Stablecoins were all the rage in 2025. The GENIUS Act provided much needed regulatory clarity for the dollar-pegged crypto tokens, and tech giants like Stripe and Sony got involved with their own related products and services.

President Trump has also reportedly profited handsomely from stablecoins and the crypto sector more generally, although the USD1 stablecoin he’s affiliated with has been at the center of serious corruption allegations. Additionally, Wall Street veteran Tom Lee made headlines by referring to stablecoins as crypto’s ChatGPT moment, echoing a report released by Citi earlier in the year.

The crypto industry often pointed to blockchain data to prove that 2025 was indeed a record year for stablecoins in terms of adoption. However, a new report from McKinsey Financial Services indicates the metrics used to show how much stablecoin adoption had increased in the past few years are extremely misleading.

Raw blockchain transfers are oftentimes pointed to as proof of stablecoin adoption, but the reality is only a small percentage of this activity—around 1% of roughly $35 trillion in total transaction volume—is actually related to real-world payments. This means stablecoin adoption, which the report estimates at $390 billion for 2025, only accounts for around 0.02% of global payments.

According to the report, B2B payments and international remittances account for most of the stablecoin payment activity, and activities such as crypto exchanges moving funds between blockchain accounts, automated activity with smart contracts, and trading on decentralized exchanges should not be included in payment measurements. The report also indicates around 60% of this activity is originating in Asia, adding, “Activity today is driven almost entirely by payments sent from Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan.”

.@chainalysis looked into decentralized exchange (DEX) activity on Ethereum after people claimed centralized exchange users were running to DeFi in response to the FTX debacle.

It turns out the increased DEX activity was mostly due to a single MEV bot frontrunning DeFi users. pic.twitter.com/ptkJw3SCoK

— Kyle Torpey (@kyletorpey) November 18, 2022

Of course, overblown or outright false adoption metrics are not new in the crypto world. Various data points, such as increased on-chain activity around decentralized finance (DeFi) apps, can be used to tell all kinds of tall tales. There has also been plenty of hype built around metrics such as transactions per second over the years, which tend to miss the point of what makes this technology valuable.

Despite the clear overstatements in stablecoin payment adoption made by various entities in the crypto industry, the report also indicates there are still signs of real growth. For example, the $390 billion in stablecoin payments occurring in 2025 is more than double what was seen in the previous year. Additionally, the total supply of stablecoins has increased from less than $30 billion in 2020 to more than $300 billion today.

Of course, not all of this was necessarily positive adoption, as a report from blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis indicated that stablecoins now account for the vast majority of illicit crypto transfers. Reports have also pointed to heavy use of Tether’s USDT stablecoin by the Maduro regime, and adoption by the Central Bank of Iran shows why a pro-stablecoin policy in the U.S. is a double-edged sword.

More generally, the prominence of stablecoins in crypto has caused a rift between cypherpunks focused on ideology and fintech startups focused strictly on adoption metrics. While stablecoins were originally seen as a boon for crypto adoption, it’s now gotten to the point where stablecoin issuers are launching their own blockchain infrastructure, adding another layer of centralized control to the tech stack.

While those like the aforementioned Tom Lee see the issuance of stablecoins and other tokens based on real world assets, such as tokenized stocks, as bullish for decentralized crypto networks like Ethereum, questions remain over how much value will accrue to these open protocols or if stablecoin issuers and other centralized entities could successfully cut these networks out of the equation entirely.