Orbital, a payment orchestration platform across stablecoins and traditional payment rails, released its Q3 Stablecoin Retail Payments Index snapshot. With data having reportedly been sourced from Artemis, the Index suggests a sector that’s gradually maturing, with various stablecoin product launches balanced with a transition to more sustainable, organic activity.
The Index reportedly tracks the pace and quality of “adoption across retail stablecoin payments.”
Key findings from the report are as follows:
- Plasma sets a $7 billion deposit record post-launch. Plasma launched its native token, XPL in Q3. Within just three days, it surpassed $7 billion in stablecoin deposits, setting a new record for a newly launched Layer 1 blockchain. However, it remains in the early adoption phase, and transaction volumes are stabilising after the initial hype.
- BSC retains leadership in retail transfers though growth slows by 50%. More established networks continued to shape retail stablecoin activity in different ways. Binance’s BNB Chain (BSC) maintained its dominance in retail transfers, particularly for low-value, high-frequency payments, though growth slowed by 50% compared to the previous quarter.
- Aptos, which surged in Q2, has plateaued, however retained its higher transaction baseline in Q3. Sustained daily activity, steady P2P volumes, and a rising average transaction size indicate that users are engaging in real economic activity.
- Stablecoin retail market cools, but genuine payment flows grow. The retail stablecoins market steadied in Q3. After a Q2 surge driven by incentive programs and promotional spikes, total transaction counts eased from 1.33 billion to 1.21 billion, while daily active users stabilised at 3.6 million. Despite this cooling, both figures remain well above early 2025 levels.
As active wallet count flattens for the most, the average “transaction size is rising.”
Although current retail activity may have cooled after the so-called incentive-driven peaks, the underlying trends seemingly point “to steady, organic growth as stablecoins continue to carve out a real role in retail payments.”
Notably, the current gap between adjusted and “unadjusted volume has narrowed significantly, from 50% to 44%, when speculative trading is filtered out to focus on P2P payments, remittances, merchant payments and SME transfers.”
This would suggest a healthier, more authentic flow of funds, with “genuine settlement and payments now driving a larger share of throughput.”
The pattern is echoed in the case of USD1, whose share of retail-sized wallet-to-wallet transactions “under $10,000 dropped from 6% in Q2 to around 1% in Q3.”
Sharp, temporary surges in activity followed “by a plateau indicating incentive programs.”
A split now appears to be emerging between DeFi and retail payments. USDC has become the stablecoin of choice for DeFi, “commanding over 50% of market share in on-chain lending, liquidity pools and institutional settlements.”
Average transactions are larger but less frequent, “suggesting fewer but larger settlements.”
USDT, by contrast, remains the preferred retail payments token – extending its dominance slightly to “83% of market share in Q3.”
It shows broad distribution, with “64% of supply held in self-custodied wallets and 30% in small retail balances between $10-$100.”
As expected, USDT and USDC anchor most stablecoin activity.
As major centralised exchanges including Binance continue to “serve as a primary source of stablecoin liquidity, solutions like Binance Pay cashier integrations become a practical option for facilitating stablecoin payments across both retail and institutional use cases.”
Luke Wingfield Digby, Co-Founder & Head of Corporate Development at Orbital, said:
“After months of incentive-driven spikes, activity is now settling into a more sustainable rhythm – one defined less by speculation and more by everyday use. Stablecoins are no longer just about growth; they’re about utility. The next step is making stablecoins usable everywhere – bridging networks, use cases, and geographies so that they become a truly universal payment layer.”
Stablecoin premiums
Premiums – the rate retail users pay “to buy US-dollar backed stablecoins compared to the local US dollar exchange rate – correlate closely with local liquidity infrastructure.”
The average global retail premium across all markets was “4.5% in Q3, but this was driven by outliers which saw high premium expansions between July and September – Venezuela (+34.6%), Turkey (+10.16%) and Argentina (+6.03%).”
Markets dependent on more informal P2P channels tend to face greater markups, reinforcing the role of “regulated fiat gateways and liquidity providers in stabilising stablecoin pricing.”
