Crypto Cards Surpass One Billion, Visa Leads the Way

Stablecoins are shifting from on-chain transfers to everyday spending, leading to rapid growth in crypto payment card transactions. USD stablecoins dominate, with a diverse settlement chain, as traditional payment networks like Visa take the lead. It won't replace bank cards but will extend USD accounts to on-chain wallets, opening up new markets outside of banks.

Written by: Conflux

In recent years, stablecoins have primarily addressed the question of "how money flows on-chain."

Now, it is tackling a bigger issue: how to spend on-chain USD like the money in a bank card.

Paymentscan data shows that in July, global crypto payment card transaction volume reached $1.038 billion, up from just $339.4 million a year ago, representing a growth of over three times; during the same period, the number of transactions also exceeded 10 million. The figures are still far smaller than traditional payment networks like Visa and Mastercard, but the change is significant: stablecoins are transitioning from tools for transactions and transfers to actual everyday spending. This time, it is not banks that are first to catch on, but traditional payment networks like Visa and Mastercard.

Stablecoins have never lacked for money

Stablecoins are not short of users. In recent years, USD stablecoins like USDT and USDC have continuously entered trading, cross-border transfers, corporate settlements, and on-chain finance. What has been truly lacking is the final step: how to spend the money on-chain.

If a user holds 1000 USDC, in the past, to spend offline, they usually needed to convert it to fiat first, then transfer it to a bank account, and finally complete the payment via a bank card, involving at least one withdrawal step. Stablecoin cards compress this path: users can pay directly from their stablecoin balance in their wallets, and when the payment occurs, the underlying system completes the conversion between stablecoins and local fiat, with merchants seeing it as a regular Visa or Mastercard transaction. For merchants, there is almost no change.

But for users, the change is significant—bank accounts are no longer the only entry point for holding digital dollars and making everyday purchases. This is the true significance of stablecoin cards.

Euro Exits, USD Stablecoins Take Over

Another change in the data is that at the beginning of 2024, according to Paymentscan data, Crypto Card spending was highly concentrated in the euro stablecoin EURe, which accounted for about 88% of transaction volume. By July 2026, the landscape had completely reversed: USDC accounted for about 51%, USDT about 20%, and EURe's share dropped to about 2%.

The rise of USD stablecoins corresponds to two types of users: one group uses stablecoins as trading tools, while the other treats them as USD accounts—the latter has greater potential, especially in markets with high local currency volatility, difficulty in obtaining USD, or high cross-border payment costs, where stablecoins have already taken on some storage and transfer functions. Now, payment cards have added the spending function, forming a complete digital dollar account: deposit, receive, transfer, and spend directly. It may not look like a traditional bank account, but its functions are increasingly similar.

More Chains, Fewer Entry Points

At the same time, the underlying settlement network for stablecoin payments is also rapidly changing—according to Paymentscan data, at the beginning of 2024, Gnosis was almost the only chain for crypto card settlements; by July this year, its share had dropped to about 2%, replaced by Base (about 30%), Optimism (about 17%), and Solana (about 13%).

This change and the shift in stablecoin shares are essentially the same phenomenon. One of the largest crypto card projects at the beginning of 2024, Gnosis Pay, defaulted to EURe for settlement—EURe's drop from 88% to 2% parallels Gnosis's decline from near monopoly to 2%, reflecting the exit of the same early users and projects.

Beyond this historical context, the current decentralization of chains indicates that the new batch of crypto card projects is not unified in their choice of settlement chains, which is a separate decision from which stablecoin they price in.

However, there is a seemingly contradictory point: while chains are decentralizing, consumer entry points are becoming more concentrated. Users do not need to know which chain their money is on; they just need to pull out a card. As chains become more decentralized, the entry for consumption remains highly concentrated, which is what Visa and Mastercard should truly pay attention to: they do not need to issue all stablecoins themselves or become the largest chain; they just need to be the network through which stablecoins must pass to enter real-world consumption.

Visa is actively expanding this position. By 2025, the transaction volume processed by Visa's stablecoin-linked cards is expected to reach about $5.2 billion, a year-on-year increase of 319%. As of March 2026, Visa had over 130 stablecoin-linked card projects covering more than 50 countries; in June, Visa announced that over 160 projects were in the process of going live or being developed globally.

Visa has even begun to delve deeper. In April of this year, its stablecoin settlement pilot reached an annualized scale of $7 billion and expanded to nine blockchains; the Visa Stablecoin Platform launched in July further covers capabilities such as stablecoin minting, redemption, wallet, and management. This is no longer just about "supporting cryptocurrency card payments" but about building infrastructure that allows stablecoins to enter the traditional financial system.

Not Replacement, but Mutual Integration

The most intriguing aspect of this situation is that stablecoins did not initially choose to replace Visa, nor did Visa choose to exclude stablecoins; instead, both are integrating with each other.

In March of this year, Visa expanded its partnership with stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge, planning to extend stablecoin-linked cards from the 18 countries already launched to over 100 countries, with wallets like MetaMask and Phantom using the related infrastructure. Mastercard is also following a similar path, already supporting users to spend through stablecoin-linked cards at over 150 million merchant locations and further providing stablecoin exchange, wallet, and merchant settlement capabilities.

This indicates that traditional payment networks see the opportunity not as "cryptocurrency replacing bank cards" but as bank card networks becoming the final layer of infrastructure for stablecoins to enter the real economy: stablecoins provide new forms of funds, wallets carry users, blockchains handle transfers and settlements, while Visa and Mastercard connect these balances to existing consumption networks. Whoever controls this layer controls one of the most important entry points for stablecoins to reach mass consumption.

Real Increment Outside of Bank Accounts

This is why stablecoin cards, although still small, are worth attention. With a monthly transaction volume of $759 million, compared to Visa and Mastercard's monthly traditional card transactions in the tens of trillions, it remains a small fraction—Visa itself points out that the $5.2 billion transaction volume of stablecoin-linked cards in 2025 is only 0.04% of its total annual transaction volume of about $14.2 trillion. Therefore, it is clearly too early to talk about "stablecoins replacing bank cards."

The more realistic change is that stablecoins are creating a group of people who previously did not have traditional USD bank cards. This is especially evident in emerging markets—Visa has observed that the growth of stablecoin-linked cards is more concentrated in markets with high inflation and significant cross-border payment friction. In June of this year, the stablecoin wallet MiniPay, under tech company Opera, also launched a Visa card, allowing stablecoin users in parts of Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia to connect directly to the Visa merchant network. MiniPay itself already has over 16 million active wallets.

These users may not need to first possess a traditional USD bank card; they might first have a wallet, then have USDT or USDC inside it, and finally use a card to convert this digital dollar balance into real-world spending power. This is a completely different market logic from American users switching from one bank card to another.

The Next Competition is Not Just Issuing Stablecoins

The United States has already established a federal-level regulatory framework for payment stablecoins through the GENIUS Act in 2025, requiring compliant payment stablecoins to be fully backed by highly liquid assets. As regulation becomes clearer, real competition in the stablecoin industry will also change: in the past, everyone competed to issue more stablecoins; moving forward, the competition may also involve who can enable more people to hold, transfer, and spend these stablecoins—because a stablecoin only holds value in a payment network when it enters the real economic cycle. This is also why Visa, Mastercard, wallets, payment institutions, and even banks are starting to enter this field.

Stablecoins may ultimately not push bank cards out of the market. What is more likely to happen is that bank card networks absorb stablecoins into their systems, while stablecoins bring "USD accounts" further into wallets. If this trend continues, the biggest change may not be that we have an additional payment method, but that the "USD account" itself is transforming from a bank account into a digital balance that can exist directly in on-chain wallets. Bank cards are just one of the outlets for this balance to enter the real world.