Stablecoin talk has spread well beyond crypto over the past two years and into the broader payments industry. Pay with USDC, stablecoin checkout, stablecoin cards, remittances and B2B settlement now appear across almost every payment narrative.
But following the actual flow of money leads to a different conclusion. The largest stablecoin flows in the market today are not the same thing as the often-cited image of a consumer using USDC to buy coffee.
In an original article published by ChainCatcher, Xu Chen Steven Payment 201 argues that stablecoins have already found scale in trading, liquidity movement, cross-border settlement, treasury management, dollar access and payout flows, rather than primarily at the retail checkout layer.
Trading and liquidity remain the largest base
The article cites data recently shared on X by Triple-A founder Eric Barbier. From July 2025 to July 2026, Triple-A’s total payment volume, or TPV, doubled. Within that, TPV from trading platforms, exchanges and market makers rose 150% and now accounts for roughly two-thirds of the company’s total TPV.
Another example comes from Codex. Codex recently disclosed that its monthly volume has reached about $1.2 billion. At the same time, Codex Par, its newly launched 1:1 USDT-USDC conversion product, is already processing hundreds of millions of dollars a month on its own.
For the author, those figures are a warning against reading large stablecoin TPV numbers as proof that all of that money has gone into buying goods, sending remittances or paying merchants. Stablecoin volume can include a large amount of trading, USDT-USDC swaps, arbitrage, liquidity rebalancing and treasury movement. Those are all real use cases, but they do not carry the same economic meaning.
Across exchanges, trading platforms, market makers, brokers and OTC desks, liquidity moves every day between venues, wallets, assets and counterparties. A market maker may need to top up inventory at an exchange. A trading firm may need to move funds from venue A to venue B. An exchange may need to handle withdrawals, counterparty settlement and treasury rebalancing.
In that setting, a stablecoin is not merely a payment method. It functions more like a settlement asset and a liquidity rail. Bank money can move funds too, but banking hours, cut-off times, account structures, correspondent banking and funding windows all affect when cash is actually available. Crypto markets run 24/7, so a dollar-denominated asset that can settle 24/7 fits the market’s operating rhythm more naturally.
That is why the article says stablecoins found product-market fit first in liquidity, not in checkout.
The piece also notes that no crypto-fiat conversion is required for this to be true. USDT and USDC both provide dollar exposure, but they are not the same asset. They differ by issuer, redemption channel, chain distribution, counterparty acceptance and liquidity depth across venues.
As a result, USDT-USDC conversion is itself a business line. Some of it is trading. Some is arbitrage. Some is treasury rebalancing. Some happens because the next counterparty only accepts one of the two assets. Codex Par reaching hundreds of millions of dollars per month on its own is presented as evidence that even within on-chain dollars, liquidity remains fragmented.
The article then breaks trading down further. Consumer funding into an exchange is basically a C2B fiat acceptance problem. Users enter the crypto economy through cards, bank transfers or local payment methods. Exchanges may be strong in trading, wallets and crypto liquidity, but not necessarily in global acquiring, authorization, fraud management, chargebacks or local alternative payment methods.
That leaves room for traditional financial institutions such as Worldpay. The article says Worldpay still explicitly lists crypto exchange and trading wallet funding as supported scenarios, and card networks even use dedicated account funding or transaction indicators for crypto and stablecoin ramp transactions.
But once the flow shifts to exchange-to-market-maker, exchange-to-liquidity-provider, or trading-firm-to-OTC-desk activity, there is no consumer checkout involved. The competition there is about fiat accounts, OTC capability, stablecoin inventory, custody, liquidity and settlement. In the author’s framing, C2B stablecoin flows are about fiat acceptance, while B2B flows are about liquidity and settlement.
Africa: cross-border liquidity on one side, dollar access on the other
The article treats remittance as another large stablecoin segment, but says the market often understands stablecoin remittance too narrowly. The easiest story to picture is a user in the United States buying USDC, sending it to family in Nigeria, and the recipient converting it into naira.
That flow exists. Still, the author says another need shows up frequently in actual business, and it may be even more important from a payments and treasury perspective: how local African money gets out.
In many markets, collecting local currency is not always the hard part. Naira, Ghanaian cedi and Kenyan shilling can be collected through banks, mobile money systems and local payment service providers. The difficult half begins later, when those local currency positions need to be turned into liquidity that can be used across borders.
The article describes a chain that looks like this:
- Local collection
- Liquidity provider
- Stablecoin
- On-chain settlement
- Offshore liquidity or off-ramp
- Destination fiat
In that structure, local collection happens first. A provider with the right FX, liquidity and regulatory capabilities then handles conversion. USDT or USDC acts as the cross-border settlement asset, and the funds are later landed as fiat again in the UAE, Europe, Asia or another destination market.
From a payments perspective, this is just money moving from A to B. From a balance-sheet perspective, local liquidity is being transformed into settlement liquidity with stronger global transferability.
That is why the article calls liquidity providers central to the chain. The hardest part is often not the few seconds taken by the on-chain transfer. It is the local fiat before the funds go on-chain and the offshore fiat after they come off-chain.
The piece notes that when Mastercard and Yellow Card announced a partnership this year, they explicitly identified cross-border remittances, B2B settlement and treasury management as key stablecoin use cases.
For that reason, the author says reducing African stablecoin adoption to “crypto remittance” understates what is happening. Stablecoins are already entering local collection, cross-border treasury and offshore settlement flows.
The article also draws a clear boundary. FX regulation, capital controls and cross-border payment licensing do not disappear just because money moves onto a blockchain. Blockchain provides settlement technology. It does not provide legal permission.
In Africa, Latin America and parts of the emerging world, there is also a separate kind of stablecoin demand: users are not trying to pay, they are trying to hold dollars.
If someone lives in New York and already has a USD bank account, cards and a brokerage account, the incremental utility of USDC may be limited. But in a market facing long-term local currency depreciation, limited access to dollar accounts and restricted official FX channels, USDT or USDC starts to function less like a payment instrument and more like a dollar asset that is easier to hold and move.
That means the same USDC can serve very different roles. For a market maker, it is liquidity. For a PSP, it is a settlement asset. For an SME, it may be a working-capital dollar position. For an individual user, it may be close to digital dollar savings.
The article’s conclusion is direct: stablecoin adoption is not the same thing as payment adoption. Some of the biggest use cases do not even require the stablecoin to be spent onward.
B2B trade: the goods are real, but the banking path is not always smooth
The author identifies physical goods trade as another area worth watching closely. That includes phones, consumer electronics, used cars, auto parts, daily-goods wholesale and import-export flows.
The shared problem in those sectors is not that businesses “like crypto.” It is that buyers and sellers often operate in very different financial systems while remaining highly sensitive to settlement speed and working capital.
The article points to a case previously discussed by Eric Barbier: a Hong Kong company exports mobile phones to Vietnam, the Vietnamese buyer wants to pay in stablecoins, Triple-A handles conversion and settlement in the middle, and the Hong Kong seller can still receive fiat in a bank account at the end.
What matters there is not crypto itself. It is that the buyer’s preferred settlement asset is not the same as the seller’s preferred settlement asset. A buyer holding USDT does not mean the seller should be forced to hold USDT as well. Mature stablecoin infrastructure solves the compliance, liquidity, FX and settlement translation in the middle.
Put differently, the useful shape of a stablecoin B2B product is one where the payer keeps using the asset that is most convenient for the payer, the recipient still receives the form of money the recipient actually needs, and the stablecoin only sits in the middle segment.
The article says used cars, phones, auto parts and wholesale trade are well suited to this model because they are strongly cross-border, the ticket sizes are not small and the cash cycle moves quickly. Once a used car has shipped, or the next batch of phones depends on payment from the last shipment, a two-day delay caused by bank cut-offs, correspondent banks or funding lags does not merely hurt the payment experience. It hurts inventory turnover and the cash conversion cycle.
So the right question for stablecoin B2B is not whether businesses are willing to accept crypto. The right question is whether it can make trade money move faster.
Digital-native businesses tend to adopt stablecoins first through payouts
The article then turns to businesses that are digital-native by design. These include gaming, creators, affiliates, freelancers, contractors, marketplace sellers and agencies.
The common trait is not only that users are younger or more crypto-friendly. These businesses are already global, distributed and active around the clock. A platform based in Singapore may have customers in the US, developers in Eastern Europe, sellers in the Philippines and affiliates in Latin America. The business itself does not stop for banking hours, but the money system still does.
That is why stablecoins tend to enter first through payouts. The author cites the G2G and OffGamers case publicly referenced by Triple-A. Those two gaming marketplaces serve more than 100 countries, and payouts account for roughly 60% of their Triple-A volume.
The point of that case is that a company does not need to become a crypto company to adopt stablecoins. It may never manage private keys directly, build wallet infrastructure or hold stablecoins on the balance sheet for long. It may simply find that stablecoins fit one part of a financial flow better than the existing rail.
The article also points to Slash’s go-to-market approach. Instead of sorting buyers into a generic “stablecoin customer” bucket, Slash sells a financial stack directly into verticals such as agencies, e-commerce, Web3, wholesalers, affiliates, travel agencies and contractors. Each vertical maps to a different mix of banking, card, FX, payout and working-capital needs.
The author argues that this is the right framing because customers are not really buying “Do you support USDC?” They are buying whether a provider understands how money moves in their industry. Stablecoins are the rail. The actual product being purchased is a money workflow.
Advertising spend and virtual cards are used as a concrete example. Some advertisers, affiliates and agencies already receive upstream revenue in USDT or USDC and are comfortable settling among themselves in stablecoins. But the major ad platforms, including Google, Meta and TikTok, still mostly live inside a fiat-and-card economy.
That creates a chain like this: stablecoin revenue to an agency or ad buyer, then conversion into fiat or card balance, then funding a virtual card, then advertising spend.
The key point is that the stablecoin does not replace the card. The stablecoin handles funding. The card handles acceptance. Upstream is already stablecoin-native, downstream remains Visa- and Mastercard-native, and the valuable layer in the middle is the translation layer.
According to the article, Slash’s current product suite makes that trend visible. It offers cards, global payments and treasury products to verticals such as agencies, affiliates, e-commerce and travel, while its Global Card is built on top of stablecoin-backed global USD infrastructure and routes spending into the Visa card system when the transaction happens.
That is why the article says it is not enough to ask whether a merchant has added a Pay with USDC button. In many cases, stablecoins never appear in the final merchant transaction. They exist only in the earlier funding or treasury layer.
The higher the banking friction, the stronger the stablecoin demand can be
The article then moves into more complex verticals. The author avoids describing them simply as “gray” industries and instead frames them as sectors with high banking friction or elevated risk. Many of these businesses are fully legal, but bank, acquirer and PSP risk models subject them to stricter enhanced due diligence, transaction monitoring, or a narrower pool of financial institutions willing to serve them.
Forex and CFDs provide a specific example. BVNK has disclosed that around 40% of deposits for its client Titan FX already come from stablecoins. The average stablecoin deposit is about €5,000, which is 10 times the size of a card deposit. Titan FX’s explanation, as cited in the article, is straightforward: for some international clients, card fees are higher or cross-border card acceptance is less reliable, while users are more willing to fund larger amounts through crypto rails.
At that point, stablecoins are no longer a marginal alternative payment method. They are entering account funding directly.
Similar demand can appear in gambling and betting, precious metals, jewelry, some mining and metals businesses, commodity trading, and certain financial or digital businesses that sit outside the comfort zone of many banks’ risk appetite.
The article says these sectors reveal a recurring tension. As banking friction rises, stablecoin utility often rises too. But as banking friction rises, compliance difficulty for the stablecoin provider often rises too.
So stablecoin demand is not the same thing as stablecoin serviceability. A bank refusing to serve a flow does not mean the problem disappears when the flow is routed through a stablecoin PSP instead. The provider still has to answer questions around KYB, UBO, KYT, source of funds, AML, sanctions, license perimeter and, most practically, whether its own banking partners are willing to accept the flow.
For the author, the hardest part of the stablecoin business often is not the blockchain layer at all. It is finding a durable operating combination across regulation, entity structure, bank relationships, liquidity, corridor design and risk appetite.
The market sometimes labels that capability “regulatory arbitrage,” but the article argues the term is not fully accurate. Real arbitrage does exist in some cases, yet much of what companies are doing is better described as regulatory fit or jurisdictional optimization. The goal is not to find a place where no one is watching. The goal is to find a market and financial partner set where rules are clear, banks are willing, liquidity is sufficient and the business model can scale.
Weaker traditional financial connectivity creates stronger demand for alternative settlement
The article also highlights a category of stablecoin flow that cannot be ignored: flows from markets where traditional financial connectivity is visibly weaker. The reasons may include limited correspondent banking coverage, FX or capital controls, or tighter financial restrictions.
As long as imports, exports, supplier payments, investment and payroll still exist in the real economy, demand for value transfer will not disappear. When traditional banking connectivity declines, markets naturally look for alternative settlement assets, and stablecoins become one of those options because they offer global transferability and 24/7 settlement.
Still, the author insists on a distinction. The existence of settlement demand does not mean a given flow can be served legally or compliantly. Stablecoins can change the technology of value transfer, but they do not remove sanctions, export controls, AML obligations or counterparty restrictions.
The article treats this as a simple economic pattern: the weaker traditional financial connectivity becomes, the stronger the demand for alternative settlement infrastructure tends to be.
The same stablecoin can solve very different financial problems
Put all of these flows together and the picture becomes clearer. The article argues that stablecoins are not a single payment product at all.
For exchanges and market makers, they are liquidity rails. Between USDT and USDC, they are a form of liquidity transformation. For PSPs and remittance firms, they are settlement assets. For African outbound flows, they bridge local liquidity and offshore liquidity. For users in emerging markets, they can act as a dollar store of value. For B2B exporters, they perform settlement translation. For gaming, creators and contractors, they are payout rails. For forex brokers, they become account-funding rails. In ad-spend and virtual-card workflows, they become a funding instrument before the payment touches the card network.
The same USDT or USDC is solving completely different financial problems depending on the context.
That is also why looking only at stablecoin TPV can produce misleading conclusions. Codex may be processing $1 billion a month or more, but that figure can combine genuine cross-border settlement with large amounts of stablecoin swaps, liquidity rebalancing and institutional flow. Triple-A’s figures, meanwhile, show that trading platforms, exchanges and market makers already account for most of the volume. The volume is real. Its economic meaning is not uniform.
The article says the better question is not how large stablecoin volume is in aggregate. The better question is why that volume exists. Is it completing a payment, or moving liquidity? Is it facilitating FX, or treasury rebalancing? Is it providing dollar access, or transforming one stablecoin asset into another? Only then is it possible to see which layer of financial infrastructure stablecoins are actually entering.
Once payment flows stabilize, credit is the next layer
The article ends by extending the argument one step further. Stablecoins are already moving deeper into payments, settlement, liquidity and treasury. If those flows become stable enough, the next layer of demand is likely to be credit.
In B2B trade, that can mean trade finance, inventory finance and receivables financing. For agencies and ad-buying businesses, it can mean working capital and card credit lines. For PSPs, remittance companies and liquidity providers, it can mean settlement credit and intraday liquidity. Once merchant flow becomes stable, merchant financing based on transaction history can follow.
Stablecoins can compress settlement from two days to a few minutes, the article says, but they cannot solve a more basic commercial problem: the upstream party needs money today while the downstream party may not pay for 30 days. That is why credit exists.
And once payment infrastructure gains access to enough real flow, it also gains a data set that banks traditionally controlled: transaction volume, settlement history, receivables, counterparties, inventory turnover, and collection and payout patterns.
At that point, the evolution starts to look natural: payment to settlement, settlement to liquidity, liquidity to credit. Or in another formulation used by the article, payment creates flow, flow creates data, and data eventually creates credit.
The author argues that the most interesting part of PayFi may not be giving DeFi lending a new label. It may be whether real payment flows can become underwriting data, repayment sources and credit infrastructure. Once that happens, the stablecoin ecosystem is no longer just about how money moves. It starts to enter the full financial lifecycle of an enterprise.
Final point: the opportunity is often in replacing only one expensive or slow segment
The article closes by returning to its opening question. What matters at this stage is not how many merchants have added a Pay with USDC button at checkout. What matters is how many real money flows have already inserted stablecoins into the most expensive, slowest, least continuous or hardest-to-connect part of an existing financial stack.
Stablecoins may solve liquidity. They may solve settlement. They may solve dollar access. They may improve working capital. They may simply function as the funding instrument ahead of card spend. They do not need to replace the full traditional financial chain. In many cases, they only replace one segment, then reconnect to bank accounts, local clearing, FX, card networks and potentially credit built on top.
The article also says the most competitive stablecoin companies in the future may not be the most crypto-native firms. They may be the companies that know when to use fiat, when to use stablecoins, when to use banks, when to use cards, when liquidity is needed and when credit should be added, then assemble those capabilities into a workflow that actually fits a customer’s business model.
In its final lines, the article says the stablecoin industry is still at an early stage and that the common goal should be to grow the ecosystem rather than compete only inside already mature segments. The author calls for going local, going into industries and going to market to find real demand and a clear position inside the ecosystem.
He adds that more real use cases should be built and that Asia’s stablecoin ecosystem should become larger and deeper. In the next round of global financial infrastructure, the region should not only participate, but help build it.