McKinsey x Artemis Joint Report: Stablecoins' $3.5 Trillion Transaction Volume, Only 1% Is Genuine Payment, C-End Usage Negligible

Stablecoin Industry Has a $35 Trillion Transaction Volume, 99% Is Internal Transfers, McKinsey Says Real Payments Rely on B2B Support

Author: Stablecoin Insider / McKinsey×Artemis

Translation: Deep潮 TechFlow

Deep潮 Guide: McKinsey and Artemis jointly released a report doing something rare in the industry: breaking down stablecoin transaction data. The conclusion is: out of approximately $35 trillion in annual on-chain transactions, only about $390 billion (around 1%) are genuine payments, with 58% being corporate-to-corporate financial operations, growing at 733% annually. Consumer stablecoin usage is almost negligible, and this is no coincidence — the article summarizes five structural reasons explaining why the gap between institutions and individuals is more than just a temporary disparity.

Full Text:

The stablecoin industry faces a headline-level problem.

On one hand, raw on-chain data shows hundreds of trillions of dollars flowing annually, fueling endless comparisons with Visa and Mastercard, and predictions that SWIFT will soon be replaced.

On the other hand, a milestone report released by McKinsey and Artemis Analytics in February 2026 strips all that away and asks a more direct question: how much of this is real payment?

The answer is roughly 1%.

Out of about $35 trillion in annualized stablecoin transaction volume, only around $390 billion represents actual end-user payments, such as vendor invoices, cross-border remittances, payroll, and card spending. The rest consists of trading activity, internal fund transfers, arbitrage, and automated smart contract cycles.

The report concludes that exaggerated headline figures should be viewed as “a starting point for analysis, not a proxy for measuring payment adoption.”

But within this real baseline of $390 billion, there is a story worth deep examination, almost entirely centered on corporate finance rather than consumer wallets.

B2B Dominates: What Do the Data Actually Show?

Based on McKinsey/Artemis analysis (using activity data as of December 2025), B2B transactions account for $226 billion, about 58%, of all real stablecoin payments.

This figure has grown 733% year-over-year, driven mainly by supply chain payments, cross-border vendor settlements, and liquidity management. Asia leads geographically, but adoption in Latin America and Europe is also accelerating.

The rest of the real payment volume is distributed among payroll and remittances ($90 billion), capital market settlements ($8 billion), and related card spending ($4.5 billion).

According to McKinsey, card spending associated with stablecoins has increased an astonishing 673% year-over-year, but in absolute terms, it remains a small fraction of B2B traffic.

As a reference: this $390 billion total accounts for only 0.02% of McKinsey’s estimated global annual payment volume exceeding $20 trillion. Specifically, B2B stablecoin flows represent about 0.01% of the global $160 trillion B2B payments market.

These figures are large in the context of stablecoins but still minuscule within the global financial system.

Monthly transaction velocity data more intuitively shows the momentum. According to BVNK citing McKinsey/Artemis, in January 2024, stablecoin monthly payments were only $5 billion; by early 2026, this exceeded $30 billion — a sixfold increase in less than two years, with the steepest acceleration in late 2025.

Annualized, this velocity now exceeds $390 billion.

“Real stablecoin payments are far below conventional estimates, but this does not weaken the long-term potential of stablecoins as a payment track; it simply establishes a clearer baseline for assessing market position.” — McKinsey/Artemis Analytics, February 2026

Why the Gap Exists: Five Structural Forces Excluding Retail

The divergence between explosive B2B adoption and negligible consumer usage is not coincidental but a product of systemic structural asymmetries favoring enterprise use cases over retail.

Here are five forces driving the institutional gap:

1) Financial Efficiency Outperforms Consumer Convenience

Corporate finance officers are driven by specific, quantifiable pain points: SWIFT’s one-to-five-day settlement times, currency exchange windows tying up liquidity, and intermediary fees stacking at each transaction stage.

Stablecoins address all three. For a company paying suppliers in fifteen countries, the economic logic is clear; for a consumer buying coffee, it’s not. The incentive to switch is vastly larger on the enterprise side.

2) Programmability Has No Equivalent Value in Retail

The B2B explosion is partly a story of programmable payments. Smart contracts enable conditional logic — invoice triggers, delivery confirmations, escrow releases — automating entire accounts payable processes at scale.

This naturally suits enterprise finance because high-value, structured, repetitive payments benefit greatly from automation. Retail payments lack similar trigger scenarios at any scale.

Consumers buying groceries don’t need programmable conditions; they want something as simple as swiping a card. The cognitive complexity of blockchain-native payments remains a barrier at retail, and programmability offers no help here.

3) Regulatory Frameworks Favor Institutions

Post-GENIUS Act, institutional operators have adapted compliance frameworks for AML/KYC, travel rules, licensing, and established legal infrastructure for confident operation.

Corporate finance teams have dedicated compliance functions, able to absorb onboarding friction; individual consumers cannot. As a result, in most jurisdictions, stablecoin deposit channels remain operationally complex for retail users, and merchant acceptance gaps persist globally.

Every frictionless B2B payment today is a data point for institutions to justify further investment; meanwhile, the consumer ecosystem waits for a compliant, seamless user experience that has yet to emerge at scale.

4) Closed-Loop Advantage

The success of B2B stablecoin payments is precisely because they are closed-loop: companies send to companies, both have wallets, compliant infrastructure, and no need for a universal merchant network.

Consumer payments face the classic chicken-and-egg problem: merchants won’t invest in stablecoin acceptance until consumers demand it; consumers won’t enable wallets until they can spend widely.

Institutions operating in bilateral or consortium environments bypass this issue entirely, without any open merchant network.

5) Upstream Incentives for Institutions

Corporate finance officers holding stablecoins can earn yields, reduce FX risk, and improve liquidity management — benefits that accrue internally. Extending stablecoin use downstream to suppliers, employees, or end consumers introduces complexity or competitive vulnerabilities.

Building a network that benefits downstream parties—like suppliers or employees—requires incentives that may not align with the initiating finance team’s goals.

Without clear ROI to drive outward network expansion, rational corporate behavior favors consolidating internal gains.

Market Context

BVNK’s infrastructure data from an operator’s perspective confirms the dominance of B2B. In 2025, the company processed $30 billion in annualized stablecoin payments, a 2.3x increase, with one-third from the US market.

Its client list (Worldpay, Deel, Flywire, Rapyd, Thunes) comprises leaders in cross-border B2B and payroll infrastructure, not consumer applications.

As BVNK noted in its 2025 year-end review:

“Remittances and consumer transfers were initially expected to drive stablecoin growth, but they did not; instead, B2B took on that role.”

When Will Retail Catch Up — If It Ever Does?

McKinsey/Artemis’s baseline makes the current state clear. It cannot answer whether the institutional gap will narrow, widen, or become permanent.

Here are three possible scenarios over the next 18 months:

Near-term 2026 — Gap Widens Further

B2B momentum shows no signs of slowing. The monthly velocity exceeding $30 billion continues as more enterprises use stablecoins for cross-border payables and financial operations. Consumer stablecoin card spending grows slightly, but in absolute terms, it remains negligible compared to B2B flows. Even if retail adoption slowly increases in percentage terms, the absolute dollar gap widens.

Mid-term 2026-end 2027 — Turning Point Begins

Several catalysts could start closing the gap: multi-currency stablecoins issued by banks reducing retail deposit friction; programmable features extended to consumer apps via AI agents; stablecoin-based gig economy wages creating downstream spending balances.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent predicts stablecoin supply could reach $3 trillion by 2030, implying eventual consumer network effects.

Contrarian View — Retail May Never “Catch Up,” and That Might Be the Key

The most honest interpretation of McKinsey’s data is that stablecoins are evolving into what the report subtly hints at: a programmable settlement layer for machines, finance departments, and institutions, with consumer adoption being an indirect, embedded benefit rather than a primary use case.

If this framework holds, the institutional gap isn’t a failure of adoption but a natural feature of technological architecture. Enterprise wages paid in stablecoins may eventually generate downstream consumer spending, but the path from B2B infrastructure to retail wallets is long, circuitous, and dependent on user experience breakthroughs that have yet to materialize at scale.

An Honest Baseline

The McKinsey/Artemis report does more than just document stablecoin growth: it establishes a rare, honest baseline the industry has long lacked.

By stripping out transaction noise, internal transfers, and automated smart contract cycles, it reveals a genuinely growing payments market — real payments doubled from 2024 to 2025 — but highly concentrated on the institutional side in a structural, non-coincidental way.

The 733% B2B growth isn’t a delayed consumer story; it’s a maturing financial story.

Today, companies building on stablecoins are solving real operational issues — cross-border friction, inefficient intermediaries, working capital delays — problems unrelated to whether consumers hold stablecoin wallets. Regardless, these issues will continue to develop.