Stablecoins Average Over $400 Million Per Hour in Transfers

Stablecoins move more than $400 million per hour on average, according to a study by Coinbase and The Block, which also found that transfers outside traditional business hours account for a dominant share of that volume. The figure reframes dollar-pegged tokens from a trading convenience into what is effectively round-the-clock settlement infrastructure.

The headline number is the average hourly transfer value across stablecoins tracked in the research. The joint study's second finding is the more operationally significant one: off-hours transfers dominate. In other words, a large share of stablecoin movement happens when banks, card networks and conventional payment rails in the U.S. are closed or running on delayed settlement cycles.

By Daniel Okafor

Why do off-hours transfers matter?

Conventional dollar payments run on schedules. Fedwire operates within a defined business-day window, ACH settles in batches, and cross-border correspondent banking can take days. Stablecoins on public chains don't observe any of that. A transfer at 2 a.m. on a Sunday settles with the same finality as one at noon on a Tuesday.

That gap is the core of the business case the study's data supports. If stablecoins were merely a crypto-market instrument, you'd expect volume to cluster during exchange trading hours. The fact that off-hours activity dominates instead points to payment and settlement use — remittances, payroll, treasury movements between entities, and cross-border flows that can't wait for a banking window.

For payment companies and banks weighing stablecoin integration, the data suggests demand exists around the clock, not just during market hours. That has direct operational consequences: treasury functions, fraud monitoring and customer support built for a nine-to-five model don't map onto rails that never close.

What does the $400 million figure imply at scale?

Averaged across the full 24-hour cycle, over $400 million per hour implies daily stablecoin transfer volume in the billions of dollars. The study's figure covers transfers — actual value movement between addresses — which is a broader measure than exchange trading volume and better reflects payment-like usage.

The hourly framing also matters for comparison. Traditional payment networks report throughput in transactions per second or daily value; a per-hour average makes stablecoin flows directly comparable to the settlement volumes that banks and card networks publish. It's a metric aimed at a payments-industry audience as much as a crypto one.

Who ran the study and what's the context?

The research is a joint effort by Coinbase, the largest U.S.-listed crypto exchange, and The Block, a crypto news and data outlet. The partnership itself is notable: an exchange with its own stablecoin ambitions co-producing usage research signals how central payment-flow data has become to the sector's pitch to institutions and regulators.

The study lands amid a shift in how stablecoins are treated in the U.S. Issuers now operate with greater regulatory clarity following the GENIUS Act, and major banks and payment firms have moved from studying stablecoins to building with them. Volume data showing continuous, off-hours-heavy usage strengthens the argument that dollar-pegged tokens are infrastructure rather than a speculative wrapper.

What happens next?

Expect the usage gap between always-on stablecoin rails and scheduled banking rails to stay in focus. The study's off-hours finding gives payment companies a concrete number to model against, and issuers a data point for institutional pitches — and as bank pilots and issued-token programs scale through the rest of the year, per-hour transfer averages will be the metric to watch.