Allium: Stablecoin Payments Rose 45% to $482 Billion in January–September 2026 as Supply Grew 0.4%
On Allium's filtered measure, payment count rose 71% to 1.04 billion and September set a $72 billion monthly high, while supply ended September at $305 billion.
By Elena Marsh, Journalist, Stablecoins
Stablecoin payments rose 45% to $482 billion from January to September 2026, while stablecoin supply grew just 0.4% over the same stretch to $305 billion, according to Allium's State of Stablecoins and Payments, Q3 2026 report, published on 15 October 2026 with data through 30 September 2026. Every figure here uses Allium's own definitions: "payments" is a filtered subset of on-chain activity, not a count of all stablecoin transfers.
The divergence is the report's central finding. Activity running through stablecoins kept growing even as the stock of tokens barely moved, and Allium attributes the payments growth to more frequent, smaller payments rather than larger ones.
The headline numbers, by period
Measure (Allium) — Period — Figure
Payments value — January–September 2026 — Up 45% to $482B
Payment count — January–September 2026 — Up 71% to 1.04B
Average payment — January–September 2026 — Fell from $544 to $462
Payments value — Q3 2026, year on year — Up 51%
Monthly payments value — September 2026 — $72B, a monthly high
Stablecoin supply — Start of 2026 to end of September — Up 0.4% to $305B
Adjusted volume — January–September 2026 — Up 48% to $2.4T
Allium's public summary does not spell out the comparison base for the 45%, 71% and 48% growth rates beyond describing them as growth through September.
How Allium gets from $97.9 trillion to $482 billion
The report separates recorded transfer value from end-user activity. Of $97.9 trillion in raw stablecoin transfers, Allium screens out exchange, DeFi, infrastructure, automated, and mint and burn flows, leaving 2.5% as "adjusted volume", its measure of end-user transfers. Each remaining transfer is assigned one use by rules applied in a fixed order, and payments are typed by sender and receiver as consumer or business. On that basis payments are about one-fifth of adjusted volume.
Allium reports that Tron settled two-thirds of payment value and USDT accounted for 84%.
Supply shifts and new spending routes
Allium says supply at Tether, Circle and Ethena fell this year while other issuers added a net $6.9 billion, and that 15 issuers now hold more than $1 billion each, up from 11. It reports that Open USD reached $799 million in the two weeks after its 30 September launch, and that branded stablecoins backed by USDC and PYUSD reached $872 million.
On newer routes into spending, Allium says agent payments doubled to 68.3 million in Q3 while their value slipped to $3.7 million, and that stablecoin card spend grew tenfold to $3.9 billion. The public summary does not state the period for the card-spend comparison.
Reading the gap between supply and payments
For payments firms, the useful signal is that usage, on Allium's filtered measure, is growing without a matching rise in outstanding supply: the same pool of tokens is being turned over more often in smaller tickets. That favours businesses that earn on transactions, such as processors, card programmes and payout providers, over models that depend mainly on reserve income from a growing float, which flat supply does little to lift.
The figures are a third-party analytics firm's classification, not issuer disclosures or audited data. Different screening rules produce materially different totals, so Allium's numbers are best compared with its own earlier reports rather than with other providers' payment estimates.