Stablecoins quietly out‑settle Visa as Coinbase crowns them the internet’s real money

Coinbase says stablecoins settled $33T in 2025, eclipsing Visa’s $16.7T and turning on‑chain dollars into the internet’s real‑time, low‑fee payment backbone.

Coinbase’s official account ignited a fresh round of payments‑wars discourse on X with a comparison thread claiming that “$33T was settled in stablecoins in 2025” and declaring that “the internet finally has real money.” The post set the “old way” of payments — 3–5 business day settlement windows and 3%+ card fees — against what Coinbase called the “new way”: 24/7/365, near‑instant settlement with fees measured in fractions of a cent on public blockchains.

Stablecoins now out-settle Visa

The $33 trillion figure tracks closely with Artemis Analytics data reported by Bloomberg, which found global stablecoin transaction value jumped 72% year‑on‑year to $33 trillion in 2025, led by roughly $18.3 trillion in volume from Circle’s USDC and $13.3 trillion from Tether’s USDT. By comparison, Visa reported $16.7 trillion in total payment volume for fiscal 2025, according to recent coverage of its annual results, underscoring how on‑chain dollar tokens now move more gross value than the world’s largest card network.

Commentators have been quick to note that these numbers dwarf earlier expectations. “For years people asked what stablecoins are for; the 2025 data tells a different story,” Forbes wrote in a March column, pointing out that stablecoins “moved $33 trillion last year, more than Visa and Mastercard combined.”

From speculation rails to “real money”

Research firms caution that raw transfer volume overstates true “payments” usage, but even adjusted estimates are now brushing against legacy rails. Chainalysis, for instance, recently estimated that stablecoins processed around $28 trillion in “real economic volume” in 2025 and argued that stablecoin payment flows could match Visa and Mastercard’s off‑chain volumes sometime between 2031 and 2039.

The growth has been turbocharged by regulatory clarity in the U.S. after the GENIUS Act, which Bloomberg and others have credited with unlocking mainstream institutional adoption of dollar‑backed tokens. As an Artemis co‑founder told Bloomberg, this surge is increasingly driven by “citizens of countries dogged by inflation and instability” who “prefer to hold dollars,” with stablecoins providing the simplest, API‑native way to do so across borders.