Author | Stablecoin Insider / McKinsey×Artemis
Compiled | Deep Tide TechFlow
Original link:
https://www.techflowpost.com/zh-CN/article/30739
Introduction: McKinsey and Artemis jointly reported on something few in the industry have done: breaking down the trading volume data of stablecoins. The conclusion is: out of approximately $35 trillion in on-chain transaction volume each year, only about $390 billion (around 1%) constitutes real payment activity, with 58% being financial operations between enterprises, experiencing an annual growth of 733%. The use of stablecoins on the consumer side is almost negligible, and this is not coincidental — the article summarizes five structural reasons explaining why the gap between institutions and individuals is not merely a temporary discrepancy.
The full text is as follows:
The stablecoin industry has a headline-level issue.
On one hand, raw on-chain data shows that hundreds of trillions of dollars flow on-chain every year, a figure that has given rise to endless comparisons with Visa and Mastercard, as well as predictions that SWIFT will soon be replaced.
On the other hand, a landmark report released by McKinsey and Artemis Analytics in February 2026 stripped all this down and asked a more direct question: how much of it is real payment?
The answer is approximately 1%.
Among approximately $35 trillion in annualized stablecoin transaction volume, only about $390 billion represents real end-user payments, such as vendor invoices, cross-border remittances, payroll, and card spending. The rest consists of trading activities, internal fund transfers, arbitrage, and automated smart contract cycles.
The report summarizes that the exaggerated headline figures should be the 'starting point for analysis, not a proxy measure of payment adoption.'
But within this real $390 billion baseline, there is a story worth examining in depth, which revolves almost entirely around corporate finance rather than consumer wallets.
B2B dominates the scene: What does the data actually indicate?
According to the analysis by McKinsey/Artemis (based on activity data from December 2025), business-to-business transactions account for $226 billion of all real stablecoin payment volume, about 58%.
This figure represents a year-on-year growth of 733%, primarily driven by supply chain payments, cross-border vendor settlements, and financial liquidity management. Asia is geographically leading, but adoption is also accelerating in Latin America and Europe.
The remainder of the real payment space is distributed among payroll and remittances ($90 billion), capital market settlements ($8 billion), and associated card spending ($4.5 billion).
According to McKinsey's data, the card spending associated with stablecoins grew an astonishing 673% year-on-year, but in absolute terms, it still represents only a small fraction of B2B traffic.
As a reference: this total of $390 billion represents only 0.02% of McKinsey's estimated global annual payment total of over $20 trillion. Specifically, B2B stablecoin flows account for about 0.01% of the global $160 trillion B2B payment market.
These figures are significant in the context of stablecoins, but still negligible in the context of the global financial system.
Monthly operational rate data presents momentum more intuitively. According to BVNK citing McKinsey/Artemis report data, in January 2024, the monthly stablecoin payment volume was only $5 billion; by early 2026, this figure exceeded $30 billion — — growing sixfold in less than two years, with the steepest acceleration occurring in the second half of 2025.
Annualized calculations show that this operational rate has now exceeded $390 billion.
"Real stablecoin payments are far below conventional estimates; this does not undermine the long-term potential of stablecoins as a payment rail, it simply establishes a clearer baseline for assessing the market's position." — — McKinsey/Artemis Analytics, February 2026
Why is there a gap: Five structural forces excluding retail
The divergence between the explosive adoption of B2B and the insignificance of consumer usage is not coincidental, but rather a product of structural asymmetry that systematically favors enterprise use cases over retail use cases.
Here are the five major forces driving the institutional gap:
1) Financial efficiency beats consumer convenience
Corporate CFOs are driven by specific, quantifiable pain points: the SWIFT correspondent chain that takes one to five business days to settle, currency exchange windows that tie up liquidity, and the intermediary fees layered on each transaction.
Stablecoins simultaneously address these three issues. For a company paying vendors in fifteen countries, the economic case is clear; but for consumers buying coffee, it is not. The incentives to switch on the enterprise side are orders of magnitude larger than for individual users.
2) Programmability has no equivalent value at the retail end
The explosion of B2B is partly a story of programmable payments. Smart contracts enable conditional logic — — invoice triggers, delivery confirmations, escrow releases — — all of which can automate the entire accounts payable process at scale.
This naturally fits corporate financial operations, as high-value, structured, repetitive payment processes benefit greatly from automation. Retail payments lack similar triggering application scenarios at any scale.
Consumers do not need programmable conditions for grocery shopping; what they need is something that works like swiping a card. The cognitive complexity of blockchain-native payments remains a barrier at the retail end, and programmability does not help this.
3) Regulatory frameworks favor institutions
(GENIUS Act) Since then, institutional operators have completed adaptations to compliance frameworks such as anti-money laundering/anti-terrorism financing, travel rules, and licensing requirements, establishing a legal infrastructure that can operate confidently.
Corporate finance teams have dedicated compliance functions that can absorb entry friction; individual consumers do not. As a result, in most jurisdictions, the entry channels for stablecoins remain operationally complex for retail users, and the merchant acceptance gap continues to exist globally.
Every frictionless B2B payment today is a data point used by institutions to justify further investment; meanwhile, the consumer ecosystem is waiting for a compliant, user-friendly entry point that has yet to emerge on a large scale.
4) Closed-loop advantages
The success of B2B stablecoin payments is precisely because it is a closed loop: businesses send to businesses, both parties have wallets, both have compliance infrastructure, and neither needs a universal merchant network.
Consumer payments face a classic chicken-and-egg problem: merchants will not invest in building stablecoin acceptance infrastructure before there is consumer demand; and consumers will not enable wallets before they can spend widely.
The institutional world operates completely around this issue in a bilateral or alliance environment, without the need for any open merchant networks.
5) Institutional incentives point upstream
CFOs holding stablecoins can earn yields, reduce foreign exchange exposure, and improve liquidity management — — these advantages accumulate internally, and sharing them downstream introduces complexity or competitive vulnerability.
Promoting the use of stablecoins to suppliers' suppliers, employees, or end consumers requires building a network that benefits those downstream, which may not necessarily align with the financial team's gains of the initiator.
In the absence of clear ROI driving network expansion, businesses rationally choose to consolidate internal gains.
Market Background
BVNK's own infrastructure data confirms the dominance of B2B from the operator's perspective. The company processed an annualized stablecoin payment volume of $30 billion in 2025, a year-on-year increase of 2.3 times, with one-third of the volume coming from the US market.
Its client list (Worldpay, Deel, Flywire, Rapyd, Thunes) is a leader in the cross-border B2B and payroll infrastructure space, rather than consumer applications.
As BVNK pointed out in its end-of-year review for 2025:
The initial assumption that remittances and consumer transfers would lead stablecoin growth has not become the main driver; instead, B2B has taken on this role.
When will the retail end catch up — — if at all
The McKinsey/Artemis baseline makes the current situation clear and discernible. What it cannot answer is whether the institutional gap will narrow, widen, or become permanently entrenched.
Here are three possible scenarios for the next 18 months:
Recent 2026 — — the gap further widens
B2B momentum shows no signs of slowing. With an average operational rate above $30 billion per month, it continues as more businesses use the stablecoin rail for cross-border accounts payable and financial operations. Consumer stablecoin card spending has seen slight growth, but the absolute volume remains trivial compared to B2B traffic. Even if retail adoption slowly advances in percentage terms, the gap is widening in absolute dollar values.
Mid-term from the end of 2026 to 2027 — — Turning points begin to appear
Several catalysts may begin to bridge the gap: multi-currency stablecoins issued by banks reduce retail entry friction; programmability extends to consumer applications through AI Agent payment delegation; gig economy wages issued in stablecoins create downstream consumption balances for employees.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent predicts that stablecoin supply could reach $3 trillion by 2030, a trajectory that suggests eventual consumer network effects.
The counterpoint — — the retail end may never 'catch up', and perhaps that is the key.
The most honest interpretation of McKinsey's data is that stablecoins may be evolving into what the report vaguely suggests: a programmable settlement layer for machines, financial departments, and institutions on the internet, with consumer adoption being an indirect, embedded benefit rather than the primary use case.
If this framework holds, then the institutional gap is not a failure of adoption, but a characteristic of the natural architecture of technology. Wages issued in stablecoins may eventually create downstream consumer spending, but the path from B2B infrastructure to retail wallets is long and winding, relying on user experience breakthroughs that have yet to emerge on a large scale.
Honest baseline
The McKinsey/Artemis report achieved something more valuable than recording stablecoin growth: it established an honest baseline that has been conspicuously missing in the industry.
By stripping out transaction noise, internal transfers, and automated smart contract cycles, a truly growing payment market is revealed — — real payment volume doubled from 2024 to 2025 — — but it is highly concentrated in a structural and non-accidental manner on the institutional side.
The 733% growth of B2B is not a delayed consumer story; it is an evolving financial narrative.
Companies building on the stablecoin track today are solving real operational problems — — cross-border friction, inefficiencies in correspondent banks, delays in working capital — — these issues have nothing to do with whether consumers hold stablecoin wallets. Regardless, they will continue to build.