted stablecoins, rising to 60% in emerging markets. The commercial case for merchants couldn't be clearer: accept crypto, attract a customer cohort that spends more and actively chooses you over alternatives.
What 2025 actually settled
It's worth being precise about what changed last year, because context matters.
The question of whether stablecoins could function as a serious payments infrastructure was answered definitively. Not in whitepapers or pilots, in production. Stripe processed enterprise stablecoin payments. Visa ran a USDC settlement on Solana. JPMorgan put a deposit token live on Base. Visa and Mastercard now support USDC settlement, allowing card obligations to be discharged onchain.
Crucially, the stablecoin market is now large enough to influence financial infrastructure discussions rather than sit outside them. When an ECB paper warns that stablecoin growth could reshape deposit flows at European banks, you know the conversation has moved from speculative to systemic.
86% of financial firms report their infrastructure is ready for stablecoin adoption, shifting the focus from pilots to execution. The question of capability has been answered. What remains is the question of will, and specifically, the will of PSPs and merchants to integrate.
The fragmentation problem nobody wants to name
Here's what I think gets glossed over in the bullish takes.
The volume figures are real, but they're misleading as a proxy for payment adoption. Nearly 90% of stablecoin transactions are automated, arbitrage, liquidity provision, and DeFi activity. The infrastructure can handle an extraordinary load. Consumer commerce is barely registering.
The reason isn't technology. It's fragmentation. In our network data, we see users holding assets across an average of nearly three chains and multiple tokens per wallet. There are over 100 distinct stablecoin symbols active in our ecosystem. A user with USDC on Ethereum trying to pay a merchant who accepts USDT on Solana faces three simultaneous barriers: wrong token, wrong chain, and potentially wrong wallet connection. Each one alone is solvable. Together, they're enough to make someone reach for their card instead.
This isn't a user education problem. Infrastructure should handle chain selection, token conversion, and routing, invisibly, reliably, at transaction time. The moment a user has to think about which chain they're on, we've already lost them.
The institutional signal worth watching
The most instructive development of early 2026 isn't a volume number. It's Shopify.
Shopify is integrating USDC directly into its core payments stack, allowing merchants to accept digital dollars at checkout without adding new providers or changing their workflows, embedded inside Shopify Payments, meaning merchants can turn it on alongside credit cards and other existing payment options.
That's the playbook. Not a separate crypto checkout. Not a new integration for merchants to manage. Stablecoins as a standard option in the existing flow, invisible infrastructure that delivers a better settlement experience without asking anyone to change their behaviour.
The success of stablecoins as a payment mechanism is increasingly coming from platforms that embed crypto into mainstream commerce without asking anyone to care that it's crypto. That sentence should be printed on the wall of every payments team currently "evaluating" a stablecoin strategy.
What 2026 must deliver
If 2025 was the year stablecoins scaled, 2026 is the year they must prove their utility. That proof won't come from supply numbers or institutional announcements. It will come from whether ordinary people can use them to pay for things they actually want to buy, in flows they actually trust.
Three things need to happen.
First, the abstraction layer has to catch up to the infrastructure. Users should send a dollar, not navigate a blockchain. The complexity of chains, tokens, and routing belongs in the infrastructure layer, not in the user experience. The products that will win in this cycle are the ones that make crypto payments feel identical to card payments from the user's perspective, while delivering fundamentally better economics underneath.
Second, PSP integration has to accelerate. Total stablecoin payments volume hit a $122 billion annualized run rate in 2025, and 226 new businesses integrated stablecoins for payroll and other operational uses. That's a signal, not a ceiling. Every PSP that integrates stablecoin settlement extends the merchant network that users can spend into. The flywheel only turns when there are enough places to spend. WalletConnect alone saw 22 PSPs integrate our tech into their stack- month on month, the volume is accelerating.
Third, compliance has to be built in, not bolted on. The frameworks now exist across every major jurisdiction. The institutions that treated compliance infrastructure as a competitive advantage during the uncertainty period now have a meaningful head start. Everyone else is working backwards from a deadline.
The honest assessment
Stablecoins have crossed the infrastructure threshold. The rails work. The regulatory frameworks are crystallising. The demand from users is real and consistent across regions, demographics, and income levels.
What hasn't caught up is the experience of actually using them to pay for something. That gap, between what stablecoins are capable of and what most users can actually do with them today, is the defining challenge of this cycle.
Closing it requires the payments industry to treat stablecoin integration not as a crypto experiment but as a settlement upgrade. Faster. Cheaper. Available everywhere, to everyone, at any hour.
The technology case is made. The regulatory case is largely made. What remains is execution, and the will to move before the window of first-mover advantage closes.
We have built all this into WalletConnect Pay because we believe everything in this piece, but that's not why I wrote it. I wrote it because the market signals are real, and they deserve to be named clearly, regardless of who benefits.]