The figures, published in a December 2025 case study by Offchain Labs (the team behind Arbitrum), reveal how a compliance-focused payroll platform has turned a public blockchain into operational payment infrastructure. Of the $340 million in lifetime stablecoin withdrawals Rise has processed on Arbitrum, $210 million settled in USDT and $131 million in USDC. Deposits, by contrast, are USDC-heavy at roughly $17 million compared to just $1 million in USDT. The split reflects a geographic divide: payers in the US and Europe tend to fund in USDC, while contractors receiving money across Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Asia prefer USDT for its liquidity on local peer-to-peer markets. The platform's overall funding mix further illustrates its hybrid character: approximately 70 percent of deposits arrive through fiat channels, and roughly 60 percent of withdrawals are also fiat-denominated, meaning crypto rails handle a meaningful but still minority share of total flow.

Rise's typical payout is $1,500 per transaction. On traditional wire transfer or ACH networks, a cross-border payment at that size can carry fees of 3 to 7 percent, or roughly $45 to $105 per transfer. Rise reports savings of approximately 5 percent compared to those legacy channels and Ethereum mainnet alternatives. On Arbitrum, payouts currently carry zero customer fees, which the Arbitrum blog attributed directly to the cost efficiency of processing transactions on a Layer 2 rollup. Layer 2 networks batch transactions off-chain before posting proofs to Ethereum mainnet, reducing the per-transaction cost dramatically compared to executing each payment individually on Ethereum's base layer.

About 25 percent of Rise's lifetime transaction volume was processed in just the 90 days leading up to December 2025, suggesting the platform is accelerating rather than plateauing. That growth is concentrated on the disbursement side: Arbitrum handles approximately 80 percent of Rise's withdrawals but only around 6 percent of its deposits, meaning most funding still flows through other channels while the network carries nearly the entire payout load. Arbitrum itself holds roughly 37 percent of the Layer 2 market by total value locked (approximately $20 billion as of late 2025) and carries around $74 billion in stablecoin transfer volume over any given 30-day window. More than 7.75 million wallets hold stablecoins on the network. PayPal expanded its PYUSD stablecoin to Arbitrum in July 2025, a signal that enterprise payment operators are treating the chain as serious settlement infrastructure.

The regional dimension of Rise's data is significant. Sub-Saharan Africa, the third-fastest growing crypto region globally according to Chainalysis, received $205 billion in on-chain crypto value between mid-2024 and mid-2025, a 52 percent year-over-year increase. Nigeria alone accounted for $92.1 billion of that. Stablecoins make up 43 percent of all crypto transaction volume in the region. For a contractor in Lagos or Nairobi, a zero-fee $1,500 payout represents real money: at 5 percent, a traditional wire eats $75 per transaction. A tech company paying 100 contractors each month would save $7,500 monthly by switching to stablecoin rails. In a Mercy Corps Ventures pilot for Kenyan freelancers, switching to stablecoins cut fees from 29 percent to 2 percent on $5 micropayments. The institutional layer is also taking shape: the African Continental Free Trade Area Secretariat has piloted stablecoin settlement using IOTA and USDT for intra-Africa trade, and Kenya's proposed Virtual Asset Service Providers Bill 2025 signals a maturing regulatory environment for compliant operators across the region.

South Asia presents a parallel case. India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh together sent and received more than $200 billion in remittances in 2024 and 2025. Rise has a specific product targeting Indian contractors paid by international employers: funds arrive in USDC, convert to Indian rupees, and land directly in a recipient's bank account. Workers never handle crypto themselves. The workflow sidesteps the Foreign Inward Remittance Certificate documentation that typically slows international payments to India. Pakistan formalized a national crypto council in March 2025 and announced a dedicated regulatory body, opening new corridors for compliant stablecoin remittance into the country. Bangladesh presents a concrete savings opportunity as well: analysts estimate that if one-third of the country's remittances shifted from traditional channels (which carry fees of approximately 5.4 percent) to stablecoin rails (approximately 1.5 percent), recipients could save roughly $260 million annually.

Rise holds US Money Service Business licensing, SOC 2 Type II certification, and GDPR compliance. The company competes against established HR and payroll platforms such as Deel, Remote, and Rippling, and differentiates through native support for both USDC and USDT, a compliance infrastructure built specifically for crypto payroll, and an Agent of Record model that manages contractor compliance across jurisdictions. The AOR model matters particularly for clients paying workers in countries with complex labor or foreign exchange rules.

The broader crypto payroll market is still early. Individual adoption of crypto salary payments grew from roughly 3 percent in 2023 to about 9.6 percent by the end of 2024, according to Rise's own annual report. Business adoption climbed from 15 percent in 2023 to 25 percent by 2025. USDC holds 63 percent of the crypto payroll market by stablecoin, with USDT at 28.6 percent. Rise's architecture, built on a four-step flow of fund, program via smart contracts, execute on Arbitrum, and deliver and reconcile with local recipients, points toward a replicable model for payment operators building in high-growth emerging markets. For developers and fintech builders in Africa, South Asia, or Southeast Asia, the combination of USDC or USDT on Arbitrum paired with regional off-ramp integrations is becoming a practical, tested template rather than a theoretical one. In Africa, platforms such as Yellow Card provide the local off-ramp layer; in India, neobank APIs and peer-to-peer networks handle the final conversion to rupees.