The B2B Stablecoin Opportunity

Why business to business payments are where stablecoin adoption is happening fastest.

Cyclops was built to help payments companies move money efficiently, with a single API for stablecoin settlement, pay-ins, payouts and treasury. The B2B opportunity is one of the themes we hear most often in conversations with PSPs. A lot of the public conversation around stablecoins focuses on consumer payments. Will everyday people pay with crypto? When does it go mainstream? Meanwhile, businesses have been quietly moving billions through stablecoin rails, and the growth has outpaced most projections.

The numbers tell the story

A joint analysis by McKinsey and Artemis Analytics published in February 2026 stripped out the trading activity, internal fund movements and automated protocol flows that inflate headline stablecoin transaction figures. What remained was $390 billion in actual stablecoin payments in 2025, more than double 2024 levels. Of that, B2B transactions accounted for $226 billion, close to 60% of the total, growing 733% year over year.

That is real traction, and it still represents a small fraction of the global B2B payment market. There is a lot of room to grow.

Why B2B

While the consumer question is still being debated, businesses have already started moving. Stablecoin adoption in B2B has accelerated because it solves operational problems that traditional rails haven't fully addressed.

Cross-border B2B payments are slow and expensive. Supplier payments, intercompany transfers, contractor payroll and marketplace disbursements all run through correspondent banking chains that carry fees, FX spreads and settlement windows that pause over weekends. For businesses running large amounts of cross-border volume, those costs and delays compound.

Stablecoin rails offer a practical alternative for the transactions where that friction is highest. At the core of that alternative is settlement: value moves and finalizes in seconds instead of days, with conversion happening on demand rather than on a banking schedule. The corridors that are most expensive on traditional rails tend to be the same ones where stablecoin adoption is highest, because the operational benefit is greatest where the friction is most pronounced. That is also why rail choice matters. Stablecoins aren't the right fit for every transaction, but for the ones where faster, final settlement outweighs the tradeoffs, they are increasingly the better option.

The use cases driving volume

Underneath every one of these use cases is the same core function: settlement. Businesses need money to move and finalize with certainty, and stablecoins do that faster than the correspondent banking chains most of them rely on today. The $226 billion in B2B stablecoin payments isn't concentrated in a single use case.

Supplier payments and trade settlement are a significant driver, with importers and exporters settling invoices across borders in stablecoins, reducing FX conversion steps and eliminating wire transfer delays. Intercompany treasury transfers are another, where settlement finality in seconds rather than days is the entire point. Circle's own treasury team moved more than $68 million across eight entities in under 30 minutes using USDC, a transaction that would typically take one to two days to settle on traditional rails.

Global payroll and contractor disbursements are growing fast, since settling in stablecoins means contractors get paid on finalized funds instead of waiting out a multi-day international transfer. Deel launched DLUSD in June 2026, a USD-denominated stablecoin balance available to contractors across more than 150 countries. Marketplace payouts are another meaningful segment, where the same settlement speed lets platforms disburse to sellers and service providers across multiple markets simultaneously, without maintaining local banking relationships in each corridor.

What this means for payments companies

Cyclops was built to help payments companies move money efficiently, and the B2B opportunity is one of the clearest use cases we see for PSPs and acquirers today. The businesses in a payments company's portfolio are already part of this shift. Suppliers getting paid, contractors receiving disbursements, and marketplaces settling with sellers are flows that run through the platforms of the payments companies that serve them.

Juniper Research projects cross-border B2B stablecoin transactions will reach $5 trillion by 2035, with B2B flows accounting for 85% of total stablecoin transaction value by that point. The growth is already underway. Payments companies that have the right partner to offer and manage these stablecoin opportunities are the ones positioned to capture it.