Stablecoin payments reached $401 billion to $527 billion through August, Allium estimates

Put the two Allium figures side by side and they invite a division that crypto.news, which reported both, says should not be made ^[5]. The $401 billion to $527 billion is a payment estimate across use cases for January through August 2026 ^[1]. The 0.31% is a share of a defined retail cross-border market in 2025 ^[4]. Applied to that $44.3 trillion base, 0.31% comes to about $137 billion for the whole year ^[14]. Run forward at an even eight-month pace (an assumption, not a finding), the broader 2026 range would reach roughly $600 billion to $790 billion ^[15].

Inside that range, businesses received 58% to 64% of classified payments, according to Allium ^[3]. Pair the low share with the low estimate and the high share with the high estimate and you get a crude band of about $233 billion to $337 billion paid to businesses in eight months ^[16]. According to crypto.news's account of the study, the spread reflects analytical uncertainty and does not come from two competing ledgers ^[2].

Raw transfer totals start much higher. The same ledger records exchange deposits, bridges, issuer mints and redemptions, and treasury sweeps between one firm's own wallets, and most of these are not a completed payment to an independent recipient ^[12]. A company that pitches on transfer totals is counting all of that alongside commerce ^[12]. In a 2026 working paper, the Bank for International Settlements counted 593 million token transfer events inside 141 million Ethereum transactions in 2025, about 4.2 per transaction ^[6][17]. Nearly 60% of the events sat inside complex transactions ^[6]. That result covers USDT, USDC and PYUSD on one chain in one year ^[7]. A single remittance routed through an intermediary, with dollars converted into USDC and then sold for pesos, can leave several transfers for one obligation ^[10].

From here the count can move three ways. Better labels can cut it. Visa's September refresh removed more exchange, bot and routing activity from adjusted volume once it greatly expanded its labeled address set ^[9]. Offchain records can add to it. A transfer between two domestic exchange addresses can serve an international remittance, and the information on counterparty locations is often held by payment companies and not published onchain ^[13][11]. Growth can also land in flows the chain barely shows: in the intermediary model the customer may never hold a token and the merchant may receive only bank money ^[10]. Visa counts more than 160 stablecoin-linked card programs on its network and says their payment volume rose nearly 200% in a year ^[8]. As reported, Visa's growth figure comes without a dollar base ^[8].

I'd size a cross-border stablecoin business from the $137 billion and a general payments business from the $401 billion floor ^[14][1]. Or rather, I'd size it from a floor I expect to fall, given which way Visa's revision went ^[9]. The share is growing: 0.31% in 2025 against 0.2% in 2024 is a rise of about 55% ^[18]. This view is wrong if payment companies' own records show two things the public chain hides. One is direct wallet-to-wallet invoice settlements, each a single visible transfer. The other is the domestic-looking legs of international remittances. If those are large enough, real cross-border volume sits well above $137 billion ^[10][13].