BCG and McKinsey independently stripped stablecoin volumes to actual payments. Both landed near $390 billion — about 7% of the $62 trillion in gross transfers. Real market, real growth, but not the revolution the headlines suggest.
That’s McKinsey’s estimate of actual stablecoin payment volumes in 2025. Not the $35 trillion headline figure, not the $80 trillion unadjusted number that gets passed around conference stages. The real thing. Payments for goods and services between people and businesses who meant to move money to each other.
BCG, working independently with Allium Labs, landed in the same neighbourhood: $350–550 billion. Out of $62 trillion in gross stablecoin transfers, they found just $4.2 trillion in real economic activity: about 7% of total on-chain volume. The rest is trading, bot activity, protocol mechanics, and exchanges shuffling funds between their own wallets.
Two major consulting firms. Two different blockchain analytics partners (Artemis for McKinsey, Allium for BCG). Same conclusion: the vast majority of stablecoin activity has nothing to do with payments.
This matters because the industry has spent two years citing the market value of key stablecoins or raw transfer volumes as proof of payment adoption. But we're starting seeing through the noise.
The convergence between these papers is striking. Both identify B2B payments as the dominant category: McKinsey at $226 billion (roughly 60% of their total), BCG at 40% of their $350–550 billion range. Both find that growth rates exceed 60% year-over-year. Both acknowledge their numbers are conservative lower bounds because large categories of activity (e.g., card-linked spending, off-chain exchange settlements) are invisible on public blockchains.
Where they diverge is in methodology. McKinsey uses a top-down approach with Artemis, tagging known payment infrastructure and cross-referencing against their Global Payments Map. BCG applies a behavior-based classification framework - transaction size, frequency, counterparty diversity - to infer economic intent from wallet patterns. The fact that both approaches converge on roughly the same order of magnitude makes the estimate sound credible, although the BCG report published in January this year might have provided some anchoring.
McKinsey’s geographic breakdown adds a dimension BCG doesn’t cover: 60% of stablecoin payment volumes originate from Asia, concentrated in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. North America accounts for $95 billion, Europe $50 billion. Latin America and Africa barely register. This is consistent with the argument that stablecoins gain traction where traditional rails fail, not where they work well. Cross-border B2B settlement between Asian counterparties dealing in USD, remittance corridors with expensive intermediaries, and platform payouts to distributed workforces. High friction, niche contexts. Not mass-market payment replacement. BCG frames it well: stablecoins today are financial market infrastructure, not a mass-market payment rail.
The evolution is credible and accelerating, but there’s no step function in sight. Both papers agree: adoption is real and concentrated, but still a rounding error in the $200 trillion global payments market. The honest read is that stablecoins are filling cracks in the existing system: the corridors where correspondent banking is slow, expensive, or simply absent. They’re not replacing the plumbing just yet as I argued in "From “Limited Benefits” to Holy Grail of Cross-Border Payment? Stablecoins in 2025" last October.
For anyone building stablecoin payment businesses, these reports are a gift. They replace vibes with baselines. $390 billion growing at 60%+ annually is a real market, but not to be confused with a $62 trillion one.
Sources: McKinsey & Artemis Analytics, “Stablecoins in payments: What the raw transaction numbers miss,” February 2026. BCG & Allium Labs, “Stablecoin Payments: The Truth Behind the Numbers,” January 2026. Both reports, with my annotations, are available in the Reading Library
