By Felipe Montoya | FeLibertarian
“We are going to keep the U.S. the dominant reserve currency in the world, and we will use stablecoins to do that.”
— U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, May 2025
While most of the financial world debates regulation, CBDCs, and monetary tightening, a quieter revolution is already underway — one happening far from Wall Street boardrooms and IMF white papers. It’s happening in phone screens, APIs, and smart contracts across Latin America, Africa, Asia, and beyond.
According to a newly released and deeply revealing report by Artemis, Castle Island, and Dragonfly, over $94.2 billion in stablecoin payments were processed between January 2023 and February 2025 across 31 real-world firms. This isn’t speculation or trading — these are actual payments for goods, services, salaries, remittances, and business operations.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
💳 From Margins to Mainstream: The Rise of Stablecoin Payments
Until recently, stablecoins mainly were seen as tools for crypto traders hedging against volatility. But this study, the most comprehensive of its kind, confirms what many on-the-ground users and builders have been saying for years: stablecoins are becoming a viable alternative payment infrastructure.
Here’s the breakdown of the $72.3 billion annualized volume as of early 2025:
- Business-to-Business (B2B): $36B
- Peer-to-Peer (P2P): $18B
- Card-linked spending: $13.2B
- Business-to-Consumer (B2C): $3.3B
- Prefunding/working capital: $2.5B
The real kicker? These figures only account for 1% of all stablecoin onchain activity, suggesting the potential market is orders of magnitude larger.
🌐 The Dollar’s New Skin: USDT, Tron, and a Post-Banking Future
Let’s talk infrastructure.
- Tether’s USDT commands ~90% of the market share in actual usage.
- Tron is the dominant blockchain for settlement, particularly in emerging markets such as Colombia, Nigeria, and the Philippines.
What this tells us is that the world isn’t just dollarizing — it’s digitally dollarizing, and doing so via unregulated, programmable, and permissionless rails.
No clearinghouse. No SWIFT. No 3-day settlement.
Just instant global value transfer at internet speed.
🇨🇴 Colombia, 🇧🇷 Brazil, 🇦🇷 Argentina: LatAm’s Real Stablecoin Economy
As a Colombian and fintech advocate, I found the Latin America section of the Artemis report particularly striking. In Brazil and Colombia, USDT transfers based on the Tron blockchain are dominant. Businesses are increasingly holding their treasuries in stablecoins to hedge against inflation and settle cross-border payments.
In Colombia specifically, stablecoin adoption halved the effective inflation rate on company-held funds, from 6.6% down to 2.9%, thanks to treasury management in USD-backed stablecoins.
Meanwhile, in Argentina, USDC is gaining unusual traction, likely a result of startup innovation responding to that country’s prolonged monetary chaos.
🛠 Real-World Applications: Not Hype, Just Utility
The companies included in the study — from Bitso Business in Latin America to Yellow Card in Africa and Reap in Asia — are integrating stablecoin payment rails not as experiments but as core financial infrastructure.
- Reap processes billions in corporate payments monthly via stablecoin-linked Visa cards.
- Bitso Business allows enterprises to bypass high FX fees and delays.
- Huma Finance offers real-time crypto liquidity for Amazon’s global supply chain partners.
These aren’t startups playing with tokens — they are infrastructure builders replacing banks.
🚨 Why This Matters: A Libertarian Lens
From a FeLibertarian perspective, this shift isn’t just technical — it’s philosophical. We are witnessing:
- The unbundling of money from the state.
- The decentralization of financial access.
- A real challenge to monetary monopoly.
With U.S. Treasuries backing 99% of stablecoin supply, stablecoins have quietly become the 14th-largest holder of U.S. debt. Ironically, even as they decentralize access, they reinforce dollar dominance, which makes U.S. regulators walk a delicate line between control and encouragement.
🧭 The Road Ahead
Stablecoins won’t replace the global financial system overnight. But they’re doing something more subversive: operating in parallel, building a permissionless payments layer that is faster, cheaper, and increasingly liquid.
And the market, from freelancers to CFOs, is already choosing it.
So when we meet tomorrow at StableCon NYC, remember: the real story isn’t just what’s being said on panels — it’s what’s already happening on-chain.
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Stablecoins Are Eating the World (Quietly): $94 Billion Says So was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
