Stablecoin $7.5T Figure Overstates Payment Use

Morgan Stanley’s digital assets research, released this week, shows public dashboards report about $7.5 trillion in monthly on-chain stablecoin transfers but estimates true payment activity will be roughly $63 billion a month by 2026 after excluding trading, exchange-wallet movement and other crypto-native flows.

The bank and separate analyses by other research groups attribute a large share of on-chain stablecoin volume to trading and internal exchange balances, activity inside decentralized finance protocols, and use as a dollar substitute outside the United States. Morgan Stanley cites Circle’s internal breakdown of USDC, which attributes about 50–55% of activity to trading and exchange balances, roughly 15% to DeFi protocols, about 25% to dollarization and 5–10% to uses that resemble ordinary payments.

Even if the $63 billion estimate materializes, that figure is small compared with global card spending, which exceeded $25 trillion in 2025. Merchant-facing crypto cards processed about $1 billion a month in mid-2026 across roughly 500,000 active users, according to industry data cited in the bank’s report.

Morgan Stanley sets out four scenarios for digital assets through 2030. Its base case, labeled Convergence, projects stablecoins will remain central to public-blockchain activity while institutional uptake is selective and incumbent banks retain most client relationships. Only the Rapid Adoption scenario, described as the bull case, anticipates stablecoins expanding into treasury operations, payments and settlement at scale; that outcome is conditional on regulated institutional access to DeFi and a larger professional investor base.

The report highlights that stablecoins require on- and off-ramps: banks or licensed custodians to hold segregated, redeemable reserves and correspondent banking links to convert and move fiat across borders. Morgan Stanley wrote that stablecoins are “already important financial infrastructure for crypto markets and on-chain liquidity, their broader payments role remains much less developed.”

The bank’s analysis notes practical implications for firms building payments infrastructure around stablecoins. Developers and service providers should not size systems to the $7.5 trillion headline and should treat the $63 billion projection as conditional. If broader adoption occurs, treasury, payments and settlement systems will need reserve custody designed for segregation and redemption and established correspondent relationships to move fiat before large-scale use follows.