Figures as of 31 August 2026. Data is a floor as it covers the entities we were able to label with confidence.
Instant payment schemes now run in more than seventy countries, according to J.P. Morgan's Real-time payments reframed. India's UPI averaged 791 million transactions a day in August, on NPCI figures, and Brazil's Pix around 250 million a day in the second quarter. Both are free to consumers. RTP and FedNow each cap an individual transfer at $10m, and SEPA Instant requires euro transfers to settle inside ten seconds.
Fast and cheap is now standard for domestic payments.
Two channels grew over the past year, and in both the payer can fund a payment without a bank account. Crypto card spend went from $126m a month to $492m. Agent payments went from 39,496 transactions to 15.3 million, though not in a straight line.
The channels that do settle into a bank account went the other way. Onchain invoicing, where a business bills a customer on a chain and is paid in stablecoins, fell by roughly half. Payment processors, which collect stablecoins for merchants and pay them out in local currency, fell about 13%. Cards added $366m a month. Everything else together lost about $78m.
Part of the card jump comes from one issuer. Wirex went from 878 active cardholders in January to 32,817 in February, and accounts for roughly $95m of the August total. Settlement records cannot tell us whether that is new customers or volume moving in from addresses we do not track, so we set it aside. Without Wirex, card spend still grew 219%.
Always-on settlement is one of the most cited advantages of onchain payments, but instant schemes stay open too. To see whether that is used, we measured the share of payment value settling on Saturday and Sunday, in UTC, from onchain records only. In an even week, weekends would carry 28.6% of value.
Agent payments, x402 and MPP, come in at 29%. They are software paying per request, so they have no weekday, and that makes them the control here. Consumer payments are close behind, near 25%. Business payments are about 5%, and every processor and invoicing channel we can identify falls between 2% and 15%.
Businesses have not stopped paying at weekends, though. Weekends still carry 21% of their transactions, against 5% of their value. Small payments go out as usual, while the large ones tend to wait. Approval queues are the most likely mechanism to account for this. The data cannot separate them from invoice due dates, multi-sig signers, accounting cutoffs, or the banking hours of whoever converts the stablecoins. All of those are organisational calendars, and all would look the same here.
One caveat on the clock. In UTC, a Monday morning payment in Asia can land on Sunday. Sliding the weekend window from UTC-8 to UTC+8, a check on the choice of clock rather than a location for each payment, moves the business figure between 5% and 10%. The gap against consumer and agent flows holds on any of those clocks.
Business payments clear a median ticket of around $500, on processors and onchain invoices alike. Consumer payments clear about $12 on crypto cards and $5 at checkout. Most of the onchain business value sits in the tail: business payments above $10,000 are 5.7% of transactions and 93.1% of value, and payments above $100,000 are 1.7% of transactions and 83.3% of value. The 99th percentile is $213,000, and the largest single payment in August was $8m.
For comparison, RTP averaged about $3,750 a payment in the first quarter of 2026, FedNow about $99,000. Those are averages rather than medians, but they still show that a typical onchain business payment is smaller than both. The $8m payment is large, but it is also within the $10m cap on RTP and FedNow.
A USDC holder cannot pay on Pix, UPI or FedNow until the money is on that rail, usually through an account at a participating institution or an off-ramp that uses one. A card can be funded from the onchain balance and spent at an ordinary merchant. That is why cards, not onchain checkout, took the consumer volume.
In August, 142,510 people spent $492m that way. It is 98% of the consumer stablecoin payment value we can name. Shopify, Stripe checkout and everything else add $8.5m.
The spend is still a card payment. It goes through a regulated issuer, card-network rules and KYC at signup, and some brands sit on neobank rails. What is different is the source of funds: an onchain balance rather than a bank account.
In August, 70.8% of onchain payment transactions cleared below $0.01. That is 13.3 million payments carrying $35,000 between them. Agent payments are 99.99% of them.
Instant schemes cannot serve this range. FedNow charges the sender $0.045 a payment before any bank markup, so those 13.3 million payments would have cost about $600,000 in fees to move $35,000. Each party also needs a bank account, and no bank will open one for a software agent.
Agent payments peaked in December 2025 at 69.6 million transactions carrying $8.9m, against 15.3 million carrying $643,721 in August, so the dollar value has not recovered. The transaction floor has risen all the same: before the spike, monthly volume ran under 40,000 payments. The set of participants remains fairly small: x402 carried 14.7m of August's 15.3 million agent payments, and those came from 15,562 addresses, about 946 each; MPP on Tempo is the rest. Receipt is narrower still, with one wallet taking 21% of all value and the top ten taking 65%, out of 230,010 recipients.
Instant schemes already do the job the onchain pitch used to own. They settle in seconds, stay open all week, take payments up to $10m, and in Brazil and India cost the consumer nothing. On speed, domestic cost and ticket size, onchain does not come out ahead.
Access is where they have already won. A USDC holder can spend at a merchant without first moving money onto a bank rail, and 142,000 people did exactly that in August. A software agent can be paid a fifth of a cent, which no scheme can do: FedNow's fee alone is more than twenty times that, and no bank will open an account for software.
Cross-border may be the other real opening. Each instant scheme stops at its own border. Linking two means a deal, corridor by corridor. Correspondent banking still takes days and three to five percent. We cannot size that here. Putting a payment in a country means guessing at the wallet, and that is a different piece of work.
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