Stablecoins were all the rage in 2025. The GENIUS Act provided much-needed regulatory clarity for dollar-pegged crypto tokens, and tech giants like Stripe and Sony got involved with their own related products and services.
President Trump is also said to have benefited greatly from stablecoins and the crypto sector more generally, although the USD1 stablecoin it is affiliated with has been at the center of serious allegations of corruption. Plus, Wall Street veteran Tom Lee made headlines referring to stablecoins as crypto’s ChatGPT momentechoing a report published by Citi earlier in the year.
The crypto industry has often pointed to blockchain data to prove that 2025 was indeed a banner year for stablecoins in terms of adoption. However, a new report from McKinsey Financial Services indicates that the metrics used to show how much stablecoin adoption has grown in recent years are extremely misleading.
Raw blockchain transfers are often touted as evidence of stablecoin adoption, but the reality is that only a small percentage of this activity – around 1% of a total transaction volume of around $35 trillion – is actually tied to real-world payments. This means that stablecoin adoption, which the report estimates to be worth $390 billion for 2025, represents only about 0.02% of global payments.
According to the report, B2B payments and international remittances account for the majority of stablecoin payment activity, and activities such as crypto exchanges moving funds between blockchain accounts, automated activity with smart contracts, and trading on decentralized exchanges should not be included in payment measures. The report also states that around 60% of this activity comes from Asia, adding: “Today, activity is almost entirely driven by payments sent from Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan.”
.@chainalysis looked into decentralized exchange (DEX) activity on Ethereum after people claimed that centralized exchange users were moving to DeFi in response to the FTX debacle.
It turns out that the increase in DEX activity was mainly due to a single MEV bot directing DeFi users. pic.twitter.com/ptkJw3SCoK
– Kyle Torpey (@kyletorpey) November 18, 2022
Of course, exaggerated or outright false adoption metrics are nothing new in the crypto world. Various data points, such as increasing on-chain activity around decentralized finance (DeFi) applicationscan be used to tell all kinds of stories. There has also been a lot of hype around metrics like transactions per second over the years, who tend to miss out on what makes this technology valuable.
Despite the obvious hypes of stablecoin adoption by various entities in the crypto industry, the report also states that there are still signs of real growth. For example, the $390 billion in stable payments made in 2025 is more than double what was recorded the previous year. Additionally, the total supply of stablecoins has grown from less than $30 billion in 2020 to over $300 billion today.
Of course, not all of this has necessarily been positive adoption, as a report from blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis indicates. Stablecoins now account for the vast majority of illicit crypto transfers. Reports have also highlighted massive use of Tether’s USDT stablecoin by the Maduro regimeand the adoption by the Central Bank of Iran shows why a pro-stablecoin policy in the United States is a double-edged sword.
More generally, the importance of stablecoins in cryptography has caused a divide between ideology-focused cypherpunks and fintech startups focused strictly on adoption metrics. While stablecoins were originally seen as a boon for crypto adoption, we are now at the point where stablecoin issuers launch their own blockchain infrastructureby adding another layer of centralized control to the technology stack.
While those like the aforementioned Tom Lee view the issuance of stablecoins and other tokens based on real-world assets, such as tokenized stocks, as optimistic for decentralized crypto networks like Ethereum, questions remain about how much value will accrue to these open protocols or if stablecoin issuers and other centralized entities managed to completely eliminate these networks from the equation.
