Current Affairs

Stablecoins Are Actually Working Now—Here's Why the Velocity Numbers Matter

2026-07-25

Stablecoin supply has roughly doubled since January 2024, but transaction volume has grown four to five times faster. That gap tells you something important: the money that's onchain is moving harder than it ever has. It's not just sitting there.

For the longest time, we measured stablecoin adoption by market cap. Simple metric. How much dollar liquidity is parked in crypto? But that tells you almost nothing about what's actually happening. You can hold a billion dollars and do nothing with it. You can hold a million and move it constantly. The latter is a real payments network. The former is just a pile.

Enter velocity. It's the monthly transfer volume adjusted for supply. Since early 2024, stablecoin velocity has roughly doubled—climbing from 2.6x to 6x. More recent data gets absurd. A report using filtered data from Visa and Allium Labs puts stablecoin velocity at an annualized 49.7 times. Visa's own velocity across the fourth quarter of 2025 was 13.56. US M1—actual money in your actual economy—sat at 1.65. Do the maths.

The composition of activity is shifting too. Remittances, B2B payments, and consumer transfers are now the fastest-growing bits. Exchange-linked volume, once the engine, has shrunk as a share. Strip out trading, arbitrage, and treasury flows—the noise—and you're looking at an estimated $350–550B in genuine payments between different parties last year. Not negligible.

Then there's the infrastructure angle. Stablecoins move on public blockchains 24/7. All day, every day, including weekends. Fedwire, the backbone of US wholesale settlement, shuts down for the weekend. ACH operates in defined windows. Coinbase found that weekends account for roughly one-fifth of weekly stablecoin volume, consistently, across years. A capability traditional banking hasn't offered.

This is reshaping the competition between USDC and USDT. Circle's USDC accounted for about 70 percent of adjusted stablecoin transaction volume in the first half of 2026, widening its lead. Tether's USDT held roughly 25 percent. Yet by market cap, Tether still leads in total supply. The split tells its own story: USDC dominates large-value settlements. USDT remains strong in smaller transfers and offshore demand.

The numbers got big fast. Adjusted stablecoin transaction volume hit a record $1.79 trillion in June 2026—up 63 percent from May, up 125 percent from a year earlier. First six months of 2026 totalled $8.82 trillion. Banks are noticing. Standard Chartered and BNY Mellon rolled out new USDC services. Visa just launched its Stablecoin Platform, giving financial institutions a single environment to run stablecoin operations with Open USD (OUSD), a new stablecoin from Open Standard.

The shift from supply-focused metrics to throughput-focused ones reflects something deeper. Supply tells you how much capital entered crypto. Throughput tells you how intensively that capital is working. Neither metric catches everything—you can't tell transaction by transaction whether each dollar moved was speculative, a treasury shift, or a merchant payment. But the acceleration in circulation tells you what matters: stablecoins have moved past being a parking space for exchange liquidity. They're functioning as settlement infrastructure that operates across time zones and bank holidays.

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