🎙️ Ep. 63. 2025 Review: Stablecoins, Onchain Cards and B2B Payments

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In Episode 63 of Tokenized, our hosts Simon Taylor and Cuy Sheffield welcome two guests from onchain analytics firm Artemis for a data-driven 2025 year in review:

• Anthony Yim, Co-Founder, Artemis – former founding engineer at Venmo with deep expertise in payments infrastructure

• Andrew Van Aken, Data Scientist, Artemis – leading the firm's stablecoin payment analytics efforts

🎙️Listen to the full episode here on your favorite podcast app or 📷 watch on YouTube.

Key Takeways

Stablecoin supply is fragmenting rapidly, but concentration remains. The number of stablecoins above $10 million in supply has grown from roughly 60 to over 140 in 2025, yet Tether added nearly $50 billion in supply, "almost as much supply as everyone else combined," according to Sheffield.

While Western Union, Klarna, and others have announced stablecoins that haven't launched yet, the data shows 93% of stablecoins above $10 million remain USD-denominated.

The proliferation raises fundamental questions: As Sheffield observed, "when does it make sense to create your own versus to partner and use an existing one?"

The stablecoin taxonomy is breaking down. The episode surfaced an emerging industry challenge around definitions. As Taylor noted, "We call a lot of things a stablecoin that are not stablecoins." He outlined emerging categories: onchain collateral products like Ethena's USDe, traditional fiat-backed issuers like Tether and Circle, and sub-issuance platforms like M0, Agora, and Bridge that allow branded tokens backed by shared reserves.

For corporate treasuries, Taylor argued the appeal is straightforward: "If somebody ran a corporate treasury and you gave them a new technology that allowed them to collect the yield and move it across borders 24/7, they'd want that thing. We happen to call that thing stablecoins."

Tron's network effects prove resilient despite competitive pressure. Despite numerous chains pivoting toward payments use cases, Tron added $19 billion in stablecoin supply in 2025.

Cuy pointed to the network's embedded position in emerging markets: "It went from most people in the US had no idea what Tron was, then they discovered a lot of people are using USDT on Tron in emerging markets."

Simon framed it as "two worlds emerging" - Western distribution increasingly on Solana, while "for everywhere else, it's Tron, Tether... in the UAE, that's the default. In Hong Kong, that's the default."

B2B payments represent the fastest-growing stablecoin vertical, but the path to trillion-dollar scale remains unclear. Artemis data with over 40 partners shows approximately $10 billion in monthly stablecoin payments - roughly $120 billion annualized.

Sheffield noted that early B2B growth comes "despite not really having privacy... and not really having great ERP integrations," suggesting adoption is driven by smaller, mid-market businesses where the improvement over existing solutions justifies onboarding friction.

Taylor argued there's no single killer feature holding back broader adoption, rather "1,000 paper cuts" around fraud screening, sanctions, mainframe integration, and vendor support.

Onchain lending is emerging as a neo-bank enabler. Loans outstanding have grown from $10 billion to the $25-30 billion range in 2025, with over $200 billion in stablecoin-denominated loans originated through smart contracts.

Taylor sees this as a structural opportunity: "If I was a neo-bank that did not have a banking charter, did not intend to use my balance sheet for lending... now you're seeing this alternative model where they can just have this off-the-shelf product that gives their customers yield on one side, but lets them borrow on the other."

Sheffield advocated for reframing industry terminology: "I still hate the term DeFi... we like to say onchain lending, or onchain credit."

Deposits and stablecoins will coexist, not compete. Taylor offered a framework for institutional audiences: "Deposits are money at rest, and stablecoins are money that moves. Stablecoins can be a really efficient rail for banks, and deposits can be a really useful thing for the stablecoin ecosystem."

He emphasized that efficiency gains must be weighed against risk management: "The problem with efficiency sometimes is - what happens if the other guy doesn't have the money? It's all the edge cases that really are where the cost is in the system."

Looking ahead: Yim offered a sobering 2026 prediction: "There will be a bunch of stablecoin blow-ups" as products mislabeled as stablecoins fail to maintain their peg, and founders "underestimate how hard it is actually to get real volume and real liquidity."

Meanwhile, the next 12-24 months will see major neo-banks and payments companies "getting their wheels in motion" on stablecoin infrastructure, setting up what Sheffield described as a significant unlock for institutional on/off-ramps.

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