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For all of cryptocurrency’s volatility, stablecoins made steady progress in 2025.
And by any measure, be it transaction volumes, regulatory milestones, partnerships, acquisitions, integrations or use cases, stablecoins progressed into the mainstream of financial services and payments this year.
For stablecoins, 2025, was about normalization. Market capitalization, or total stablecoin supply, crossed $300 billion and breached a symbolic milestone that placed the category alongside systemically relevant financial markets. Chief financial officers and treasury teams took notice.
At the same time, stablecoin transaction volumes hit “payment network” scale, with McKinsey citing $27 trillion in annual transaction volume. Of course, as payment networks go, stablecoin volumes remain a drop in the global bucket, processing less than 1% of global daily money transfers. Despite that, stablecoin circulation doubled over the previous 18 months, and digital assets began to break out of cryptocurrency-native environments into more mainstream use cases.
This shift matters. Historically, stablecoins were stockpiled: held as dry powder or collateral. In 2025, they increasingly moved. That transition from store-of-value proxy to medium of exchange is what made stablecoins economically relevant beyond crypto-native users.
Stablecoin growth in 2025 was not purely organic; it was bolstered by regulatory milestones and traditional FinTech and banking partnerships and initiatives that reduced uncertainty and opened doors for institutional engagement.
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Mainstream FinTech Partnerships and Network Expansion
In the United States, the GENIUS Act, signed into law mid-year, created a federal framework for payment stablecoins, clarifying reserve requirements, issuer oversight and consumer protections. The law resolved years of ambiguity that had kept major institutions on the sidelines.
As a result, 2025 saw several major initiatives spring forward from FinTech players and payment stakeholders. Visa and Bridge, which Stripe spent over $1 billion to acquire, partnered to launch a card-issuing product that enables cardholders to use their stablecoin balance to make purchases at any merchant location that accepts Visa.
Visa also expanded its U.S. stablecoin settlement capabilities, allowing select issuers and acquirers to settle obligations in stablecoins rather than through traditional banking hours and rails. The move was less about cryptocurrency enthusiasm than balance-sheet efficiency: faster settlement reduces counterparty risk and frees capital.
Separately, Visa this year announced the launch of its Stablecoins Advisory Practice to serve banks, FinTechs, merchants and businesses of all sizes.
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Mastercard also focused on multi-stablecoin enablement during 2025, joining Paxos’ Global Dollar Network and enabling stablecoins including USDC, PYUSD, USDG and FIUSD across its network.
SoFi launched an enterprise stablecoin. Coinbase rolled out a white-label stablecoin issuance product aimed at corporations and banks, while partnering with Klarna and enabling it to raise short-term funding from institutional investors denominated in USDC. PayPal introduced stablecoin financial tooling tailored for artificial intelligence (AI)-native businesses.
Fiserv announced it was entering the stablecoin business, while YouTube began letting creators on its platform get paid in PayPal’s stablecoin.
Mark Nelsen, head of product for Visa Commercial Money Solutions, discussed the topic of using stablecoins for creator payouts, during an earlier interview with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster.
“There are 30 million creators and they’re in all these markets where the local currency isn’t really strong,” he said. “That’s where stablecoins can offer a sweet spot in being able to say, ‘We can pay you immediately.’”
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It wasn’t just FinTechs making moves into the stablecoin space. In May, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup announced they were exploring the launch of a jointly operated stablecoin.
“I think the largest banks will succeed as stablecoin issuers,” Amias Gerety, former assistant secretary of the Treasury, told PYMNTS in March.
Across the Atlantic, 10 European banks also announced they had formed a company to launch a euro-pegged stablecoin. The new venture, dubbed Qivalis, is a joint effort by BNP Paribas, Banca Sella, CaixaBank, Danske Bank, DekaBank, ING, KBC, Raiffeisen Bank International, SEB and UniCredit.
And Japan’s Sony Bank is reportedly readying the launch of its own dollar-pegged stablecoin.
Ultimately, banks will choose payment rails based on “the path of least resistance,” meaning the lowest barriers across risk, compliance, fraud prevention and technology migration, Himal Makwana, global head of corporate strategy at FIS, told PYMNTS in August.
But as banks move into stablecoins, stablecoin firms are also moving into banking-adjacent territory. The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) on Dec. 12 conditionally approved applications for new national bank trust charters to five applicants from the digital asset and blockchain finance space, charters that could see them launch their own privately-owned on-chain financial infrastructure related to stablecoin custody and issuance.
Read more: Stablecoins Power Billions in Payments. One in Ten Could Be Illicit
Real-World Use Cases That Clicked in 2025
For years, “payments” was the most overused and underdelivered promise in cryptocurrency. In 2025, stablecoins began to make it real. While stablecoins struggled in 2025 to make inroads in consumer-facing commerce, they instead capturing inroads across one of the most antiquated corners of global finance: cross-border B2B payments and corporate treasury operations.
“The real opportunity isn’t about chasing the buzzwords, but it’s more about being disciplined, identifying where stablecoins truly outperform a so-called legacy payment system,” Bryce Jurss, vice president, head of Americas, digital assets at Nuvei, told PYMNTS this month.
Cross-border transfers emerged as the most mature use case. Businesses used stablecoins to settle invoices, manage international payroll, and rebalance treasury positions across regions in minutes rather than days. For emerging markets, dollar-denominated stablecoins continued to serve as a hedge against currency volatility, but with growing integration into local FinTech platforms rather than informal peer-to-peer usage.
The natural upstream impact of more streamlined cross-border payments proved to be within corporate treasury.
“Treasury has always been the last to modernize,” Trovata CEO Brett Turner told PYMNTS in July. “Everything around it is digital — supply chains, CRMs, ERP systems — but cash management is stuck in the past.”
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Despite their progress, stablecoins are not a panacea. Consumer adoption remains uneven, particularly in developed markets where existing payment systems already work well. User experience, custody, and fraud prevention continue to lag behind familiar FinTech apps.
There are also unresolved questions about concentration risk, especially around reserve assets and systemic reliance on a small number of issuers. Even with regulation, the idea of private entities issuing digital dollars at scale remains politically sensitive.
Interoperability, transparency, and the ability to move value off chain continue to be pain points for the industry to solve in the years ahead.
As Kirill Gertman, Conduit co-founder and CEO, told PYMNTS, “this space needs interoperability.”