Your linked article is solely about SpaceX customers paying with stable customers, as reported by Chamath Palihapitiya. Even if I disregard the fact that I strongly think Chamath must be lying because his lips are moving, everyone in that story has a clear biased incentive to pump crypto.
Point being, I don't think you can take this story and think it applies to a broader, general group of enterprise customers without more mundane examples.
While it’s easy to dismiss one story, stablecoin payments are gaining legitimate adoption.
> monthly B2B volume has more than doubled since February, rising 113% to about $6.4 billion. The expansion lifted the cumulative value of stablecoin payments since 2023 to over $136 billion, representing that on-chain money is no longer a niche settlement tool.[1]
And $9T in annual payment volume[2].
As it turns out stablecoin payments are actually a real thing, especially B2B.
I cannot for the life of me articulate why, because I actually don’t understand its value prop (despite lengthy conversations with ChatGPT and people on HN about it) or see any reason for its growth, but it is a thing whether we admit it or not.
I had a look at the second source. It goes to crypto investor A16Z's report, where they are looking at all crypto trading volumes. $46 trillion transaction volume but once they remove bots $9 trillion per year.
Note that forbes seriously misquotes. A16Z is counting transactions, not payments.
They compare it to visa which seems like a rubbish comparison. People use visa to buy things. Crypto trades are much more like forex, and A16Z seems to be measuring crypto for crypto purchases.
Global forex volume is about $9 trillion per day. But even that's a poor comparison as most people trade forex to DO stuff with the other currency.
Crypto is largely traded to trade crypto.
As for payments, supposing we take $136 billion cumulative lifetime payments as accurate. Mckinsey reports that global annual payments are $2 quadrillion dollars per year.
The crypto industry LOVES to throw big numbers around and tell tales of use cases just around the corner but the majority of actual use cases still seem to be skirting regulations.
>But even that's a poor comparison as most people trade forex to DO stuff with the other currency.
No, most of this volume (>99%) is institutional speculation. If people actually do something with this money you would see payments of over 9T a day, which is not happening.
Point being, I don't think you can take this story and think it applies to a broader, general group of enterprise customers without more mundane examples.