The Stablecoin Spend Index

The directory currently holds 40 researched merchant records, of which 38 accept stablecoins today. 22 carry a completed editorial verification against the merchant’s own documentation; the rest are marked as varying, which in almost every case means the merchant confirms crypto acceptance but delegates the asset list to a payment gateway.

USDC leads acceptance at 29 merchants ( 76.3% of those accepting), ahead of USDT at 21 (55.3%). That ordering is worth dwelling on, because it inverts the market-capitalisation ranking of the two assets. Tether is substantially the larger stablecoin by supply, but USD Coin is the one merchants put on their checkout — a gap driven by regulation rather than preference, and visible most sharply among European merchants whose gateways withdrew USDT under MiCA.

The most striking figure is not an adoption number at all. Of 38 accepting merchants, 15 do not publish which blockchain network they settle on, and 5 do not publish which stablecoins they take. Those gaps are not gaps in our research — they are the merchants’ own silence, and they are the single largest practical obstacle to paying a bill in stablecoins without losing money to a wrong-chain transfer.

How the figures are produced

The index is recomputed on every build from the merchant collection. There is no separate statistics store to fall out of sync, and no figure is entered by hand. The denominator for share calculations is the 38 merchants whose acceptance is live; records marked as no longer accepting are excluded from adoption percentages and counted separately.

What this is not

It is not a measure of transaction volume, and nothing here should be read as one. We count merchants, not payments. A hosting company processing four stablecoin invoices a month counts exactly as much as a marketplace processing four thousand. Volume data would have to come from the gateways, and they do not publish it per merchant.

It is also a sample, not a census. It covers merchants we have researched and could verify from primary sources, which biases towards businesses that document their payment options in English. Merchants that accept stablecoins quietly, or document it only in another language, are under-represented. We would rather state that plainly than imply completeness.

Corrections

If a figure here contradicts something you know about your own business, the fix is at the record level. Tell us, with a URL, and the correction propagates to this page on the next build and appears in What’s Changed.