Bitcoin and US greenback–pegged stablecoins are rising as a worldwide different for shifting worth throughout borders with out banks and card networks, because the Bitcoin community’s settlement quantity begins to rival the world’s largest fee giants.
Bitcoin (BTC) settled $6.9 trillion price of funds over the previous 90 days, which is “on par with or above Visa and Mastercard,” in accordance with blockchain knowledge platform Glassnode’s digital asset analysis report for the fourth quarter of 2025, revealed on Wednesday.
Over the identical interval, Visa processed $4.25 trillion in fee quantity and Mastercard $2.63 trillion, for a mixed $6.88 trillion, in accordance with the report.
“Exercise is migrating off-chain as flows transfer to #ETFs and brokers, however Bitcoin and #stablecoins proceed to dominate on-chain settlement,” Glassnode stated on X.
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Bitcoin’s financial settlement nonetheless small subsequent to playing cards
As soon as inner transfers between addresses managed by the identical entity are stripped out, Bitcoin’s “financial” settlement is nearer to $870 billion per quarter, or about $7.8 billion per day, Glassnode estimated. The agency stated the numbers nonetheless present Bitcoin’s rising function as a “globally related settlement community, bridging each institutional and retail transaction flows.”
This determine pales compared to Visa’s $39.7 billion day by day common transaction quantity, or Mastercard’s $26.2 billion, the lion’s share of which is used for shopper retail spending and day by day wants.
In distinction, Bitcoin’s settlement quantity is especially attributed to buying and selling, remittances, and store-of-value funding, as international service provider adoption stays low.
Worldwide, solely 20,599 retailers settle for Bitcoin funds in accordance with BTCmap, in comparison with Visa’s 175 million international service provider places.
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Stablecoins transfer $225 billion a day, however largely bots
Stablecoins are rising as one other international worth switch different, due to their mounted value, low transaction charges and 24/7 availability.
Stablecoins are actually shifting a median of $225 billion in worth per day, in accordance with the 30-day shifting common of combination switch quantity for the highest 5 stablecoins calculated by Glassnode.
But, about 70% of the $15.6 trillion stablecoin transfers throughout the third quarter of 2025 have been linked to automated buying and selling bots, not natural exercise.
Natural non-bot exercise solely accounted for about 20% of the entire, whereas the remaining 9% was attributed to inner sensible contract transfers and inner alternate transactions, in accordance with a analysis report from crypto alternate CEX.io.
The alternate’s researchers stated it was “essential” to tell apart between natural and bot exercise for policymakers to judge the systemic danger and real-world adoption of stablecoin funds.
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