McKinsey and Artemis estimated actual stablecoin payments at about $390 billion annualized as of December 2025, roughly 0.02% of global payment volumes. And a device is not a sender. Samsung tied Coinbase into its wallet last October for a pool the companies put above 75 million US users, and public usage data for that tie-up is hard to find. Western Union, the incumbent supposedly under threat, already uses Solana for its own dollar token, USDPT. If the rail is no longer exclusive, what exactly is the moat? The BIS adds a structural warning in its 2026 annual report: today’s stablecoins fall short of money on singleness, elasticity, interoperability and integrity. Same facts, different denominators
The camps mostly disagree about the denominator. The bulls measure Samsung against the average remittance, a figure inflated by bank wires and cash counters. The skeptics measure it against the best digital competitor. Same world, different baseline, different verdict.
The useful lens is the cost stack. A technology that removes one layer of cost matters in proportion to that layer’s share of the total. Settlement was already a small slice of a remittance. Cutting it to near zero is real, but modest.