Asia now handles about 60% of global stablecoin payment volume, totaling roughly $245 billion annually. That's according to a February 2026 analysis by McKinsey & Company in collaboration with Artemis Analytics.
Key financial hubs driving this growth: Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan.
Total stablecoin transaction settlement exceeded $33 trillion in 2025. But the McKinsey-Artemis report draws a clear line between genuine payments and on-chain trading activity. Most of that volume is traders moving value between exchanges and DeFi protocols.
Actual payment volume-where stablecoins function as money rather than trading collateral-comes to roughly $390 billion worldwide. That's just 1.2% of total on-chain settlement.
B2B transactions dominate real payments, accounting for about $226 billion, or 60% of the total. That segment grew an astonishing 733% year-over-year in 2025.
Why Asia? The region received approximately $2.36 trillion in total crypto value in 2024. Countries like Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines are leading adopters, driven by practical use cases.
USDC and USD Tether together hold over 95% of the stablecoin market.
The takeaway for investors: when a manufacturing firm rewires its treasury to settle invoices in USDC, that's not a decision reversed by a market downturn.