Bitcoin (BTC) and US dollar–pegged stablecoins are emerging as a global alternative for moving value across borders without banks and card networks, as the Bitcoin network’s settlement volume begins to rival the world’s largest payment giants.
Bitcoin settled $6.9 trillion worth of payments over the past 90 days, which is “on par with or above Visa and Mastercard,” according to blockchain data platform Glassnode’s digital asset research report for the fourth quarter of 2025, published on Wednesday.
Over the same period, Visa processed $4.25 trillion in payment volume and Mastercard $2.63 trillion, for a combined $6.88 trillion, according to the report.
“Activity is migrating off-chain as flows move to #ETFs and brokers, but Bitcoin and #stablecoins continue to dominate on-chain settlement,” Glassnode said on X.
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Bitcoin’s economic settlement still small next to cards
Once internal transfers between addresses controlled by the same entity are stripped out, Bitcoin’s “economic” settlement is closer to $870 billion per quarter, or about $7.8 billion per day, Glassnode estimated. The firm said the numbers still show Bitcoin’s growing role as a “globally relevant settlement network, bridging both institutional and retail transaction flows.”
This figure pales in comparison to Visa’s $39.7 billion daily average transaction volume, or Mastercard’s $26.2 billion, the lion’s share of which is used for consumer retail spending and daily needs.
In contrast, Bitcoin’s settlement volume is mainly attributed to trading, remittances, and store-of-value investment, as global merchant adoption remains low.
Worldwide, only 20,599 merchants accept Bitcoin payments according to BTCmap, compared to Visa’s 175 million global merchant locations.
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Stablecoins move $225 billion a day, but mostly bots
Stablecoins are emerging as another global value transfer alternative, thanks to their fixed price, low transaction fees and 24/7 availability.
Stablecoins are now moving an average of $225 billion in value per day, according to the 30-day moving average of aggregate transfer volume for the top five stablecoins calculated by Glassnode.
Still, about 70% of the $15.6 trillion stablecoin transfers during the third quarter of 2025 were linked to automated trading bots, not organic activity.
Organic non-bot activity only accounted for about 20% of the total, while the remaining 9% was attributed to internal smart contract transfers and internal exchange transactions, according to a research report from crypto exchange CEX.io.
The exchange’s researchers said it was “crucial” to distinguish between organic and bot activity for policymakers to evaluate the systemic risk and real-world adoption of stablecoin payments.
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