Bitcoin fell roughly 50% from its October peak last year. At the same time, one of the biggest payments companies on the planet watched its stablecoin business more than quadruple.
Stripe shared the numbers in its 2025 annual letter published. The stablecoin orchestration platform it acquired in 2024, Bridge, saw volume more than quadruple year-over-year.
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Globally, stablecoin payment volume doubled to around $400 billion in 2025, with roughly 60% of that representing business-to-business flows such as cross-border settlements and payroll.
You can see the shift in plain terms. A company in Europe paying suppliers in Asia no longer needs to wait three days and lose 1-2% on FX and wire fees.
The money moves in seconds, stays at exactly $1, and lands straight into the recipient’s system.
That’s what enterprises started doing in volume last year.
What the numbers actually show about stablecoin adoption
Stripe’s total payment volume across all methods hit $1.9 trillion in 2025, up 34% from 2024.
The stablecoin piece inside that is still small in absolute terms, but the speed of growth matters more than the size right now.
Bridge didn’t just grow because crypto traders were moving money. The majority of the volume is coming from real business operations.
And this is the part that separates the 2025 story from previous hype cycles. The growth happened while the rest of the crypto market was bleeding.
It points to stablecoins moving from speculative tool to operational infrastructure.
Other big players are making the same bet
Meta is reportedly preparing to bring dollar-pegged payments back to Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp in the second half of 2026.
According to people familiar with the plans, it is working with Stripe as the likely infrastructure partner rather than issuing its own coin.
The goal is to cut the cost and time of paying creators internationally, especially smaller cross-border transfers, by plugging into existing, regulated rails instead of repeating the Diem-era mistakes.
On the traditional finance side, TruStage, the fintech and insurance company that works with 93% of U.S. credit unions, announced a pilot for its own dollar-pegged stablecoin called TSDA.
The pilot, running through the first half of 2026, targets loan funding, settlements between credit unions, cross-border member payments, and peer-to-peer transactions.
These are legacy financial institutions testing whether stablecoins can make their existing operations faster and cheaper.
Hong Kong added another piece to the puzzle. In the 2026-27 budget speech delivered February 25, 2026, Financial Secretary Paul Chan confirmed the government will issue the first batch of stablecoin issuer licenses in March.
Even the rumors around Stripe itself fit the pattern. Bloomberg reported that Stripe is in early talks to acquire parts or all of PayPal.
PayPal already has its own stablecoin, the PYUSD, that crossed $4 billion in market cap earlier this month.
A combination would give the combined entity enormous reach in both traditional payments and stablecoin rails.
Why this decoupling matters
For years the story was that crypto moves together, prices, volumes, stablecoin adoption, everything. 2025 started to break that pattern for stablecoins.
When Bitcoin drops, retail traders pull back. When stablecoins get cheaper and easier to move, businesses that need to move dollars keep using them.
The two things no longer rise and fall in lockstep. Stripe’s cofounders didn’t frame it as a victory for crypto. They simply reported the numbers and let the data speak.
The quiet part is that traditional companies are now treating stablecoins the way they treat ACH or SWIFT, as just another settlement option, except this one is programmable and instant.
What institutions are actually doing with it
The biggest use cases showing up in the data are exactly the ones you would expect from companies that move money for a living:
Cross-border supplier payments. Instant payroll for global teams. Treasury management between subsidiaries.
Machine-to-machine micropayments, as Stripe started letting developers charge AI agents directly in stablecoins for API calls.
These are operational decisions made by finance teams who care about cost, speed, and reliability more than price charts.
The road ahead
None of this means every bank will launch a stablecoin tomorrow. But it does mean the infrastructure layer is now proven at meaningful scale by one of the most scrutinized payments companies in the world.
Regulators in the U.S. and Hong Kong have started giving clear pathways. Major platforms are integrating rather than fighting it.
The next test will be whether the volumes keep compounding in 2026 even if token prices stay range-bound.
If they do, the conversation shifts from “will institutions adopt stablecoins” to “how fast and in which use cases first.”
For now, the data from Stripe’s 2025 letter is the clearest signal yet that the rails are being built and used, quietly, at enterprise scale, and largely independent of the broader crypto market mood.
Crypto market researcher and external contributor at Kriptoworld
Wheel. Steam engine. Bitcoin.
📅 Published: February 28, 2026 • 🕓 Last updated: February 28, 2026
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