Cross-border payments have become increasingly digital, but much of the financial infrastructure underpinning them still operates around traditional banking and settlement hours.
Stablecoins offer a different model. Dollar-backed tokens such as $USDT and $USDC can move and settle across blockchain networks around the clock, creating access to dollar-denominated liquidity even when conventional banking infrastructure is offline.
That difference is increasingly visible in the data. Coinbase Institutional found that weekend activity has consistently accounted for roughly 20% of weekly adjusted stablecoin volume over several years. In other words, a meaningful share of stablecoin activity is taking place precisely when many traditional financial rails are unavailable for settlement.
Stablecoin payments themselves are also growing. Research firm Artemis tracked $136 billion in stablecoin payment settlements between January 2023 and February 2025. By August 2025, the annualized pace of those payments had reached approximately $122 billion, with monthly volume reaching roughly $10.2 billion.
The Philippines as a test case
The Philippines offers a particularly relevant example. Overseas Filipino workers sent $35.63 billion in cash remittances through banks and regulated financial institutions in 2025, up 3.3% from the previous year, according to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas.
That creates a large market where the ability to continuously convert dollars into Philippine pesos has practical value.
Coins.ph, a Philippine crypto exchange and e-wallet licensed by the country’s central bank, has been building $USDT and $USDC-to-peso liquidity around that demand. The company says its peso order book currently handles around $100 million a day in $USDT and $USDC trading.
“The bigger difference is the FX layer,” Coins.ph CEO Wei Zhou said in a recent interview. “Outside the US, nothing converts one to one. The price changes constantly, and with that comes uncertainty: is this the right price, and how much can I actually execute at it?”
The distinction becomes particularly visible outside normal banking hours.
“On the weekends we see higher stablecoin trading volume than on weekdays, because the banks are closed,” Zhou said. “There are no rates on the weekend.”
For remittance companies, the problem is practical. A provider processing a transfer from the United States to the Philippines on a Saturday still needs to determine how many pesos the recipient should receive. Without an executable FX price, the provider may need to account for potential currency movements before conventional markets reopen.
A continuously traded $USDT or $USDC-to-peso market offers another route, allowing payment providers to potentially access executable local-currency liquidity outside conventional FX hours.
This is already moving beyond theory. Remitly and Coins.ph launched a remittance solution in early 2026 that converts U.S. or Canadian fiat into stablecoins for the transfer leg before delivering Philippine pesos to a Coins.ph wallet or connected bank account. The companies say the structure enables near-real-time settlement.
The composition of stablecoin liquidity is changing as well. Zhou says $USDC now represents roughly 40% of stablecoin volume on Coins.ph, compared with a market that was almost entirely $USDT two years ago. He attributes part of that shift to U.S. businesses and financial institutions using $USDC for overseas payouts.
An always-on layer for cross-border payments
The dynamic is not limited to the Philippines.
In Nigeria, the International Monetary Fund has identified constraints on access to foreign exchange as one factor increasing the relative attractiveness of stablecoins for cross-border transactions. The IMF noted that stablecoins can reduce reliance on correspondent banking networks and intermediaries, potentially enabling faster and cheaper international transfers.
The cost gap in some corridors remains substantial. The same IMF report, citing World Bank data, puts the global average cost of sending $200 internationally at 6.49%, rising to 8.78% in Sub-Saharan Africa. The IMF cautions, however, that the final cost of a stablecoin transaction still depends on network fees as well as the cost of converting between fiat and digital assets.
None of this suggests stablecoins are about to replace the global foreign-exchange market. Traditional banks continue to provide deep liquidity, large transaction capacity and regulated financial infrastructure that stablecoin markets do not consistently match.
Instead, a more immediate role is emerging alongside that system: an always-on layer for moving dollar liquidity across borders and, increasingly, converting it into local currencies.
The roughly 20% of stablecoin activity occurring on weekends illustrates where that difference becomes most tangible. Cross-border payments do not stop when banks close, and the infrastructure supporting them is beginning to reflect that.
