Stablecoin payments jump 45% to $482B even as supply stalls, Allium says

The amount of stablecoins in circulation has barely moved this year, but the coins that exist are being spent far more often. A new report from blockchain analytics firm Allium puts stablecoin payments at $482 billion in the first nine months of 2026, up 45% from a year earlier, CoinDesk reported.

The numbers

• Supply: about $305 billion of stablecoins at the end of September — up only 0.4% since January.
• Payments: $482 billion through September, +45% year on year.
• Number of payments: more than 1 billion, +71% — the same dollars are changing hands more often.
• Stablecoin-linked cards: $3.9 billion of spending, ten times a year earlier; purchases under $50 accounted for 84% of the growth in card transactions.

If you're new to the asset class, our explainer on what a stablecoin is covers how these dollar tokens work.

Card networks plug in

Three announcements last week show where the growth is coming from. Mastercard launched its Global Money Platform with BVNK, the stablecoin firm it bought in August, letting banks and fintechs offer accounts that hold both regular currencies and stablecoins (our earlier report). Stripe is working with Plasma on cards that hold dollar, euro, real, Mexican peso and Colombian peso balances alongside eligible stablecoins, spending from whichever matches the purchase. Visa said Inyo Global became the first firm to use its stablecoin prefunding service commercially, using Circle's USDC to fund cross-border payouts almost in real time (background here).

The caveats

The headline figure comes from a narrow slice. Of $97.9 trillion in raw stablecoin transfers through September, Allium classed just $2.4 trillion (2.5%) as end-user activity after stripping out exchange, DeFi and automated flows; the $482 billion payments estimate sits inside that pool. Stablecoin cards are also tiny next to traditional rails: second-quarter spending equalled about 0.03% of Visa's $4 trillion in payment volume.

For payment companies that gap is the opportunity. As Fipto CEO Patrick Mollard put it to CoinDesk, businesses "don't want separate crypto infrastructure" — they want to switch between fiat and stablecoins inside the systems they already use.