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10/07/2026 9:12 pm
TL;DR: Stablecoin adjusted volume reached $28 trillion in 2025 and Chainalysis projects it could hit $719 trillion by 2035, or as much as $1.5 quadrillion with macro catalysts, while stablecoin payment volumes could match Visa and Mastercard between 2031 and 2039. The identity and access question is no longer theoretical: payment infrastructure that settles in seconds and operates 24/7 shifts governance pressure onto controls around wallets, keys, delegated access, and transaction authorisation.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Chainalysis: The New Rails: How Digital Assets Are Reshaping the Foundations of Finance
By the numbers:
- Stablecoin payments processed $28 trillion in real economic volume in 2025.
- Adjusted stablecoin volume has grown at a 133% compound annual growth rate since 2023.
- Stablecoin payment volumes could match Visa and Mastercard’s off-chain transactions between 2031 and 2039.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should organisations govern stablecoin wallets and signing keys?
A: They should treat wallets and signing keys as privileged non-human identities with lifecycle, custody, and approval controls.
Q: Why do stablecoin payment rails change identity and access requirements?
A: Because settlement happens faster and with less intermediary delay, the organisation has less time to catch mistakes after the fact.
Q: What breaks when payment automation can sign transactions too broadly?
A: A compromised workflow can move funds directly, without a useful manual stop point.
Practitioner guidance
- Define wallet governance as privileged access Inventory every wallet, custodian, signing service, and automation path that can initiate or approve transfers.
- Separate initiation from settlement approval Require distinct identities, roles, or systems for payment creation, approval, and transaction signing where the rail supports it.
- Bind transaction policy to context Use amount, counterparty, jurisdiction, and workflow context as policy inputs for stablecoin transfers.
What's in the full report
Chainalysis' full report covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Adjusted stablecoin volume methodology, including how liquidity, bot activity, and MEV transfers were excluded from headline figures
- Generational wealth transfer assumptions behind the 2028 to 2048 adoption forecast
- Point-of-sale saturation scenarios showing when stablecoin transaction counts could intersect legacy card networks
- Treasury, remittances, and B2B payment use-case analysis for teams planning implementation
👉 Read Chainalysis' full report on how stablecoins are reshaping payments infrastructure →
Stablecoin payments are scaling fast, so what changes for IAM teams?
Explore further
10/07/2026 9:34 pm
Stablecoin adoption turns payment infrastructure into an identity governance problem. The article frames scale, speed, and market pressure, but the deeper operational shift is that money movement increasingly depends on non-human authorities such as wallets, signing services, and automated payment workflows. That is a governance change, not just a payments change. Practitioners should treat on-chain payment rails as another privileged identity domain.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who is accountable when stablecoin transfer controls fail?
A: Accountability should sit with the teams that own wallet custody, signing policy, and transaction approval, not only with payments operations. Under regulated programmes, the governance question is whether controls prove who or what was authorised to move value at the time of signing.
👉 Read our full editorial: Stablecoin rails are reshaping payments governance and identity risk
