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

Author: Stablecoin Insider / McKinsey × Artemis

Translation: Deep潮 TechFlow

Deep潮 Guide: A joint report by McKinsey and Artemis Analytics has done something rare in the industry: breaking down stablecoin trading volume data. The conclusion is: out of approximately $35 trillion in on-chain transactions annually, only about $390 billion (around 1%) are actual payment activities, with 58% of that being enterprise-to-enterprise financial operations, growing at 733% annually. Consumer-side 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 below:

The stablecoin industry faces a headline-level problem.

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

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

The answer is roughly 1%.

Of the approximately $35 trillion in annualized stablecoin trading volume, only about $390 billion represents genuine 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 summarizes 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 deeper examination, and it almost entirely revolves around enterprise 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), enterprise-to-enterprise transactions account for $226 billion, about 58%, of all real stablecoin payments.

This figure represents a 733% year-over-year growth, mainly driven by supply chain payments, cross-border vendor settlements, and financial liquidity management. Asia leads in geographic activity, but adoption in Latin America and Europe is also accelerating.

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

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

For reference: this $390 billion total accounts for only 0.02% of McKinsey’s estimate of over $20 trillion in global annual payments. Specifically, stablecoin B2B flows constitute about 0.01% of the global $160 trillion B2B payments market.

These figures are large in the context of stablecoins but negligible 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 payment volume was only $5 billion; by early 2026, this had exceeded $30 billion — a sixfold increase in less than two years, with the steepest acceleration occurring in the second half of 2025.

Annualized, this velocity now exceeds $390 billion.

“Real stablecoin payments are far below conventional estimates, but this does not diminish the long-term potential of stablecoins as a payment track; it simply establishes a clearer baseline for assessing market positioning.” — 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 major forces driving the institutional gap:

1. Financial efficiency outperforms consumer convenience

Corporate finance officers are driven by specific, quantifiable pain points: SWIFT proxy banks requiring one to five days for settlement, currency exchange windows tying up liquidity, and intermediary fees layered at each transaction stage.

Stablecoins address all three issues simultaneously. 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 at retail

The explosive growth in B2B is partly a story of programmable payments. Smart contracts enable conditional logic—invoice triggers, delivery confirmations, escrow releases—that can automate entire accounts payable processes at scale.

This naturally suits enterprise financial operations, where 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 need 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 completed compliance infrastructure for AML/KYC, travel rules, licensing, and established legal foundations for confident operation.

Corporate finance teams have dedicated compliance functions capable of absorbing 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 used by institutions to justify further investment; meanwhile, the consumer ecosystem awaits 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, both have compliant infrastructure, and there’s no need for a universal merchant network.

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

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

5. Upstream incentives favor enterprises

Corporate finance officers holding stablecoins can earn yields, reduce FX exposure, and improve liquidity management—benefits that accrue internally. Sharing these advantages downstream by integrating suppliers, employees, or end consumers introduces complexity or competitive vulnerabilities.

Expanding stablecoin use to suppliers, employees, or end users requires building a network that benefits those downstream parties, which may not align with the incentives of the initiating finance team.

Without clear ROI driving outward network expansion, rational enterprises tend to consolidate internal gains.

Market Context

BVNK’s infrastructure data from an operator perspective confirms the dominance of B2B. In 2025, the company processed an annualized stablecoin payment volume of $30 billion, a 2.3x increase, with one-third coming from the U.S. 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, initially assumed to drive stablecoin growth, did not become the main driver; instead, B2B took that role.”

When will retail catch up—if at all?

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

Here are three possible scenarios over the next 18 months:

Near-term (2026)—Gap widens further

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

Mid-term (late 2026–2027)—Turning point begins

Several catalysts may start closing the gap: multi-currency stablecoins issued by banks reduce retail onboarding friction; programmable features extended to consumer applications via AI agent payment mandates; stablecoin-based gig economy wages create downstream spending balances for workers.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent predicts stablecoin supply could reach $3 trillion by 2030, implying a potential eventual consumer network effect.

Reverse perspective—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 valuable, honest baseline that the industry has long lacked.

By stripping out trading noise, internal transfers, and automated smart contract cycles, it reveals a genuinely growing payments market—real payment volume doubled from 2024 to 2025—but one that is 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, enterprises building on stablecoin rails are solving real operational problems—cross-border friction, proxy bank inefficiencies, working capital delays—that have nothing to do with whether consumers hold stablecoin wallets. Regardless, these issues will continue to develop.