Stablecoins are increasingly being spent by card swipe.
Crypto payment cards have gone from a novelty to more than $750 million in monthly spend. These cards let people pay with crypto anywhere traditional card networks are accepted. Behind the scenes, the crypto — stablecoins, overwhelmingly — gets converted to local currency at the point of sale, so the payments look like any other card transactions to merchants.
Crypto cardholders don’t require a traditional bank account. Depending on the program, users either deposit stablecoins with a card issuer, or hold them directly onchain through self-custody. Crypto cards expand people’s access to U.S. dollar accounts globally, and they offer a convenient way for stablecoin holders to transact.
Monthly crypto payment card volume reached $759 million in July, up (roughly 2.5x) from $306 million a year earlier — and up from less than $1 million when tracking began in Oct. 2023. These figures reflect onchain activity attributable to card programs tracked by Paymentscan. (For RedotPay, the largest program by volume, spending is self-reported by the issuer rather than observed onchain.)
Growth in the number of purchases made with crypto payment cards is trending similarly to the growth in crypto card volume. Nearly 9 million purchases were made using crypto payment cards during July, up from about 5.2 million a year ago.
That puts the average amount spent per transaction at around $86.
In early 2024, crypto card spending was concentrated in a single chain: Gnosis, home of Gnosis Pay (the first Visa card connected directly to a self-custodial wallet). As new card programs have launched, the number of card settlement chains has expanded.
As of July, Optimism carries about 29% of crypto card spend volume, Solana about 19%, and Base about 19%, according to Paymentscan. Gnosis has dropped to about 2%.
Euro-backed stablecoins once dominated spending: In early 2024, around 88% of crypto card volume settled in EURe, much of it on Gnosis. As of July, EURe’s share has fallen to about 2%.
Dollar-backed stablecoins have since taken the lead. USDC handles about 58% of card spending and USDT about 26%, up from roughly 48% and 7% a year ago, respectively. Crypto payment card spending now happens overwhelmingly in digital dollars.
Crypto payment cards remain a small market next to traditional card networks, which process trillions of dollars per month.
But the trend is growing as stablecoins make greater inroads into the global financial system, including by piggybacking on existing major card network rails. For the tracked programs, this is happening almost entirely through Visa.
Crypto payment cards are one piece of a broader crypto acceleration post-GENIUS, which we’ve been charting here. That includes the rapid adoption of stablecoins and tokenized assets.
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Robert Hackett is features editor and head of special projects at a16z crypto.
Ryan Holloway is a data consultant.
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