Stablecoins are 0.31% of cross-border payments and growing seven times faster than fiat
A bank CFO looks at 0.31% and closes the deck. That is the number FXC Intelligence and Allium published on 30 July 2026: stablecoins moved an estimated $135bn of the $44.3tn retail cross-border payments market in 2025\. Three tenths of one percent, and a reasonable person could conclude there is nothing here worth a strategy cycle.
The same report explains why that reading is wrong. The 0.31% is an average across four use cases with very different adoption rates, weighted down by the one segment that dominates volume and resists change hardest.
The headline number is doing the wrong job
The figure is credible. Allium built it from its Real-World Payments layer, around 2.1 billion transactions across 2024 to 2026 year-to-date, filtering out internal settlement, treasury mint and burn, exchange rebalancing and intermediary hops, then geotagging flows across Ethereum, Polygon, Base, Solana and Tron to isolate cross-border activity. FXC mapped that against its corridor-level market sizing data. These are directional estimates, and the report says so, but this is the first attempt to answer the question with real payments data on both sides rather than raw onchain volume, most of which is not payments at all.
The problem is that 0.31% answers a question no institution has. Nobody builds a stablecoin product for "cross-border payments." They build it for a segment and a corridor.
Consumer flows are three times more stablecoin-native than the average
Split the same $135bn by use case and the picture inverts. B2B is 79% of fiat cross-border volume but 49% of stablecoin volume, under-indexed at roughly 0.6x. C2C runs the other way: 15% of stablecoin volume against 5% of fiat, over-indexed about 3x. B2C is the same shape at 14% versus 5%. C2B sits at 22% versus 11%.
Penetration follows. C2C reached 0.95% of its own market in 2025, up from 0.7%. B2C hit 0.89%, up from 0.62%. C2B is at 0.59%. B2B trails at 0.19%, which is the most misread number in the report.
