While crypto prices remain volatile - stablecoins continue to see staggering growth in all kinds of use cases, from B2B to card based payments. Together with 30+ partners, Artemis published an update to our stablecoin payments survey and volumes are up across the board. Stablecoin payments climbed from $6.0B in February to $10.2B in August, a 70% increase. We estimative since 2023, more than $136B in payments have been settled.

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While there have been a proliferation of stablecoins, for payments USDT/USDC are still have a commanding lead. USDT still comprises 80%+ of the stablecoin payment market and very few respondents report using other stablecoins.

Outside of payments - October was an interesting month for stablecoins. While in the past year crypto market performance has been decoupled from stablecoin activity, a cascade of liquidations on Oct 11th has certainly impacted the stablecoin market. Ethena was the stablecoin most impacted, as it has seen its circulating supply drop by $5bn in a month. Ethena’s loss seemed to be Tether’s gain, with the stablecoin issuer having its 4th best month ever in adding stablecoin supply.

Will the agents use stablecoins?

In May 2025, Coinbase announced x402 a payment protocol that enables instant stablecoin payments directly over HTTP. Coinbase imagined it would be used for APIs, apps, and AI agents to transact over blockchains. The protocol has started to attract some interest with volumes totaling ~$500k per day. While volumes are small, we note the avg transaction size is <$1 - indicating blockchains could be a perfect use case for micropayments

Will Non-USD Stablecoins Ever Emerge?

We continue to watch the non-USD stablecoin market, despite 99% of the market being USD. The past year has shown some encouraging signs, albeit it mostly in Euros. Supply for non-USD stablecoins sits at around $600mn, although this is down from the peak of $800mn.

Fore more emerging trends and stablecoin market overview, please see our full report here and please reach out to us with any questions.