Stablecoins Are Moving From Crypto Rails to Payments Infrastructure: $304 Billion Market, $390 Billion in Real Payments, and Revolut’s EURR Rollout

Stablecoins are no longer just a trading tool for crypto markets. The numbers now show a market that is being pulled into payments, cross-border transfers, and B2B settlement — which is exactly where high-risk PSPs and fintechs start caring, because that is where money movement turns from theory into operating infrastructure.

1. By the end of August 2026, the combined stablecoin market reached about $304 billion. According to DefiLlama, roughly 60% of that market is USDT, with a market cap above $183 billion, and almost $74 billion is USDC.
2. Visa Onchain Analytics estimated adjusted stablecoin transaction volume at $10.2 trillion over the last 12 months, up 63% year on year. The catch is that this does not mean $10.2 trillion in consumer and merchant payments; a large share of onchain activity is exchange trading, transfers between platforms, wallet-to-wallet movement, and other crypto-internal flows.
3. McKinsey and Artemis Analytics tried to separate those flows from actual payments. Their research put real stablecoin payment volume at about $390 billion in 2025, or roughly 0.02% of global payment volume. That is still small in macro terms, but the mix matters: about $226 billion of that came from B2B payments, and that segment grew 733% year on year.
4. That growth explains where stablecoins are finding product-market fit in practice. The main use case is not checkout at the supermarket; it is moving money quickly between countries, counterparties, platforms, and internal accounts.
5. Revolut started a phased rollout of EURR on 26 August, initially opening access to selected users in Denmark, Poland, and Portugal, with plans to expand to other countries in the European Economic Area. EURR is integrated directly into the Revolut app, where users can exchange euros for the token, hold it alongside other digital assets, and move funds between the app, external wallets, and supported blockchain networks.

The legal issuer of EURR is Bridge Building, part of Bridge, which is owned by Stripe. The token is designed to maintain a 1:1 peg to the euro and is issued under European regulatory requirements. Revolut is also working on stablecoins pegged to other currencies, which tells you the company sees this as a product line, not a one-off experiment.