Payment Methodology

We apply a three-step approach to isolate economically meaningful stablecoin activity.

Step 1 — Remove non-economic activity: We exclude bot-driven transactions, protocol mechanics (e.g., pre-minting, bridges, internal contract calls), and intermediary routing such as automated market maker hops.

Step 2 — Infer economic use cases: Unlike traditional payments analytics, which map intent using identity and metadata, the analysis infers use cases from observable wallet behavior, including sender–receiver dynamics, transaction sizes, frequency, counterparty breadth, and timing patterns.

Step 3 — Apply conservative classification: Ambiguous activity is intentionally classified as investment or trading rather than payments. This creates a bias toward understatement of real-economy usage.

Definitions

Intra CEX Settlements - These flows reflect exchange internal liquidity management, including movements between online/hot wallets used for daily operations and offline/cold wallets used for asset custody and risk management.

CEX Deposits - These transfers represent users depositing from EOAs to the centralized trading infrastructure.

CEX Withdrawals - These transfers represent users withdrawing from the centralized trading infrastructure to EOAs.

DEX Deposits - Activity involving users sending stablecoins from self-custodied wallets to on-chain trading protocols

DEX Withdrawals - Activity involving users receiving stablecoins from self-custodied wallets to on-chain trading protocols Investment/trading: This category captures short-term, reversible flows or transaction patterns inconsistent with payment behavior, such as for wallet management or store-as-value. Typical signals include rapid inflow-outflow cycles, irregular transaction sizing, and high temporal clustering.

Real-World Payments - This category represents payments for goods and services between economically distinct parties. The flows are directional, non-reversible, and recurring, consistent with commercial and personal payment activity.

Unclear Classification - Here, we allocate activity that cannot be confidently attributed to any category, often due to insufficient history, anomalous behavior, or atypical transaction patterns. These flows are deliberately excluded from payments estimates, so that our results remain analytically conservative.

Payment Category Overview

B2B - We identified on-chain B2B flows through ticket sizes, directional and non-reversible transfers, low counterparty diversity, and recurring payment patterns consistent with invoice settlement.

B2C - On-chain, B2C flows are identified through recurring outbound payments from business wallets to a wide range of individual wallets, typically with moderate ticket sizes. Adoption is most visible among Web3-native companies and global platforms paying distributed workforces or creators.

C2C - Methodologically, C2C flows are characterized by high transaction counts, smaller average ticket sizes, and broad counterparty diversity, resulting in a meaningful share of payment activity but a lower share of aggregate value relative to B2B.

C2B - On-chain, C2B payments are characterized by moderate ticket sizes, one-directional flows to business wallets, and recurring transaction behavior, distinguishing them from trading or treasury activity.