Retail crypto trading has cooled, but the dollar-pegged tokens underneath it are having their best year. "In the past 12 months, there's been over 300 million unique users of stablecoins, which is an absurdly high number," said Patrick Kim of the analytics firm Artemis. "If you told this to someone five years ago, they would look you dead in the eyes and say you're bluffing." That figure is Artemis's tally of unique on-chain addresses transacting in stablecoins, not a verified headcount of people, and address counts can overstate real users because one person often controls many wallets. Even discounted, the direction is clear: the firms moving the tokens are increasingly payment companies and consumer apps rather than crypto exchanges.