How big is this, really? Sizing the market for digital cross-border settlement
When I describe what we are building, the first question a serious investor asks is the right one: how large is the prize. It is the question that separates an interesting idea from an investable one. So this note is about market size — done honestly, with current numbers, and without the inflation that usually surrounds this topic.
Let me start with three terms, because I will use them throughout and they are worth getting straight.
TAM is the total addressable market — the entire universe of spending, if you served everyone. SAM is the serviceable addressable market — the slice your actual product can realistically reach. SOM is the serviceable obtainable market — the portion you can genuinely win in the near term. Good companies are honest about the difference. A vast TAM means little if your SOM is a rounding error.
One more term: a basis point is one hundredth of one percent. It matters here because in payments, the fee captured on a transaction is tiny — often a fraction of a percent — but the volumes are enormous. Small percentages of large numbers are how this industry makes money.
The universe: cross-border payments
Start at the top. Money moving across borders is one of the largest flows in the world economy. Recent estimates put total cross-border payment flows at close to $190 trillion a year, rising toward roughly $290 trillion by 2030.
That is the volume. The revenue the industry earns on it is far smaller — in the region of $200 billion a year today, growing toward $280–320 billion by 2030. The gap between those two numbers is the basis-point point above: trillions move, but only a thin slice is captured as fee.
Crucially for us, the value is overwhelmingly business-to-business. B2B flows make up around 73 percent of cross-border value. This is not a consumer story. It is a story about how companies pay each other across borders.
Narrowing to the part that actually hurts
A $190 trillion TAM is not a strategy. The relevant question is where the friction — and therefore the willingness to pay — is concentrated.
It is concentrated in exactly the markets we focus on. Remittances to low- and middle-income countries alone reached roughly $690 billion in 2025, and that is just the personal flows; the commercial flows behind them are far larger. These are the corridors where dollars are scarce, where banks are slow or retreating, and where a company will pay a real premium simply to get a supplier paid on time.
That is the serviceable market: API-first, multi-rail treasury and cross-border settlement for the businesses, mid-market corporates, and platforms operating in and out of these markets. On a base-case view, that SAM represents on the order of $8 trillion in annual flow and tens of billions in revenue — a fraction of the global TAM, but the fraction with the most pain and the least competition.
The new settlement layer
Now the part that is genuinely new, and growing faster than anything else in finance.
Stablecoins — digital dollar tokens used to settle value — have moved from the margins to real infrastructure. As of early 2026, the total stablecoin market stands at around $315 billion, and it kept climbing even while the wider digital-asset market fell. More telling than the size is the throughput: stablecoins settled roughly $33 trillion in transfers during 2025, up more than 70 percent year on year. Two tokens, USDT and USDC, account for about 93 percent of the market.
The most relevant figure for us sits inside that total. Real-economy business-to-business stablecoin payments grew several-fold year on year — off a small base, but on a trajectory that few things in finance ever show. This is the layer through which the cross-border B2B flows above are beginning to move.
Our slice
Put the three together and the picture is clear.
The TAM is the $190 trillion cross-border universe. The SAM is the high-friction, B2B, emerging-market slice of it, settling increasingly on stablecoin rails. The SOM — the part we intend to win first — is the flow across a focused set of corridors: Nigeria, Pakistan, Argentina, Turkey, and the China–UAE trade hub. On our own bottom-up estimate, those five corridors alone represent more than $200 billion in annual cross-border flow.
Here is the line that matters to an investor. The market is so large that we do not need a large share of it. If our platform eventually coordinates even a low-single-digit share of our serviceable market at a take rate of a fraction of a percent, that is a business measured in tens of millions of revenue — and the math only improves as recurring software revenue is layered on top. A tiny share of a market this size is still a venture-scale outcome.
My read
Two honest caveats, because the temptation in this topic is to wave around the biggest number available.
First, most of that $190 trillion is wholesale, bank-to-bank flow that we will never touch and should not pretend to. The relevant number is not the TAM; it is the serviceable slice where friction is real and we can actually compete.
Second, the stablecoin settlement layer, for all its growth, is still small against the total — single-digit percentages of cross-border value at most. We are early. That is precisely the point. Being early to a market that the central banks are now building on, that the United States is now legislating for, and that is compounding at over 70 percent a year is not a risk to apologise for. It is the opportunity.
The honest version of the market-size story is more compelling than the inflated one. The prize does not need exaggerating. It needs reaching.