Stablecoins are the strongest real-world signal that blockchain payments are not theoretical anymore. It's already happening.
Annual stablecoin transaction volumes are growing at an astounding rate, with payments volumes in several hundreds of billions.
According to a Boomblerg report, total stablecoin transaction volumes soared 72% to $33 trillion in 2025, as highlighted by data compiled by Artemis Analytics Inc. Circle’s USDC leads with over $18.3 trillion worth of transactions, while Tether Holdings SA’s USDT recorded $13.3 trillion.
When we come down to volumes considered to be real payments, a Coingeek report highlights that over $390 billion is transacted through stablecoins.
Whilst this is a little over 1.18% of total volume, it is regardless a figure that should raise eyebrows across traditional payment companies including modern fintechs and the banks.
For blockchain for payments to be considered a valid threat to traditional payment giants, it has to be solving a problem or more.
Some of the most widely discussed pain points of traditional finance systems are high fees, slow settlements and rigidity, not just for the end users, but sometimes to even the payment companies.
If we look at rigidity for instance, payment companies could struggle to expand their solutions due to the rigidity involved with dealing with different jurisdictions.
End users, on the other side, have to sometimes deal with high wait times and always pay significant fees to move money around.
Blockchain-based payments solves all of this. Since on-chain transactions are permissionless, rigidity is the first line of flaw to be thrown out the window.
That said, transactions are largely instantaneous and low cost, and for networks where this isn't the case, there's active developments to ensure that low fees and fast transactions are fundamental solutions.
Instead of dealing with 5 days settlements and even more for dispute settlements, in addition to high fees rising to as much as 7% of transaction value, the payment market is shifting to a new infrastructure.
In a lot of ways, the arguments in support of major shift from traditional payments to blockchain-based payments often fixate on solutions closely tied to cross-border payment flaws, often why it is suggested that SWIFT-like infrastructure are in the first line of threatened businesses than companies like Visa and MasterCard, notwithstanding, it's to be expected that eventually, this eats into more than the cross-border payments vector.
Traditional payments have to deal with fixed infrastructure costs, which is effectively reflected in end-user costs of service use. Also, traditional payments deal with multiple layers of friction including banks, messaging channels, security, etc.
All of these gets solve when we turn to blockchain payments. Security is programmable. Messaging is programmable and backed by decentralized nodes. Bank intermediaries do not exist as transactions are peer-to-peer, and this leaves the only difficult nut to crack to be distribution.
Payment giants such as Visa and MasterCard are in the last line of defense for traditional payments, their survival holds up a lot of traditional payment solutions and companies.
There are numerous companies out there whose entire business is dependent on the survival of Visa and MasterCard. The fall of both would mark the complete transition to decentralized finance.
Right now, these two are considered by many as too hard to fall. It's considered the network effect that's currently hard to break because even as crypto payments are growing, we are seeing integrations that are ironically helping keep these companies alive.
That said, as much as this may come off as comical, AI could be the reason payments move completely on-chain.
The reason is simple.
AI is an interface. A lot of people want to see it as something that will function in the backend, but it's most valuable use case will be up front.
It will be the primary gateway to a lot of things.
When it comes to crypto payments, wallets, keys, understanding gas fees = friction, this is the UX and abstraction gap that currently limits blockchain-based payments.
In order to solve this problem and also to be more appealing to end users than traditional cards are for payments, we want something that will not need cards to function seamlessly and that is AI, or more specifically, AI agents.
AI agents will handle most transactions in the future, this is inevitable. This means your agents will have permissioned access to your wealth and will autonomously or on demand, facilitate transactions or payments.
Carrying cards around will not be as important when much payments rely on blockchains as the finance infrastructure layer and AI agents will be the most "consumer-friendly" approach to facilitate payments.
Cards will become the friction points, while agents will be the seamless solution.
The resistance that exists today that might limit blockchains for payments from replacing traditional payments companies will be blown out of the water with increased development of agentic solutions.
