TechFlow News, March 16: According to China Securities Journal, the de-duplicated and de-inflated on-chain transaction volume of global stablecoins in 2025 totaled approximately $25 trillion; however, transactions backed by genuine payment activity accounted for less than 1%, with the vast majority classified as “inflated transactions.”
This analysis covers 36 major stablecoins across 16 leading public blockchains, including Ethereum, TRON, and Solana. The analysis identifies three primary sources of inflated transactions: (1) intra-institutional fund transfers—i.e., internal transfers between different wallets or protocols under the same institution; (2) protocol-level transaction splitting—where a single business operation triggers multiple internal calls, artificially inflating the reported transaction volume; and (3) use of stablecoins as intermediary tokens for cryptocurrency exchanges driven by speculative trading, resulting in the same funds being counted repeatedly.
Regarding genuine payment use cases, in 2025, 15 leading cryptocurrency payment providers—including Coinbase, BVNK, BitPay, and Binance Pay—processed a combined total of $132 billion in stablecoin transactions. International card networks such as Visa processed approximately $4.5 billion in stablecoin-related transactions. Even if stablecoin usage associated with illicit activities—including money laundering, telecom fraud, and online gambling—is included in the tally, transactions backed by genuine payment activity still constitute less than 1% of the total.
