What specific activities make up this $33 trillion figure — what's actually driving such a massive number?
This figure is composed primarily of three categories entirely unrelated to consumer checkout. First, inter-exchange fund routing — stablecoins are the most commonly used settlement tool between crypto exchanges, with traders, market makers, and arbitrageurs moving large volumes of stablecoins between exchanges and chains daily, at a frequency and scale far exceeding retail consumer spending. Second, corporate treasury operations — a growing number of multinational companies now use stablecoins for internal fund transfers, supplier payments, and cross-border payroll; individual transaction sizes in these B2B scenarios are typically far larger than typical consumer transactions, but the counterparties are businesses or institutions, not individual consumers. Third, wholesale settlement between institutions, such as large settlements between market makers or capital flows for institutional investors.
Combined, these three categories make up the overwhelming majority of the $33 trillion, sharing a common characteristic: both parties in the transaction typically already hold stablecoins and are familiar with using them, without involving the full process of an ordinary consumer converting fiat to stablecoins and then spending them. This is exactly why citing this figure directly to argue "Stablecoin spending has gone mainstream" is a misleading analogy — comparable to using a country's total interbank clearing system volume to argue its citizens routinely use that system to buy coffee.
What might explain the difference in merchant acceptance between the U.S., Europe, and Latin America (4% vs. 8% vs. 12%)?
Flagship's research observed an interesting pattern: regions where operating across borders is harder, or where local currencies are more volatile, tend to have higher rates of merchant Stablecoin Adoption. Latin America's rate (12%) is notably higher than the U.S.'s (4%), and one reasonable explanation is that some Latin American countries face persistent high inflation or exchange rate instability, meaning the "stable dollar value" stablecoins provide carries genuine hedging value for local merchants, not just serving as another payment option. Europe (8%) sits between the two, possibly related to the EU's MiCA regulatory framework offering relatively clear compliance guidance for merchants.
This pattern also echoes another observation in Flagship's research: merchants in regions or verticals with high fraud rates or high foreign exchange costs are more likely to adopt stablecoins for their concrete advantages — irreversible payments, 24/7 settlement, avoiding currency conversion costs on cross-border transactions — rather than simply trying it out because "it's new technology." This suggests regional differences in Stablecoin merchant adoption are more likely driven by whether a specific pain point exists, rather than a simple difference in technology receptiveness.
IFRS now treats MiCA-compliant stablecoins as cash equivalents — how would this accounting classification shift actually affect corporate willingness to adopt?
Currently, most corporate finance teams handling Stablecoin payments must book them as "property" or "intangible assets," meaning every stablecoin transaction requires extra fair-value assessment, gain/loss recognition, and tax reporting processes — even though the stablecoin's price barely deviates from $1. This accounting treatment essentially requires corporate finance teams to bear a compliance workload similar to what's needed for a volatile asset (like Bitcoin), for an asset with almost no price movement at all — a recurring cost for corporate finance departments that's hard to justify.
If stablecoins are reclassified as cash equivalents, the accounting logic simplifies substantially — businesses can treat stablecoins the way they treat bank deposits or short-term notes, without an extra fair-value assessment process. While this shift may sound like a purely technical accounting adjustment, for corporate CFOs it's often the deciding threshold for whether to adopt stablecoin payments: if the marginal cost of subsequent accounting treatment drops substantially after adoption, a business may become more willing to prepare the payment option in advance — even before everyday consumer demand for stablecoin spending has grown significantly — simply because internal compliance burden has been lowered. This is exactly why this seemingly technical accounting classification issue deserves a place among the key indicators for judging how fast merchant adoption will actually move.
If both consumer demand and the accounting barrier are hard to solve in the near term, is there a practical way for merchants to participate in the Stablecoin ecosystem without facing these obstacles directly?
Yes, and Flagship's own research data points directly to this path: indirect participation through "crypto gift card malls." This model works by having consumers use stablecoins or other cryptocurrency to buy a specific merchant's branded gift card from a service like BitPay, Coingate, or Bitrefill, while the merchant still receives fiat currency (the service provider handles the crypto-to-fiat conversion) — meaning the merchant doesn't need to change its accounting treatment at all, nor bear any crypto price volatility or tax classification issues. This is exactly why the share of merchants participating in this model across all three regions runs far higher than direct stablecoin acceptance, approaching half in each region.
This path is particularly well-suited for merchants who want to reach the customer segment that already holds crypto and is willing to spend it, but who aren't yet ready to bear the accounting and compliance cost that direct stablecoin payment integration requires. From an industry development standpoint, this kind of indirect participation model is likely a transitional option for most merchants ahead of formally adopting direct stablecoin checkout — once the accounting classification issue is genuinely resolved and the share of consumers holding stablecoins rises meaningfully, merchants will have a much stronger incentive to integrate stablecoins directly into their own checkout systems, rather than participating indirectly through a third-party service provider.
In 2025, on-chain Stablecoin settlement volume hit $33 trillion, surpassing the combined transaction volume of Visa ($16.7 trillion) and Mastercard ($10.6 trillion). That figure gets cited constantly as proof that "stablecoin payments have arrived" — but another set of numbers from the same period tells a completely different story: the share of large merchants worldwide actually accepting stablecoins at checkout sits in the single digits. This article unpacks exactly where the gap between these two numbers comes from.
Break that staggering number apart, and most of it is trading activity between exchanges, corporate treasury movement, and wholesale settlement between institutions — not consumers paying with stablecoins at a register. Genuinely "retail-sized" stablecoin payments — transactions where consumers actually purchase goods or services — reached roughly $70 billion globally in 2025 according to Allium data. That's growing fast, up about 83% year over year, but placed against the scale of the broader payments industry, it remains a tiny niche: the major card networks alone process over $50 trillion in transactions annually. In other words, stablecoins have genuinely become a massive force at the "moving money" layer, but remain at a very early stage at the "consumer checkout" layer.
Flagship Advisory Partners surveyed the websites of the top 50 merchants across Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America in 2026, finding that the share of merchants directly accepting stablecoins (whether via direct on-chain payment or through a specialist processor like BitPay) sits at just 4% among the top 50 U.S. merchants, roughly 8% among large European merchants, and roughly 12% among large Latin American merchants. Interestingly, the share of merchants participating indirectly through "crypto gift card malls" — services from BitPay, Coingate, and Bitrefill that let consumers use crypto to buy merchant-branded gift cards — runs considerably higher, close to half across all three regions. This suggests most merchants today are opting for the lower-risk indirect route rather than integrating stablecoins directly into their own checkout systems.
From a pure cost perspective, stablecoins clearly offer merchants an advantage: Flagship's analysis puts stablecoin payment processor fees at roughly 0.8% to 1.4%, notably below typical U.S. debit card fees (0.5% to 2.5%) and credit card fees (1.8% to 4%). But cost advantage alone isn't enough to drive adoption — the real bottleneck sits on the demand side and the compliance side. The demand-side problem is straightforward: Flagship estimates roughly 5% of U.S. adults hold stablecoins, and the Federal Reserve's SHED consumer payment survey found only 2% of consumers actually used stablecoins or any form of cryptocurrency to pay for anything in 2024. No rational consumer converts fiat to stablecoins specifically to spend them (a conversion that itself carries a cost) while giving up credit card rewards. That means the population that can practically spend stablecoins today is almost entirely limited to people who already hold them through payroll, remittances, or other inflows.
Flagship's research points to a barrier that's often overlooked but arguably more fundamental than consumer demand: tax and accounting systems haven't historically treated stablecoins as "cash." Under IFRS and U.S. GAAP, stablecoins are classified as intangible assets, and the IRS taxes them as property — meaning every stablecoin payment a business accepts adds extra reporting and compliance work, rather than being as simple as handling cash or a bank transfer. This barrier has started to shift: IFRS now treats MiCA-compliant stablecoins as cash equivalents, and the U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) added stablecoin cash-equivalent classification to its technical agenda in 2025 following the passage of the GENIUS Act. If GAAP eventually classifies stablecoins as cash equivalents, IRS tax policy is expected to follow suit, substantially lowering the accounting cost of business adoption.
If you run a cross-border business, or operate in a market with high fraud rates or high foreign exchange costs, stablecoins' cost advantage and settlement speed already carry real value today, worth evaluating for adoption. But if your customer base is largely accustomed to paying with cards and cash, with no particular demand for crypto, the added complexity of adopting stablecoin checkout right now may not be worthwhile. For ordinary consumers, this gap tells you one thing: stablecoins today are better positioned as a tool for cross-border money movement and business settlement, not as a way to pay for your daily coffee. If you come across a headline citing "$33 trillion in settlement" to argue stablecoin spending has gone fully mainstream, the two datasets compared in this article can help you spot that the argument is actually conflating two fundamentally different kinds of transaction activity.