If you blinked sometime this year, you may have missed one of the fastest adoption waves in crypto payments to date. Binance Pay — which started 2025 with around twelve thousand merchants — now says more than 20 million businesses accept its payment rails. The number is almost surreal when you say it out loud. Ten months, and the network grew by more than 1,700 times. The expansion hasn’t been limited to crypto-native hotspots. Retailers and service operators from South Africa to Argentina, from Turkey to Thailand, have been adding Binance Pay to their checkout flow. Much of this isn’t coming from curiosity; it’s coming from customers asking for faster ways to pay, especially in regions where traditional banking still moves at a glacial pace. What’s striking is how matter-of-fact the shift feels. Crypto payments used to be something you pulled out for novelty — “let me see if this works.” Now they’re turning into an everyday option, almost mundane, which in itself says a great deal about where the financial world is heading.
Investor Takeaway
Why Stablecoins Have Become the Default Choice
Most of the momentum can be credited to stablecoins. They’ve evolved into the “practical” side of crypto — less volatile, more predictable, and increasingly familiar. Binance Pay’s own numbers understate nothing: more than 98% of its B2C transactions this year have used stablecoins like USDT, USDC, EURI, FDUSD, or others in that growing basket. It makes sense. Cross-border payments through banks often feel like time travel back to the 1990s. You send money, then sit and wait while the transfer wanders through fees, intermediaries, and foreign exchange markups. Stablecoin settlements skip all that. They move instantly. They cost next to nothing. And they don’t care what continent you’re on.
Since its 2021 launch, Binance Pay has processed over $250 billion in cumulative volume — a number that’s quietly snowballed alongside its user base, which has now climbed past 45 million people. The story is the same almost everywhere: users want faster payments, and merchants want to stop fighting settlement delays. Industry data mirrors the trend. Artemis reported stablecoin payment volumes topping $10 billion monthly by August 2025, up 82% from January. EY believes stablecoins could make up 5–10% of all global payments by 2030, though that estimate is beginning to look conservative. The pace of change tends to surprise even the people predicting it.
How Banks and Legacy Networks Are Responding
The acceleration hasn’t gone unnoticed by traditional financial players. SWIFT — often criticized for long settlement windows — has launched a shared blockchain ledger to keep pace with the new reality. It’s a far cry from the posture banks held a few years ago, when many dismissed crypto as a passing phase. Now, they’re quietly building on-chain tools inside their back-end systems. These aren’t isolated experiments. They’re early attempts at full-on integration, the kind that can reshape how institutions move money, hedge positions, handle correspondent banking, and manage liquidity. What matters is that the direction is now the same across the board: legacy rails are leaning into blockchain instead of resisting it. Even smaller companies are reacting. Payment processors, booking platforms, e-commerce hubs — all are sizing up stablecoins as a way to shave operating costs and shrink settlement windows. When enough businesses make the switch, the network effect becomes self-reinforcing.
Binance Pay’s Expanding Role in Global Commerce
Binance Pay is increasingly positioning itself as the connective tissue of this new ecosystem. Its merchant network spans luxury hotels, convenience stores, telecoms, fast-food chains, travel platforms, and local shops that rely heavily on fast turnover. Names like JW Marriott Cannes, KFC South Africa, and SPAR Switzerland give a sense of how mainstream the technology has become. A big part of the momentum comes from national integrations. In Brazil, Binance Pay ties directly into Pix, making crypto-to-reais conversions nearly instantaneous. Argentina’s universal QR code system lets people pay with crypto at any merchant that accepts QR payments — which, in Argentina, is virtually all of them. Bhutan has gone further by enabling crypto payments for its national tourism platform, from flights and lodging to local services. Binance Pay also plays a role in Google’s agentic payment initiatives, a sign that crypto payments are being considered for next-generation consumer interfaces rather than remaining boxed inside wallets.
Investor Takeaway
Where the Trend Is Heading
Payments are drifting toward an obvious conclusion: if money can move instantly and globally without friction, people will choose that option. The global financial system isn’t there yet, but the gap is closing quickly as merchants, consumers, and institutions all pull in the same direction. Binance Pay’s numbers aren’t just huge — they’re revealing. Tens of millions of users, billions in volume, integrations at the national infrastructure level — these are signs of a technology that’s beginning to slip into the background of daily life. The future, at this pace, looks increasingly borderless. Stablecoins may not replace existing systems, but they’re already complementing them, and in some regions, outright surpassing them. Crypto payments aren’t the experiment anymore. They’re the upgrade.