Stablecoins now move more money than Visa and Mastercard combined

Stablecoins processed $33t in 2025, topping Visa and Mastercard, and could clear over $50t by 2026 as corporates, banks and AI agents turn on‑chain dollars into core payment rails.

Stablecoins processed $33 trillion of on-chain transaction volume in 2025, surpassing the combined $25.5 trillion handled by Visa and Mastercard and signaling that tokenized dollars have quietly outgrown legacy card rails, according to a new “State of Stablecoins” report from Ethereum layer-2 network Morph. Morph’s analysts argue the asset class has moved beyond its speculative origins to become a core settlement layer for global finance, with volumes now comparable to the world’s largest payment networks despite a total market capitalization in the low hundreds of billions.

Crucially, roughly 60% of stablecoin flows are now business-to-business, as corporates lean on dollar tokens for cross-border treasury management, supplier payments, and procurement. “Enterprise adoption is no longer a thesis; it is visible in the data,” the Morph team wrote, highlighting rising average transaction sizes and the growing role of stablecoins in institutional liquidity and settlement workflows. The report notes that in several recent months, stablecoin volumes exceeded $1.5 trillion, rivaling or surpassing the monthly throughput of major card schemes.

Looking ahead, Morph projects annual stablecoin settlement volumes could exceed $50 trillion as early as 2026, cementing their role as a parallel payment stack alongside banks, card networks, and systems like SWIFT. By 2030, the report forecasts stablecoins could account for around 10% of global cross-border payments, helped by lower fees, instant settlement, and regulatory clarity in key markets under frameworks such as the EU’s MiCA and new US stablecoin laws.

Morph also bets that AI agents will become primary initiators of stablecoin transactions, automating everything from just-in-time inventory payments to machine-to-machine settlement. Under that scenario, the team estimates stablecoins could support a $1.9 trillion market by 2030, with autonomous systems triggering high-frequency, low-latency payments across global supply chains. In a previous crypto.news story, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said stablecoins processed more than $33 trillion in volume last year and could become crypto’s “ChatGPT moment” for businesses, underscoring how quickly on-chain dollars are converging with mainstream finance.

That same story pointed to forecasts from Bloomberg Intelligence that stablecoin flows could reach $56.6 trillion by 2030, while another crypto.news story on institutional adoption reported that 90% of surveyed financial institutions now use stablecoins in some form, from settlement to collateral management. A separate story on cross-border payments detailed how incumbents such as SWIFT are testing blockchain and digital-asset rails, suggesting that by the time stablecoins hit a 10% share of global cross-border volume, the line between “crypto” and conventional payments may be largely irrelevant to end users.