Retail crypto trading has cooled, but the dollar-pegged tokens underneath it are having their best year.

"In the past 12 months, there's been over 300 million unique users of stablecoins, which is an absurdly high number," said Patrick Kim of the analytics firm Artemis.

"If you told this to someone five years ago, they would look you dead in the eyes and say you're bluffing."

That figure is Artemis's tally of unique on-chain addresses transacting in stablecoins, not a verified headcount of people, and address counts can overstate real users because one person often controls many wallets.

Even discounted, the direction is clear: the firms moving the tokens are increasingly payment companies and consumer apps rather than crypto exchanges.

The growth is running opposite to the trading market. Sami Start, who co-founded the fiat-to-stablecoin onramp Transak, described the split on the On The Margin podcast: "The total addressable market is much larger on the stablecoin side than the crypto side now. There's somewhat of a crypto winter happening in terms of retail buying and selling of crypto, but stablecoin adoption is orthogonal to that, and institutions are adopting stablecoins for real-world use cases."

Raj Kamal, who runs the Dubai cross-border firm TransFi, said the base is still small next to the opportunity: "Stablecoins are just about starting. We're just scratching at the surface of what is possible, because compared to traditional payments, stablecoins do very little volume."

Regulation is what moved it from the fringe. "The Genius Act that Trump signed creates the rules on how stablecoins should be managed," said Ignas Survila, founder of the dollar-banking app Rizon, adding that Europe's MiCA offers "pretty clear and straightforward regulation" for the software built on top.

The money has followed the rules: Stripe paid about $1.1 billion for the stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge, Mastercard has moved to buy the payments company BVNK, and Visa is building settlement on the same rails that issuers Circle and Tether run.

The recurring argument is that stablecoins fix a payments system that never got faster.

"It's still slow. Swift internationally can take seconds or can take days," said Brian Mehler, chief executive of the Bitfinex-backed stablecoin chain Stable.

"We look at the embrace of AI and how fast your 5G needs to be, but then we're totally okay, for some strange reason, that payments go extremely slow and are extremely expensive."

Kim expects the entry point to be plastic: "Cards will likely be the number one retail payment use case for stablecoins by the end of this year."

That is where a wave of apps is trying to turn the technology into something ordinary users touch, and most hide the crypto entirely.

"Our goal is to actually hide the stablecoins," said Survila, whose app lets users top up money, get account details and a card, and send funds to another user for free.

Rizon avoids holding licenses itself: "We operate as a front-end technology provider, working with licensed entities that sponsor their licenses towards us," with US firm Rain issuing the cards.

It claims 122 countries in 65 weeks, against roughly 47 for Revolut, plus 280,000 users and $120 million in annual payment volume, self-reported figures that are not audited. The demand it describes is concrete.

"I'm earning similar money to an engineer in Europe, but I'm in Pakistan," said Matas Olendra, who leads Rizon's marketing.

"My payments get declined. I want Spotify, I want to watch Netflix, I want to order things from Amazon, but I always get blocked."

Not everyone thinks these apps are as new as they look. Neo, who ran Alipay's overseas QR-payments push before launching the onchain neobank UR and goes by a single professional name, argues most stablecoin-first apps are a veneer on the same system: "Everyone's taking the easy way out.

Easy USDC stablecoins, you issue a card, suddenly you're a neobank, and you can spend, and it's very cool. But structurally at its core, nothing's really changing."

That is the open question for the whole consumer layer, Rizon included: whether wrapping a stablecoin in a card is a genuinely better bank or just a cheaper way to distribute the same dollars.

Whether these apps become licensed banks or stay thin front ends, and whether Global South regulators keep tolerating dollar apps they do not control, will decide how far the 300 million number climbs.

The issuers are betting it only goes one way. "Once you see there's an option out there, it's really hard to put that genie back in the bottle," said Mehler. "It's pretty much out. They know there's a better solution, and I think it's going to stick that way."

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