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1. Stablecoin news today: supply is flat while payments climb
Stablecoin supply has barely moved in 2026, yet payments made with the tokens have surged. Data from the blockchain analytics firm Allium covering the first nine months of the year show supply rising just 0.4% to $305 billion, while payment value grew 45% to $482 billion and payment transactions rose 71% to 1.04 billion. Circle's third-quarter results, released on Wednesday, November 4, showed the same split.
The divergence matters because the industry entered the year expecting rapid expansion in the dollars outstanding. Instead, two trends are running in opposite directions: weaker demand for tokens tied to crypto trading, and rising use of existing tokens to move money between people and businesses. Analysts say the two should not be read as one story.
Circle, the issuer of USDC, the second-largest stablecoin, reported that USDC in circulation ended September at $73.9 billion, unchanged from a year earlier. On-chain transaction volume in the token, however, rose 49% to $13.9 trillion. Chief Executive Jeremy Allaire said balances were flat but usage continued to grow. That volume figure includes trading and other blockchain activity, not only payments.
2. How far did expectations fall short?
Stablecoins are tokens designed to hold a steady value, most often against the U.S. dollar. Their supply grew about 50% in 2025, and forecasts for 2026 were bold. SharpLink Chief Executive Joseph Chalom predicted a $500 billion market by the end of the year, and Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko suggested the market could exceed $1 trillion if adoption broadened across real-world use and trading.
Reality has been far more subdued. Supply has stayed in a range of $300 billion to $320 billion for the past 12 months. Standard Chartered has responded by pushing back its forecast of a $2 trillion market, moving the target date from 2028 to 2030 and citing slower supply growth.
3. Does flat supply mean adoption has stalled?
Not necessarily, according to analysts and executives. Supply measures the dollar value of tokens outstanding, not how often they change hands, so payment growth does not require matching issuance. The likelier explanation is a shift in use: fewer new dollars are being added for crypto trading, while existing balances support a larger number of payments.
Tianwei Liu, chief executive and co-founder of the Singapore-based issuer StraitsX, which issues the XSGD and XUSD tokens and runs stablecoin card programs, said supply says little about how actively tokens are used. A fixed liquidity pool, he noted, can support far more transactions without growing. Stablecoins serve two distinct roles: dollar-denominated assets held for trading, savings or collateral, and instruments for moving money.
4. What is the same-dollar, many-payments effect?
The effect is known as velocity: the rate at which the same token changes hands. A single dollar passed among 10 people, each paying the next, can cover $10 of purchases while only one dollar exists. In stablecoins, adoption shows up as velocity rather than as new supply.
Allium's figures point in that direction. The average stablecoin payment fell to $462 from $544 over the first nine months, suggesting growth came from more frequent, smaller payments. September alone set a monthly high of $72 billion in payments.
Cross-border commerce illustrates the pattern. A business converts local currency into a stablecoin, sends it abroad and exchanges it into the destination currency, a routine the industry calls a stablecoin sandwich. The same tokens are reused repeatedly, so little new issuance is needed. Abdulaziz Kanoo, co-founder of the Gulf-based digital asset firm ARP Digital, said tokens may stay in circulation for only minutes or hours, so payment growth adds volume but little net issuance.
StraitsX offered a company-specific example. Daily transactions across its card programs rose from about 66,000 in January to 291,000 in October, with average spending near $54 on food, groceries and transport. That reflects one issuer rather than the whole market. Ray Yang, chief executive and co-founder of Singapore's WasabiCard, said his enterprise clients grew from 500 to more than 700 since May, and argued that payments need little new supply because the same dollar can be reused.
Circle Payments Network reached annualized volume of $41.3 billion at the end of September, more than 15 times the level a year earlier, and Mr. Allaire said it exceeded $58 billion by October 30. These are annualized projections, not 12-month totals.
Standard Chartered estimates that stablecoin velocity roughly doubled to about 30 times a month in 2026 from 15 in 2025. Raw on-chain transfer value averaged just under $10 trillion a month, up from $4 trillion in 2025, with a record $19 trillion in May. USDC velocity rose to about 80 times a month from 45, while Tether's USDT stayed near 7 because it is held mostly as savings in emerging markets rather than spent. Geoff Kendrick, the bank's global head of digital assets research, said market segmentation has mainly produced higher velocity: more transactions with the same coins.
5. Is every on-chain transfer a payment?
No. Blockchains record token movements, not whether a transfer is a customer paying a merchant or a business settling an invoice. Allium counted $97.9 trillion in raw stablecoin transfers over the nine months, of which only $482 billion, about 0.5%, were payments.
Mr. Kanoo cautioned that the popular argument for stablecoin adoption leans on raw volume, which includes exchanges moving their own funds and bots recycling the same dollars. A June working paper from the Bank for International Settlements found that treating every transfer as a payment misclassified almost six in ten transfer events, overstating both counts and volumes.
6. Will AI agents fill the gap?
Agentic payments, in which software buys goods or services on a user's behalf, are often pitched as a natural fit for stablecoins. Experts say agents will add transactions rather than supply. Mr. Kanoo said agent balances are small, capped and quick to turn over, so agentic commerce creates transaction counts rather than float. Declan Hannon, chief executive of Aurora Labs, said an agent paying just in time holds a balance only briefly.
Early deployments are modest. Stripe's Link began rolling out USDC-funded balances on October 26 for eligible U.S. users of the Instinct shopping agent, converting the balance into a single-use virtual card so merchants receive ordinary card payments. Separately, x402, an open protocol developed by Coinbase, lets agents pay websites and services directly in stablecoins without cards. Allium recorded 68.3 million agent payments in the third quarter, double the previous quarter, totaling $3.7 million, or about 5 cents each.
Mr. Liu said moving money on-chain is getting easier, while the harder problem is trust and controls: who authorizes spending, what limits apply and who is accountable for errors. Mr. Hannon noted that crypto lacks the refunds, disputes, accounting and bank off-ramps that card networks built over decades, and said crypto has mostly built the rail. Fixed network fees and compliance checks also do not scale down: Mr. Kanoo said they are negligible on a $10 million trade but can erase the savings on a $50 purchase. He expects payment-focused blockchains and x402 to reduce costs.
7. Why did stablecoin supply stall?
Most stablecoins are minted to fund crypto trades and to serve as collateral in derivatives and decentralized finance, so weaker trading means weaker demand for new tokens. A market participant identified only as Howard said trading volumes fell more than 50%, meaningfully reducing net issuance, and expects some demand to return as trading recovers.
Mr. Kendrick called the flat period cyclical rather than structural, noting that earlier stretches of flat or falling supply ended when crypto markets recovered. Supply has slipped about 5% from its May record of $322.4 billion. Bitcoin fell more than 50% from its October 2025 peak early this year, yet supply held up better than in earlier downturns. In the 2022 bear market, the combined market capitalization of major stablecoins fell 26%, from about $166 billion in March 2022 to $122 billion in September 2023, according to RWA.xyz.
Mr. Kanoo said supply shrank by about a quarter in 2022 as idle exchange balances were withdrawn, whereas this time it largely held, suggesting much of the float is kept for purposes other than trading. Circle's third quarter shows how muted net issuance can be: it minted $104 billion and redeemed $104 billion of USDC, about $208 billion of combined activity, with little net change. Mr. Yang said payment growth has not yet offset the drop in trading demand.
Yield is another factor. Three-month Treasury bills pay about 4.1%, making a non-yielding token costly to hold, and the GENIUS Act, the U.S. stablecoin law that bars issuers from paying interest, takes effect in January 2027. Jason Dehni, co-founder and chief executive of BlackOpal, which offers asset-backed finance in emerging markets, said yield has moved to the application layer, which is why tokenized Treasuries and credit vaults grew while stablecoin supply stayed flat.
8. What comes next for stablecoins?
Payment activity has not yet offset weaker trading demand, so transactions are multiplying while balances barely move. Mr. Hannon summed it up as two different businesses sharing one chart, and said the flat line reflects trading going quiet rather than payments failing. A recovery in crypto trading, together with the GENIUS Act taking effect in January 2027, are the developments most likely to change the supply picture, while payment volumes are expected to keep growing independently of issuance.