$2.5 million processed in stablecoins: the numbers, the merchants, and what we learned

This week TronDealer crossed a figure that a year ago felt far away: more than $2.5 million processed in stablecoins for merchants, platforms and services that get paid in USDT and USDC from Latin America and the Caribbean.

It is not a marketing number. It is the sum of real deposits that landed in real wallets, confirmed on chain, fired a webhook and were swept to the merchant's destination. In this article we open the pipeline and publish what we see: how much came in per coin and per network, how volume grew month over month, what a typical payment looks like, who is getting paid through us, how we compare with the industry's largest players, and how much money stayed with merchants instead of leaving as fees.

The milestone in one table#

Thirty-eight thousand wallets for fifteen thousand deposits may look disproportionate. It is not: the dominant usage pattern is one wallet per invoice. Checkout platforms generate an address for every order, and most of those orders are never paid. That this waste is free for the merchant is one of the reasons the model works.

Volume by coin#

Three takeaways:

• USDT is still the dollar of Latin America. Four out of every five dollars arrive as Tether. It is the coin the end customer already holds, and a gateway that does not treat it as a first-class citizen is locked out of the Spanish-speaking market.
• USDC grows where the network is cheap. Almost two thirds of the USDC we processed arrived through Solana and Base, not Ethereum. When gas costs cents, merchants and customers pick the regulated coin without a second thought.
• PYUSD showed up without us looking for it. We added it on Ethereum in July because a client asked; four months later it moves more than all of Bitcoin combined. Niche stablecoins find their place once there is a rail that accepts them.

Volume by network#

Here is the surprise for anyone coming from the global crypto narrative: BNB Smart Chain, not TRON, is the number one network of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. TRON dominates USDT worldwide, but in our markets the end user usually arrives from Binance, where a BEP20 withdrawal costs cents and is the default option. TRON holds a solid second place thanks to built-in energy renting, which means a TRC20 payment never forces the merchant to keep TRX on hand.

Solana in third place, ahead of Ethereum, confirms the trend: stablecoins move wherever they are cheapest, and the expensive networks are left for the large amounts.

Month-over-month growth#

From $27 thousand in March to $766 thousand in October: monthly volume multiplied by 28 in seven months. The jump from July to August coincides with two things we did on purpose: opening registration without manual approval, and publishing the full API with documentation readable by humans and by agents. What followed was not a campaign, it was integration: every new merchant that plugged in its checkout brought its own flow.

At October's pace, the next million lands in about six weeks.

What a typical payment looks like#

Eighteen percent of payments are under $10 and more than half are under $50. This is what separates a gateway built for Latin America from one built for Silicon Valley: here the typical payment is a top-up, a subscription, a delivery, a food order. A fee model with a $1 minimum per transaction, common in the industry, would eat 10% of our median payment. That is why our fixed fee under $10 is $0.30, and why the stablecoin minimum deposit went down to $0.40.

How merchants get paid#

Two out of three merchants choose not to touch crypto at all: the customer pays in USDT and they receive balance. It is the piece global gateways cannot offer in our markets, because none of them settles in Caribbean local currency or to accounts without a traditional bank.

Success stories#

We do not publish merchant names without permission, so the following cases are described by what their data shows, with one exception that is public.

QvaPay: one wallet per invoice, at scale#

QvaPay, the payments platform for the Cuban diaspora and the Caribbean, is TronDealer's anchor client and the reason most of this infrastructure exists. Its integration generates a fresh deposit address for every invoice on BSC, TRON, Solana and Ethereum, collects USDT and USDC, and credits the user's balance seconds after confirmation. It moves more than four out of every five dollars in the pipeline: 11,394 settled deposits and most of the pipeline's twelve-thousand-plus TRON wallets, almost all single-use.

What QvaPay taught us became product for everyone: automatic expiry of unfunded wallets, chunked log queries on TRON once the active set crossed a thousand addresses, energy renting per sweep so no wallet ever needs its own TRX, and native coin detection because its users "only had TRX" or "only had SOL".

A services platform with 414 payments and a $55 ticket#

Registered at the end of March, it collects USDT on BSC exclusively and settles to custody. Four hundred and fourteen settled payments, $24 thousand, an average of $59 per charge: the classic profile of a recurring digital service. It never configured a webhook. It checks the dashboard and the balance simply arrives. This is the "I do not want to know anything about blockchain" case, and it is our favorite, because it proves the complexity stayed on the right side.

A multi-network merchant that let the customer choose#

Registered in April, it is the only one of the large accounts that enabled deposits across five network and coin combinations: USDT and USDC on BSC, USDC on Base, USDT and USDC on Ethereum. Result: 261 payments, almost $43 thousand, and 14% of its volume arriving through networks most regional gateways do not even offer. It has a webhook configured and automated order fulfillment from the confirmation event.

Two high-ticket businesses#

Two accounts, registered in March and June, with fewer than 140 payments each but averages of $250 per payment, both in USDT on BSC, both settling to custody. Between them they add up to $58 thousand. This is the profile of the importer or wholesaler that used to depend on multi-day international wires with fees of tens of dollars, and now gets paid in minutes.

The 174 that already got paid#

Beyond the five largest, there are 169 accounts with settled payments that together add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Stores running the WooCommerce plugin, Telegram bots, travel agencies, top-up services, developers who tested with $5 and stayed. The median of those businesses is small, and that is exactly the long tail that gateways with corporate KYC and monthly minimums do not serve.

State of the art: how the big players do it#

Stablecoin payments stopped being a niche. Total stablecoin supply hovers around $300 billion in 2026, with USDT and USDC concentrating more than 80% of it, and the large payment processors have entered the field. It is worth looking at how they solve it, because the architecture decisions explain the fees.

What the big players have in common:

• They charge between 1% and 1.5% because they convert to fiat and carry the compliance risk in banking jurisdictions. It is a valuable service in the US and Europe, and a service the Latin American merchant does not need if it already operates in digital dollars.
• They concentrate networks. Stripe chose USDC on four networks; Coinbase Commerce bets on Base, its own chain. Neither treats TRON or BSC as a priority, and those are the two networks that carry 77% of our volume.
• They require corporate identity. Reasonable for their market, and an impassable barrier for an entrepreneur in Havana, Caracas or Managua.
• They close the loop. Binance Pay charges 0%, but only if both sides are inside Binance. It works until a customer shows up with their own wallet.

What we do differently is in the architecture, not the price:

• Our own detection per chain. Seven independent subsystems, each with its native strategy: event logs on EVM and TRON, associated-account scanning on Solana, block walking on Bitcoin and Litecoin, jetton-wallet reads on TON, and contract events on Stellar. On BSC, Ethereum, Polygon, Base and Solana, WebSocket workers additionally see the deposit within one to three seconds.
• Keys encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM and decrypted only at the signing point, as described in the encryption guide.
• HMAC-SHA256 signed webhooks with retries, anti-SSRF validation on every delivery and manual resend from the dashboard.
• Sweeps with the fee paid by us. On TRON we rent energy, on Solana we pay the transaction as fee payer, on EVM we fund the gas. The merchant never needs native coin to receive a stablecoin.
• Documentation for humans and for agents. OpenAPI 3, llms.txt and a registration endpoint with no approval step, because half of the integrations of 2026 are written by a coding assistant.

Earnings and savings versus the industry#

Take exactly what went through the pipeline, $2.44 million across 15,765 payments, and compute what it would have cost to process through other rails. These are processor fees, excluding the network fee, which in our case we cover in the sweep.

Two out of three merchants are on custody, so the actual fee charged on these $2.44 million came in far below the worst case. Versus cards, merchants saved around $65,000; versus remittances, close to $150,000. And that leaves out what cannot be measured as a percentage: zero chargebacks, settlement in minutes instead of days, and access to customers who do not hold an international card.

There is a second, less visible gain. Every wallet we generated that was never paid, more than twenty thousand of them, cost the merchant nothing. On a gateway with a fee per address or per active invoice, that checkout "waste" would be a line item.

What did not go perfectly#

A real milestone includes the scars. Three worth telling, because each one changed the product:

• Stranded TRX in July. TRON silently drops a transfer that exceeds the balance after fee burn, while still returning a transaction id. Max-mode sweeps left activation TRX stuck in deposit wallets. Today every drain is verified by re-reading the balance, and the dashboard has a button to reclaim whatever is left.
• The TRON scan froze at a thousand wallets. The RPC provider caps log queries at a thousand topics. The day the active set crossed that number, the cursor stopped moving. The query is now chunked, and unfunded wallets expire on their own after seven days.
• A $0.49 USDT payment was swept and never credited. The worker's dust threshold and the sweep's did not match. They were unified at $0.40 on every path, and a test guarantees it.

None of the three incidents lost a merchant's funds. All three are documented in the code so they do not come back.

What is next#

• Stellar with USDC and memos has been in production since October, on the shared-address model.
• USDG on Robinhood Chain closed end to end at the end of October.
• Mobile app with push notifications per deposit, already available to dashboard clients.
• WooCommerce plugin in its second version, with the network catalog served live by the API.
• Sponsored transfers on BSC and Solana so the end user can pay USDT without holding gas, rolling out with QvaPay.

Thank you#

To the 853 businesses that trusted part of their cash flow to a gateway that does not ask permission to start. To QvaPay, which was the first client and the most demanding. And to every developer who opened the documentation at two in the morning and wrote to us when something did not add up.

The next $2.5 million will be faster.

Sources for third-party figures#

• Stablecoin supply and market concentration: Spark, market cap tracker and REAP, 2026 statistics.
• Stripe's stablecoin payment fee (1.5%) and processor comparison: Eco, 2026 fee comparison.
• Coinbase Commerce and BitPay fees: Coinpaprika, 2026 solutions comparison.
• Global average remittance cost (6.49%): World Bank, Remittance Prices Worldwide, Q1 2025.
• Card and PayPal rates are their published US merchant prices. Third-party fees change often: verify with each provider before deciding.