11-12-2026 
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TL;DR: Stablecoin payments rose 45% to $482 billion in the first nine months of 2026, while supply grew just 0.4% to $305 billion, according to Allium. Meanwhile, Russia will let retail investors buy BTC, Ether, and USDT starting November 17, and Nigeria’s new rules ban algorithmic stablecoins and yield.
Key Takeaways:
- Stablecoin payments rose 45% to $482 billion in the first nine months of 2026, while global supply grew only 0.4% to $305 billion.
- Stablecoin payment count jumped 71% to 1.04 billion as the average payment fell from $544 to $462.
- Russian exchanges can offer BTC, Ether, and USDT to retail investors from November 17, with a 300,000-ruble annual cap for non-qualified investors.
- Nigeria’s central bank banned algorithmic stablecoins and yield on custodied stablecoin balances under rules effective November 5.
Stablecoin use is up as countries around the world continue to develop digital asset rules to account for the growing space.
A new report has revealed that stablecoin payments and transactions have increased significantly this year, even as supply has slowed. Meanwhile, major digital currency adopters are rolling out new rules to govern the sector, with Russia and Nigeria the latest to join the regulation party.
Stablecoin supply slows as adoption grows
Despite global stablecoin supply growing only 0.4% this year to $305 billion, payments grew by almost half (45%) to $482 billion, and the number of transactions skyrocketed by 71%, according to a recent report from online data platform Allium.
Measuring stablecoin supply, adjusted volume, payments, agentic payments and card spend through September 30, 2026, with commentary from 17 industry contributors—including Visa (NASDAQ: V), Stripe, Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN), Citizens and Moody’s (NASDAQ: MCO)—Allium’s Q3 2026 report found that stablecoin supply ended September at $305 billion, 0.4% above the start of the year, while the activity running through it kept growing.
Payment count rose 71% to 1.04 billion and the average payment fell from $544 to $462, so growth came from more frequent, smaller payments. Meanwhile, third-quarter payment value grew 51% year-on-year, with September setting a monthly high of $72 billion, and adjusted volume—Allium’s measure of end-user transfers—rose 48% to $2.4 trillion in the first nine months of the year, and payments, one-fifth of that, rose 45% to $482 billion.
In contrast to this boom in adoption, supply at Tether, Circle and Ethena—the world’s top three stablecoins by market cap—fell this year, as other issuers added a net $6.9 billion, and 15 issuers now hold more than $1 billion, up from 11 in 2025.
“Distribution is now where issuers compete,” concluded Allium. “Open USD shares reserve income with the partners that bring it supply, and companies such as Polymarket and Jupiter issue their own stablecoins backed by existing ones, mainly USDC and PYUSD, while agents and cards open newer routes into spending.”
On the latter innovation, Allium found that AI agents—autonomous software that can make purchases or payments on someone’s behalf, often called “agentic payments”—were increasingly becoming a new route into stablecoin spending, even if “still small in value.” Agent payments doubled to 68.3 million in Q3 while their value slipped to $3.7 million. Stablecoin card spend also grew tenfold, to $3.9 billion.
Visa, Stripe and Coinbase, among the contributors to the report, have all been publicly building infrastructure for AI-agent payments: Coinbase’s x402 protocol, Stripe’s agentic commerce tools and Visa’s agent-payment initiatives.
Overall, the report suggests stablecoins may be shifting from trading collateral towards a genuine payments rail, with a flat pool of dollars changing hands more often and in smaller amounts.
This creates a tension for issuers, whose revenue comes from interest earned on reserves, which scales with supply rather than with how much the coins are used, which may help explain why the market leaders are losing ground to newer issuers willing to share that income with the platforms that bring them users.
The timing also matters, as in the United States the GENIUS Act, signed on July 28, 2025, is due to take effect on January 18, 2027, limiting issuance to licensed firms with full reserves and barring them from paying holders interest. This may push reserve income toward the platforms that distribute stablecoins.
While the U.S. must wait until next year for its stablecoin rules, and remains without a market structure framework—with the Clarity Act stalled in Congress—Russia is preparing to roll out new rules for exchanges.
Russia finalizes rules
Russia’s central bank has finalized rules allowing exchanges to offer BTC, Ether (ETH) and Tether USDt (USDT) to retail investors starting November 17.
Under the rules, Russian exchanges can start offering digital assets to ordinary investors on November 17, when a Bank of Russia directive takes effect. As the last major piece of the country’s first comprehensive digital asset framework, the central bank said that, from that date, exchanges may admit the approved assets into public circulation.
Thus far, only three assets are approved: BTC, Ether and Tether’s USDT, which were chosen for their market capitalization, average daily trading volume and at least five years of price history on foreign exchanges. Non-qualified investors can buy up to 300,000 rubles (about $3,700) a year through each intermediary, including brokers, asset managers and exchange providers, while qualified investors have no cap—but everyone must pass a mandatory test before trading.
The directive rests on Federal Law No. 282-FZ, which was based on a framework proposed by the Bank of Russia in December 2025, passed by the State Duma on July 22, 2026, and signed by President Vladimir Putin on August 4.
The law took effect on September 1, and in October the central bank authorized Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank, to offer digital asset exchange services. Meanwhile, in a November 2 press release, the Moscow Exchange said it plans to start pilot trading in the three assets on December 1.
The digital asset market in Russia is potentially huge and lucrative. Blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis ranked Russia as Europe’s largest crypto market, with more than $376 billion in inflows between July 2024 and June 2025—most of that activity has run through unregulated offshore platforms. More recently, in February Russian Finance Ministry estimated daily turnover at around 50 billion rubles (roughly $650 million), or more than 10 trillion rubles a year.
Russia isn’t the only state imposing new rules on the digital asset space, with some proposing more far-reaching measures.
Nigeria’s new licensing regime bans yield and algorithmic stablecoins
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has introduced a licensing regime with sweeping new rules for digital asset firms in the country, including reserve requirements, tightened oversight of stablecoins and digital asset payment services, and bans on algorithmic stablecoins and yield, in a major shift for one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing digital asset markets.
On November 5, the CBN issued its Regulations for the Operations of Non-Security Virtual Assets, which established new rules for stablecoin issuers, digital asset payment providers, exchanges, custodians and other service providers.
Notable among a host of new measures was a licensing regime that splits stablecoins offered to Nigerians into naira-referenced and foreign-currency-referenced tokens, each requiring its own CBN issuer license and individual token approval, while issuers must be incorporated in Nigeria with a staffed local office and a resident chief compliance officer.
In other words, henceforth, global dollar-stablecoins can only reach Nigerian users through a licensed local entity, with existing digital asset operators given 180 days to apply for a license.
Issuers of naira tokens need 10 billion naira (around $7.4 million) in paid-up capital; issuers of foreign currency tokens need 15 billion naira ($11.1 million); and other service providers, such as exchanges and wallets, need 1 billion naira ($741,000). In addition, reserves must back tokens one-to-one at all times, plus a 2% over-collateralisation buffer, with at least 40% held in cash or high-quality liquid assets.
Naira token issuers must also lodge at least 20% of their reserves with the CBN as a non-interest-bearing deposit.
Meanwhile, coins exceeding 500 billion naira ($370.5 million) in circulation or five million Nigerian users face enhanced “systemic” supervision.
Perhaps most significantly, the new regulations come with outright bans on several categories of tokens. Namely: algorithmic Stablecoins, i.e. tokens that seek to maintain a stable value solely or primarily through algorithmic adjustment of supply or demand rather than full backing by Eligible Reserve Assets; tokens that reference a fiat currency but are backed wholly or primarily by other virtual assets; tokens issued by, or on behalf of, a sanctioned person or a person located in a sanctioned jurisdiction; tokens that are represented or marketed as stablecoins but do not confer on their holders an enforceable right of redemption at par; and any other token that the central bank determines poses an unacceptable risk to monetary or financial stability, financial integrity or consumers.
Neither the European Union’s landmark Markets in Crypto Asset (MiCA) nor the U.S. GENIUS Act ban algorithmic or crypto-backed stablecoins outright, making the CBN rules look unusually harsh by comparison. However, both MiCA and GENIUS arguably amount to a similar result, if indirectly, by setting reserve requirements that those designs can’t meet.
A prohibition that the incoming Nigeria regulation does share with its EU and U.S. counterparts relates to yield, a hot topic in the stablecoin space over the past few years.
According to the CBN, any business that holds approved stablecoins or tokenized deposits in custody on customers’ behalf “shall not pay interest or yield on those balances and shall enable customers to redeem or transfer their balances without undue delay.”
Yield is also restricted under MiCA, which bars both issuers and service providers from paying interest, and the GENIUS Act, which bans issuers from doing so. In the U.S., the restrictions have largely been driven by banks’ fears that interest-bearing stablecoins could draw deposits away from the banking system, and efforts to extend the ban to exchanges have met stiff resistance from the digital asset industry.
In terms of repercussions for falling foul of Nigeria’s rules, anyone who issues, offers, distributes, or facilitates access to a prohibited token in the country is liable for substantial enforcement and administrative measures, including fines of no less than 100 million naira ($74,108) for each day the contravention continues.
For breach of the ban on interest and yield payments to holders, the regulation imposes a fine equivalent to twice the amount of the prohibited payment or benefit. While for fraudulent or deliberate misrepresentation to the Bank or to the public in connection with reserve management or stablecoin operations, comes a fine of no less than 500 million naira ($370,540) and referral for criminal prosecution.
Nigeria’s new regime marks another shift in the CBN’s oft-changing approach to crypto. In February 2021, it ordered banks to close accounts linked to digital asset trading, then lifted that ban in December 2023 with guidelines allowing banks to serve licensed virtual asset service providers.
Since then, the Investments and Securities Act 2025 has brought digital assets that count as securities under Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and, in July 2026, President Bola Tinubu signed an executive order setting up a CBN-chaired Virtual Asset Council to coordinate oversight across agencies, leaving the central bank responsible for non-security assets such as stablecoins.
The CBN’s newly revealed framework seeks to bring clarity and control to one of the world’s biggest digital asset markets. Nigeria ranked sixth in Chainalysis’ 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index, down from second the year before, and received $92.1 billion in on-chain value in the 12 months to June 2025, the most in Sub-Saharan Africa. Dollar stablecoins also are widely used in the country for remittances and as a hedge against the falling naira.
The new rules came into effect on November 5, meaning existing operators have until roughly December 5, 2026, to register with the CBN, with supervisory reporting kicking off a month later, and a deadline for full license application in May 2027.
FAQs:
How much did stablecoin payments grow in 2026?
Stablecoin payments rose 45% to $482 billion through September, according to Allium. Supply grew just 0.4% to $305 billion.
Why are stablecoin payments growing but supply isn’t?
The same dollars are changing hands more often in smaller amounts. The average payment fell from $544 to $462.
Can Russians buy Bitcoin legally?
Yes. From November 17, Russian exchanges can sell BTC, Ether, and USDT to retail investors, with a 300,000-ruble annual cap for non-qualified buyers.
Are stablecoins banned in Nigeria?
No. Nigeria bans algorithmic stablecoins and yield, and dollar stablecoins must go through a licensed local entity.
How much capital do you need for a stablecoin license in Nigeria?
Naira stablecoin issuers need 10 billion naira (about $7.4 million). Foreign currency issuers need 15 billion naira ($11.1 million).
What is the deadline for Nigerian crypto operators to get licensed?
Operators must register by about December 5, 2026, and apply for a full license by May 2027.
Watch: CBDCs or Stablecoins? What the Industry Leaders Actually Think
