Stablecoin Rails is at a pace to challenge current cross-border networks by 2026. Monthly on-chain dollar settlements are already running in trillions, with merchant access expanding through mainstream processors.
Following the live dashboard on RWA.xyz, Stablecoins traveled around $3.3 trillion on the chain in July, with around 39.7 million active addresses, and Stablecoin Value is close to $259 billion.
The crossover case is available on three levers. Firstly, payment access has been improved. Stripe said it reintroduced crypto payments starting with USDC for Solana, Ethereum and Polygon, and returned Stablecoins to a standard checkout flow with additional feature rollouts in 2025.
Following Coinbase and PayPal, the PYUSD conversion fee was waived on April 24th, and the integration will allow merchant settlements on PYUSD in place of card rails.
Second, the off-ramp cost decreases for Ethereum L2 after increasing blob capacity for Dencon and Pectra, following Galaxy’s 4844 analysis and subsequent BLOB-Market updates, reducing the median rollup transaction costs to the low cent range, with real-time fee trackers showing subdime transmissions at the main L2.
Third, cash-like yields on tokenized T-Buildings are becoming a pull factor for the Ministry of Finance and Fintech flows. The Rwa.xyz financial panel shows the on-chain T-build value at about $7 billion, and Securitize says BlackRock’s Buidl fund surpassed its $3 billion AUM in June.
Framing benchmark issues. Visa’s 2024 10-K cites $16 trillion in total payments and cash volumes, while Swift Materials references about $300 billion a day in GPIs in capital market flows, demonstrating how legacy networks aggregate large value movements across use cases.
Modeling future stubcoin payments
Since neither Stablecoin Payments is a similar series, the scenario lens is more useful for the 2026 crossover story than a raw sum headline comparison.
A simple forward model pinned to observable drivers generates a $2026 trillion payment range, ranging from $3 trillion to $5 trillion.
Merchant’s rails spread through stripes and fee-free PYUSD conversion, transfers, B2B usage normalize, off-ramp penetration into mainstream accounts rising through processors and exchanges, and 2% to 3% consecutive addresses are assumed to be compounded in month 2% to 3% to maintain the cost of maintaining L2 costs.
Apply conservative haircuts to exclude internal replacement churn and increase the cash-out factor of 10% to 20% every few months. Under these constraints, annual end-user payments clear $3 trillion in the base case, pushing towards $5 trillion when address growth and average tickets grow together.
Remittance costs also created a wedge, with the World Bank RPW citing the global average of 6.26% as of March 27th.
Macro tail winding strengthens the floor. The current law, the US Genius Act, requires Fiat-backed reserves and monthly disclosures, strengthening the reliability of dollars and fixed rates, and even short-term Treasury demands sitting behind many tokens.
In cost, Galaxy’s work has seen a decrease in revenue from roll-up fees, and has improved margins since 4844, and is consistent with sustained low end-user fees as capacity increases.
When accepted, PayPal cites tens of millions of merchant relationships in filing and industry trackers, coupled with Stripe’s return to Stablecoin Checkout, expands its distribution across encryption and native channels.
The 2026 crossover is not about swift or replacing cards, but rather about absorbing speed, cost and specific corridors where 24/7 settlements are binding constraints. On-chain volume is already sufficient, and the fees compressed by the L2 upgrades, as well as regulatory transparency, will encourage causality.
