The retail stablecoin payments market is showing signs of maturity, with an emerging shift from explosive, incentive-driven growth to more sustainable, organic activity, according to the Q3 2025 Stablecoin Retail Payments Index released by global payment orchestration platform Orbital in partnership with Artemis.
The Index, which tracks the pace and quality of adoption, noted a general cooling across the sector in Q3. After a surge in the previous quarter driven by promotional spikes, total transaction counts eased from 1.33 billion to 1.21 billion, while daily active users stabilised at 3.6 million. Both figures, however, remain significantly above early 2025 levels.
Genuine payments drive larger throughput share
A key finding is the narrowing gap between adjusted and unadjusted volume (from 50% to 44%) when speculative trading is filtered out to focus on genuine payment flows. This suggests that authentic payments, such as P2P transfers, remittances, and SME transactions, are now driving a larger, healthier share of the overall throughput.
Luke Wingfield Digby, co-founder and head of corporate development at Orbital, commented that activity is settling into a more sustainable rhythm, defined less by speculation and more by everyday utility. “Stablecoins are no longer just about growth; they’re about utility. The next step is making stablecoins usable everywhere—bridging networks, use cases, and geographies so that they become a truly universal payment layer,” he stated.
This shift was mirrored by the decline of USD1’s share of retail-sized wallet-to-wallet transactions (under $10,000), which dropped from 6% in Q2 to around 1% in Q3, following sharp, temporary surges often associated with incentive programmes.
DeFi and retail payments divergence
The report highlights a clear divergence in stablecoin usage across the financial ecosystem:
- DeFi Use Case: USDC has become the stablecoin of choice for Decentralised Finance (DeFi), commanding over 50% of market share in on-chain lending, liquidity pools, and institutional settlements. Its average transactions are larger but less frequent, suggesting fewer but larger institutional settlements.
- Retail Payments Use Case: USDT remains the preferred retail payments token , slightly extending its dominance to 83% of market share in Q3. It shows broad distribution, with 64% of supply held in self-custodied wallets.
More established networks continue to shape retail activity, with Binance’s BNB Chain (BSC) maintaining its dominance in retail transfers, particularly for low-value, high-frequency payments, despite a 50% slowdown in growth compared to the previous quarter.
Meanwhile, the new Layer 1 blockchain Plasma set a record, attracting over $7billion in stablecoin deposits within three days of its native token launch, though its transaction volumes are now stabilising after the initial hype.
Premiums reflect local liquidity gaps
The Index also tracks stablecoin premiums—the rate retail users pay to buy US-dollar backed stablecoins compared to the local USD exchange rate—which correlate closely with local liquidity infrastructure. The average global retail premium across all markets was 4.5% in Q3. However, this was skewed by significant expansions in high-inflation and market-disrupted environments like Venezuela (+34.6%), Türkiye (+10.16%), and Argentina (+6.03%).
The data reinforces the role of regulated fiat gateways and liquidity providers in stabilising stablecoin pricing, as markets reliant on informal P2P channels face higher markups.
