THE RESEARCH DESK — SPECIMEN BULLETIN No. 0
SPECIMEN EDITION — SET BEFORE THE PRESSES TURN. FIGURES ILLUSTRATIVE; PLATES TRUE TO FORM. THE FIRST AUDITED BULLETIN FOLLOWS THE FIRST REAL QUARTER.

State of Crypto Payments

Q2 · MMXXVI
Being a full and honest account of ninety-one days of money in motion.
FILED ✓
JUL 08 1926+100
$6.1B
SETTLED FLOW, Q2 — ▲ 61% YoY
$0.31
MEDIAN COST PER $1,000 MOVED — ▼ 22% QoQ
41s
MEDIAN SETTLEMENT, 1.2M TRANSFERS TIMED
MEDIAN ACROSS ALL RAILS, MAINNET INCLUDED; STABLECOIN RAILS RUN ~1S. THE TAIL HAS DIGNITY, NOT SPEED.
I. THE QUARTER IN ONE PARAGRAPH

The second quarter of 2026 will be remembered as the one in which the question changed. Merchants stopped asking whether to accept crypto payments and began asking which corridors first. Settled flow through the CGP network reached $6.1 billion — a 61 percent gain on the year — while the median cost of moving a thousand dollars fell to thirty-one cents, a figure that would have read as a typographical error in any prior decade.

Stablecoins now carry 61.7 percent of network flow, up 2.3 points on the quarter; Layer-2 rails carry most of the remainder and nearly all of its impatience. The share of transfers settling same-block-day — T+0 in the old tongue — stands at 96.4 percent. The long tail belongs, as ever, to Ethereum mainnet acting its age.

We profile six corridors in this bulletin. In every one of them, the incumbent wire is no longer the benchmark. It is the anecdote.

PLATE II — EIGHT QUARTERS, THREE RAILS

Settled volume by rail, $B per quarter

Click a rail in the legend to remove it from the record. It will not take offence.
$7.5B$5.0B$2.5B0Q3'24Q4'24Q1'25Q2'25Q3'25Q4'25Q1'26Q2'26$7.2B
PLATE III — THE PRICE OF PASSAGE

Median cost per $1,000, by corridor

SG → PH
$0.19
AE → IN
$0.22
US → MX
$0.28
EU → TR
$0.31
BR → AR
$0.44
US → NG
$0.62
The legacy wire averages $38.40 per $1,000 and does not fit on this plate. We tried. — ED.
PLATE IV — HOW LONG IS NOW

Settlement time, 1.2M transfers

< 30 SEC
41.2%
30–60 SEC
33.4%
1–2 MIN
16.8%
2–5 MIN
6.0%
> 5 MIN
2.6%
The long tail is Ethereum mainnet, acting its age with dignity.
PLATE V — THE CORRIDOR LEAGUE TABLE

Six routes, ranked by settled flow

No.CORRIDORFLOW, $M/QCOST / $1,000T+0 SHAREQoQ
01US → MX1,142$0.2897.8%+11%
02AE → IN984$0.2298.1%+14%
03SG → PH811$0.1998.9%+9%
04EU → TR640$0.3196.2%+17%
05US → NG512$0.6293.4%+22%
06BR → AR448$0.4495.1%+8%
“The wire transfer is not dying. It is retiring — with a gold watch, a modest pension, and no idea what happened.”
— THE RESEARCH DESK, CLOSING NOTE
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