The payments distribution reflects where stablecoins solve the most acute economic frictions, which today are in high-value, cross-border, and treasury-driven settlement, rather than everyday retail scenarios.

Differences across segments are driven by transaction economics (ticket size, urgency), structural inefficiencies in traditional payment rails, and behavioral patterns observable on-chain.

In 2025, TRON remained the dominant rail by volume (accounting for about $235–375 billion of transactions), but our analysis shows incremental growth is increasingly driven by larger, more regulated entities, favoring chains such as BNB Smart Chain ($35–50B), Ethereum ($20–35B), Solana ($20–35B), and Polygon ($8-10B). This reflects a shift from pure cost minimization toward a multi-rail interoperable settlement model, where compliance, programmability, analytics, and institutional trust are seen as equally as important as fees

Our analysis of real-economy payment flows by blockchain shows that TRON is the dominant settlement rail in absolute terms, with 60–80% of flows driven by ultra-low transaction fees and deep USDT liquidity. These characteristics make TRON highly effective for high-frequency, price-sensitive transfers such as remittances and peer-to-peer payments. However, TRON’s share of real economy stablecoin payment volumes declined from about 74% in January 2025 to about 60% by year-end, even as absolute volumes continued to grow.