Stablecoins Are Quietly Becoming Business Infrastructure, NOWPayments Data Shows

[PRESS RELEASE – Tallinn, Estonia, October 8th, 2026] SaaS and eCommerce increased their combined share from 48.26% to 55.54%, while Trading moved from 14.07% to 13.15%. Businesses can build stablecoin infrastructure around the wrong problem. The mistake is treating stablecoins primarily as a coin-and-network decision. For a digital business, they may need to support a much broader set of operating workflows, including billing, checkout, settlement, payouts, and reconciliation. Which of those workflows matters most depends on the business model. New aggregated data from> NOWPayments shows the industry mix shifting toward businesses that use payments as part of their day-to-day operations. Between January 16 and July 16, 2026, SaaS and web services accounted for 27.78% of classified partners. eCommerce Marketplaces followed at 27.76%. Together, the two sectors represented 55.54% of the sample. During the same period in 2025, their combined share was 48.26%. The increase of 7.28 percentage points represents a 15.08% year-over-year rise in their combined share. Trading remained an important part of the sample, but its share moved in the opposite direction. It declined from 14.07% in 2025 to 13.15% in 2026, leaving trading in third place behind SaaS and eCommerce. The clearest upward shift came from SaaS. Its share increased from 15.58% to 27.78% in one year, closing a gap of 17.10 percentage points with eCommerce. The emerging picture is not stablecoins replacing trading. It is stablecoin adoption expanding into the operating infrastructure of digital businesses. Unless otherwise stated, industry-distribution figures compare January 16 to July 16, 2025, with January 16 to July 16, 2026. The Partner Mix Is Shifting Toward Operational Use Cases In 2025, eCommerce marketplaces led the dataset at 32.68%. SaaS and Web Services followed at 15.58%, with Trading close behind at 14.07%. One year later, SaaS had increased its share by 12.20 percentage points to 27.78%. eCommerce stood at 27.76%, leaving only 0.02 percentage points between the two sectors. Their combined share rose from 48.26% to 55.54%. More than half of the classified partners in the 2026 sample therefore came from two sectors built around digital transactions, recurring services, and online customer relationships. The rest of the partner mix changed more gradually. Financial Services moved from 9.00% to 6.35%. Gambling and iGaming increased from 6.20% to 6.87%, and adult platforms rose from 4.99% to 5.89%. Charity declined from 2.27% to 1.40%, while TGE/Presale moved from 2.12% to 1.35%. These figures measure changes in each industry’s share of the sample. They do not measure absolute