For most of their history, stablecoins have been a trading tool: a dollar-shaped place to park money between crypto trades. The total supply of stablecoins has been the market's favourite gauge of their success. On that gauge, the past 12 months look flat. Look at how stablecoins are being spent, though, and a different picture appears.
The numbers
According to DefiLlama's data, the total supply of dollar-pegged stablecoins was about $304 billion on 1 November 2025 and about $298.5 billion on 1 November 2026, a small decline of roughly 2%. Two tokens still dominate: Tether's USDT at about $180 billion and Circle's USDC at about $72 billion, together more than 84% of the total.
Over the same period, the payment side moved fast. On Visa's (V) fiscal fourth-quarter 2026 earnings call on 28 October, management said the network now has more than 225 stablecoin-linked card programs, up more than 70% year over year, with volume growth of more than 150% across 5 million cards in more than 50 countries. The issuers, Visa said, are crypto exchanges, neobanks, wallets and remittance companies. Separately, Visa's own stablecoin settlement, where its partners settle with Visa in stablecoins rather than through banks, has passed an annualised $25 billion, ten times the level of a year earlier. Visa now supports five stablecoins for settlement.
Supply standing still while spending grows is the important signal. It suggests the same pool of stablecoins is being used more often, and for different purposes, than a year ago.
Why spending, not supply, is the signal to watch
Supply measures how much money sits in stablecoins. It rises when traders want dry powder and falls when they move into other assets or cash out. That makes it a better measure of crypto market sentiment than of real-world use.
Card spending measures something else: stablecoins leaving the crypto economy to pay for ordinary goods and services. A stablecoin balance that pays for a software subscription, an online advertising budget or a hotel booking behaves less like an investment and more like a working cash balance. The growth in stablecoin-linked cards, and in the volume flowing through them, is the clearest public evidence that this shift is under way.
The scale is still small. Visa processes trillions of dollars a year, and stablecoin-linked cards are a tiny fraction of that. But the direction is consistent, and it is being driven by issuers that serve customers the traditional banking system serves poorly.
Who is using stablecoins to spend, and why
The pattern is easiest to understand from the point of view of a small business or a freelancer outside the United States. Much of what they buy online is billed in US dollars: cloud hosting, design and productivity software, AI tools, advertising platforms, marketplaces. Paying those bills from a local bank account can mean currency conversion at a poor rate, international transaction fees, and cards that are declined for cross-border or online payments.
Moving money across borders through the traditional system is still expensive. The World Bank's Remittance Prices Worldwide database put the global average cost of sending $200 at 6.49% in the first quarter of 2025, more than double the G20 target of 3% by 2030. Stablecoins move across borders in minutes, at network fees that are often a fraction of a dollar on lower-cost blockchains.
A stablecoin-linked card closes the last gap: it lets a balance held in USDT or USDC be spent anywhere the card network is accepted, without the user ever opening a US bank account. That is why exchanges, wallets and remittance companies, which already hold their customers' stablecoins, are the ones launching card programs.
What it actually costs
Stablecoin payments are not free, and anyone weighing them should count every step:
Getting stablecoins: buying USDT or USDC with local currency usually involves an exchange spread or fee, which can be wider in smaller markets.
Moving them: each blockchain charges its own network fee. Fees on Ethereum can be much higher than on lower-cost networks, and sending on the wrong network can mean the funds are lost.
Loading a card: card programs typically charge a fee to issue a card and a percentage to load it.
Spending abroad: a card payment to a merchant in another country can still carry a cross-border fee charged by the card issuer.
For many users, the total is still lower than the alternatives, especially when the alternative is a declined card or a bank wire. But the savings depend heavily on the corridor, the network chosen and the card program's fees.
The risks that have not gone away
Concentration. Two issuers account for more than four-fifths of all stablecoins. The health of the whole system rests on the reserves and operations of a very small number of companies.
Peg stability. Stablecoins have broken their pegs before. In March 2023, USDC fell to around 87 cents for a short period after Circle disclosed that part of its reserves was held at Silicon Valley Bank, before recovering once the deposits were secured.
Regulation. The rules are now arriving rather than being debated. The European Union's MiCA regulation has applied to stablecoin issuers since June 2024, and the United States enacted the GENIUS Act, its first federal framework for payment stablecoins, in July 2025. Clearer rules should support mainstream adoption, but they also raise compliance costs and may restrict which stablecoins can be used where.
Identity checks. Card programs linked to stablecoins operate inside the card networks' rules, so users must pass identity verification. That is a feature for the system's legitimacy, but it means stablecoin cards are not an anonymous product, and users in sanctioned countries are excluded.
What to watch next
Three indicators will show whether stablecoins are becoming everyday money rather than a trading instrument:
Spending growth against supply growth. If card volume keeps growing faster than total supply, the same dollars are circulating more, which is how working money behaves.
Settlement volumes at the networks. Visa's settlement figure is a direct measure of how much real payment activity is being cleared in stablecoins.
The cost of the full journey. As on-ramps, networks and card programs compete, the total cost of paying a dollar bill with stablecoins should fall. That cost, more than any headline about market capitalisation, will decide how far this shift goes.
The supply chart may look flat this year. The spending data says stablecoins have quietly started doing the job they were named for.
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