Beyond their primary use in crypto trading (which still represents 90-95% of stablecoin volume), stablecoins are finding significant traction in various sectors:

1. Cross-Border Payments and Remittances

Stablecoins offer a faster, cheaper, and more transparent alternative to traditional cross-border systems, particularly benefiting remittances to the Global South and B2B payments.

• Emerging Markets Lifeline: In high-inflation environments, stablecoins act as “lifelines”. Over 40% of stablecoin users in emerging economies rely on them for daily transactions. Countries like Turkey and Nigeria rely on stablecoins due to local currency weakness and inflation, allowing users to retain access to US dollar liquidity. Turkey alone saw $38 billion in stablecoin purchases in the 12 months to March 2024, the highest transaction volume globally.
• Remittance Corridor Improvements: Approximately 10% of cross-border remittances are now reported to be through stablecoins and cryptocurrencies. Bitso, for example, processes up to 10% of remittance volumes on the US-Mexico corridor. MoneyGram has partnered with stablecoin infrastructure providers to enable seamless on- and off-ramping across its global outlets.
• B2B Payment Revolution: Aggregate B2B stablecoin volumes grew substantially from under $100 million in monthly volume at the start of 2023 to over $3.0 billion by early 2025, reaching a $36 billion annualized run rate. Companies like Conduit help businesses settle payments in Euros over 500x faster than traditional methods, and enable Colombian companies to keep their treasury dollar-denominated, halving inflation from 6.6% to 2.9% in 2024. Yellow Card, the largest licensed stablecoin company in Africa (operating in 20 countries), has facilitated over $5 billion in transactions, replacing SWIFT for faster, cheaper payments in regions facing FX shortages.

2. Corporate Treasury and Cash Management

Businesses are leveraging stablecoins for instant liquidity, 24/7 availability, and optimized returns on surplus cash, streamlining cross-border treasury transactions.

• Industry Adoption: Companies as diverse as Ferrari and SpaceX are using stablecoins for treasury and cash management.
• Efficiency Gains: Stablecoins can facilitate near-instant cross-border treasury transactions between corporate entities, significantly reducing delays and FX exposure risks. They also play a significant role in collateral mobility for on-chain repo transactions, enabling near-instant delivery-versus-payment settlement. While JPMorgan’s Kinexys uses JPM Coin (a tokenized deposit) in this way, the concept applies broadly to stablecoins.
• BVNK’s Infrastructure: BVNK provides stablecoin payments infrastructure that unifies banks and blockchains. They offer auto-conversion capabilities, allowing businesses to hold funds in USD, GBP, or EUR while settling with stablecoins. Worldpay, one of the largest merchant acquirers, uses BVNK’s embedded wallets for instant global payouts in stablecoins to clients in over 180 markets. Similarly, the employer of record platform Deel uses BVNK to pay over 10,000 freelancers in more than 100 countries in stablecoins, providing speedy payment and a hedge against local currency inflation.

3. Merchant Acceptance

Merchant acceptance of stablecoins is steadily rising, driven by lower costs and instant settlement, particularly for cross-border e-commerce.

• Leading Markets & Integrations: Dubai is emerging as a leading market due to its proactive regulatory environment. Major players like Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal (with PYUSD) are integrating stablecoins into their payment flows. E-commerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce have developed plug-ins for seamless crypto payments.
• Cost Savings & Speed: Stablecoins can reduce merchant acceptance costs to as low as 1% on-chain. Worldpay’s partnership with Fireblocks for blockchain-based payments resulted in 50% faster payment processing.
• Asia’s Innovators: Reap, Asia’s leading stablecoin-enabled card issuer, processes billions in stablecoin-funded payments monthly, providing corporate cards and expense management for Web3 businesses.

4. Tokenized Real-World Assets (RWAs) and Capital Markets

Stablecoins are crucial for settling transactions in the rapidly growing market for tokenized real-world assets, which has reached about $22 billion after tripling over the past two years.

• Yield-Generating Opportunities: This growth reflects rising demand for yield-generating opportunities from on-chain investors holding stablecoins, particularly in tokenized money market funds.
• Institutional Adoption: MakerDAO (Sky), originally a decentralized stablecoin issuer, has significantly shifted towards holding traditional reserve assets like USDC and BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund (BUIDL). Huma Finance, through its PayFi Network, enables licensed financial institutions to settle cross-border transactions and stablecoin-backed card payments without traditional pre-funding. They are piloting with Amazon’s payment partners to enable supplier payments in Asia in under 3 hours, a significant improvement over traditional methods. Huma reports zero credit defaults on $4 billion in transactions to date.

5. Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Integrations and Yield Generation

Stablecoins are essential to DeFi, allowing users to “earn” yield by lending into on-chain money markets and facilitating arbitrage opportunities.

• Yield-Bearing Stablecoins: Ethena’s USDe is a notable example, tokenizing a high-yielding, delta-neutral strategy into a synthetic dollar. This allows USDe holders to earn upwards of 25% APY and can be used as margin collateral on exchanges like Bybit, offering traders 9% APY compared to 0% for USDC.
• Incentivized Growth: PayPal rapidly grew PYUSD’s circulation on Solana from $0 to $665 million in just four months in 2024 by incentivizing PYUSD markets on DeFi protocols like Kamino.

6. Agentic Commerce

The programmability of stablecoins is enabling entirely new forms of commerce, particularly with the rise of artificial intelligence.

• AI-Powered Payments: Coinbase has introduced x402, an open standard that enables AI agents and applications to autonomously execute payments directly over the web using stablecoins like USDC. This eliminates the need for traditional payment intermediaries or manual processes, streamlining machine-to-machine commerce.

7. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Payments

P2P payments were among the earliest stablecoin use cases, offering a faster, cheaper, and more accessible alternative to traditional remittance and money transfer channels, especially in regions with currency instability.

• Binance Pay’s Role: Binance Pay has been a major catalyst in scaling P2P stablecoin usage, enabling users globally to send stablecoins directly to other Binance Pay users in real-time with zero gas fees.
• Lower Value Transactions: Platforms like Sling and Celo P2P record significantly lower average transaction sizes ($47 and $26 respectively) compared to traditional alternatives like Zelle ($277), demonstrating stablecoins’ efficiency for lightweight, frequent P2P payments.