In 2025, the real trading proportion of global stablecoins is less than 1%, with the vast majority being "wash trading."
According to China Securities Journal, the global on-chain transaction volume of stablecoins in 2025 is estimated to be around $25 trillion after deduplication and adjustment for inflated figures, but the proportion of transactions with actual payment backgrounds is less than 1%, with the vast majority being "inflated transactions."
This statistic covers 36 mainstream stablecoins on 16 major public chains, including Ethereum, Tron, and Solana. Analysis shows that "inflated transactions" are mainly composed of three categories: first, internal fund transfers within institutions, meaning transfers between different wallets or protocols under the same institution; second, on-chain protocol splits and transfers, where the same business is inflated due to multiple internal calls; third, stablecoins used as intermediary currencies for cryptocurrency exchanges, leading to the same funds being counted multiple times.
In terms of real payment scenarios, in 2025, 15 leading cryptocurrency payment institutions, including Coinbase, BVNK, Bitpay, and Binance Pay, processed stablecoin transactions totaling $132 billion, while international card organizations like Visa processed approximately $4.5 billion in stablecoin-related transactions. Even when including the use of stablecoins in illegal activities such as money laundering, telecom fraud, and online gambling, the proportion of transactions with actual payment backgrounds remains less than 1%.
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