Stablecoin Payments at Scale: How Cards Bridge Digital Assets and Global Commerce

From $100M to $18B: How crypto cards quietly became the main bridge between stablecoins and real-world spending

Executive Summary

Crypto cards enable users to spend stablecoin and cryptocurrency balances at traditional merchants, emerging as one of the fastest-growing segments in digital payments. Volume has grown from approximately $100 million monthly in early 2023 to over $1.5 billion by late 2025, a 106% compound annual growth rate. Annualized, the market now exceeds $18 billion, rivaling peer-to-peer stablecoin transfers ($19 billion) which grew just 5% over the same period.

Infrastructure. The crypto card stack operates across three layers: payment networks (Visa, Mastercard), card program managers and issuers, and consumer-facing products. Despite near-parity in program counts (130+ each), Visa captures over 90% of on-chain card volume through early partnerships with infrastructure providers. The most significant structural development is the emergence of full-stack issuers—companies like Rain and Reap that hold direct principal membership and combine program management with issuance, bypassing traditional issuing bank dependencies and capturing more economics per transaction.

Geography. Stablecoin card opportunity concentrates where stablecoins solve tangible problems. India ($338B crypto inflows) and Argentina (46.6% USDC share) stand out as global outliers. India’s opportunity is crypto-backed credit cards (UPI has commoditized debit); Argentina’s is stablecoin debit cards for inflation hedging (no competing digital rail exists). For developed markets, the opportunity is not solving unmet needs but capturing a differentiated, high-value user segment that traditional products are not optimized to serve.

The future. Direct merchant acceptance of stablecoins faces an insurmountable bootstrap problem: no captive audience, no exclusive inventory, no problem solved better than cards for the average Western consumer or merchant. Every successful payment network in recent history launched with exclusivity or a forcing function—stablecoin checkout has neither. The real opportunity lies not at the point of sale but in behind-the-scenes settlement. Stablecoin-backed cards represent the synthesis: cards provide ubiquitous acceptance; stablecoins provide superior cross-border value storage. The builders who recognize this will focus on the integration layer rather than fighting behavioral economics with technology.

Crypto cards are infrastructure for the next phase of stablecoin adoption: store value anywhere with stables, spend anywhere with cards.

Section I: What are crypto cards?

Stablecoin payments have entered a new growth phase. Monthly volume has grown from $1.9B in January 2023 to $10.2B in August 2025, fueled by persistent demand from emerging markets facing currency instability, improved UI/UX, and growing institutional comfort with stablecoin rails.

Crypto card volumes have compounded at 106% annually since January 2023, growing to $18B annualized volume, while peer-to-peer stablecoin transfers grew just 5% to $19B annualized volume over the same period. Cards have gone from a fraction of retail volume to rivaling P2P entirely.

1.1 What are crypto cards?

Crypto cards are payment cards—prepaid, debit, or credit—that enable users to spend cryptocurrency or stablecoin balances at traditional merchant locations through existing card network infrastructure. When a user holds stablecoins in a wallet or Bitcoin on an exchange and wants to buy coffee, pay rent, or shop online, a crypto card bridges that digital asset balance to the global network of merchants that accept Visa and Mastercard.

1.2 Transaction Flow Mechanics

When a user swipes a crypto card at a merchant terminal, what actually happens to the money? The answer depends on the card’s underlying infrastructure. Three distinct settlement flows exist in the market today, each with different technical architectures, counterparty relationships, and implications for the broader payments ecosystem.

The vast majority of crypto card volume today settles via fiat rails. This remains the default because it requires no merchant integration. The crypto-to-fiat conversion happens before settlement to the payment network level, making the transaction indistinguishable from any other card payment by the time it reaches the network. Importantly, typical program managers a la Baanx’s Crypto Life and Bridge, do not handle settlement to their desired payment network, instead partnering with issuing banks such as Lead Bank and Cross River Bank who handle settlement, respectively. Full-stack issuance platforms like Rain handle settlement directly to Visa by liquidating stablecoins or crypto assets to the Visa network, which then routes the amount to the acquiring bank’s desired fiat currency. For the vast majority of crypto card usage, nothing from the merchant’s perspective changes.

Stablecoin settlement is growing rapidly but remains nascent. Visa’s stablecoin-linked card spend reached a $3.5 billion annualized run rate in Q4 FY2025—approximately 460% year-over-year growth—but still represents approximately 19% of total crypto card settlement volume by our estimates.

1.3 The Infrastructure Stack: Three Layers

The infrastructure stack for crypto cards can be broken down into three core layers, each of which are reliant on one another.

Layer 1: Payment Networks

According to the Nilson Report, as of 2024, Visa and Mastercard control over 70% market share of the card network payments infrastructure industry. Within the crypto card industry, we estimate their current market share to be almost 100%, barring outliers such as the Coinbase One Card issued by American Express.

Despite near-parity in program counts, Visa captures a disproportionately larger share of onchain transaction volume. The divergence reflects different go-to-market strategies.

Visa’s strategy has centered on early engagement with emerging program managers, such as Rain, Reap, and other infrastructure providers, to capture net-new crypto-native issuers as they enter the market. These partnerships give Visa exposure to dozens of downstream card products through a single integration, enabling it to scale volume rapidly as new programs emerge.

Mastercard, by contrast, has historically focused on direct partnerships with major centralized exchanges. Revolut, Bybit, and Gemini all operate Mastercard-branded card programs. This approach ties Mastercard’s crypto card volume more closely to exchange user bases and trading activity cycles.

Importantly, their strategies are not mutually exclusive, and the networks often compete within the same issuer portfolios.

• Bybit uses Mastercard for its global debit and prepaid cards, but partners with Visa for its credit card offerings in Asia-Pacific.

• Mastercard also acts as the primary network for Baanx’s Crypto Life, a white-label program manager supporting products such as the MetaMask Card, the Ledger Card, and others.

Visa’s dominance suggests that capturing the infrastructure layer may scale more efficiently than exchange-by-exchange partnerships.

Layer 2: Card Issuing Infrastructure

Specialized platforms provide the technical and regulatory infrastructure for card programs, which can be broken down into two main categories: program managers and full-stack issuance platforms.

Program managers typically work with issuing banks who hold Visa or Mastercard Principal Membership, manage BIN sponsorship relationships, handle compliance requirements, and operate the settlement systems from the user’s created bank account to the desired payment network. The individual program managers are responsible for converting the cryptoassets or stablecoins held in the users’ associated digital wallet into fiat such that it may be compatible with the issuing bank’s settlement infrastructure. Program managers offer white-label capabilities enabling other companies to launch branded card products. Some examples of these white-label card program managers include Baanx, Bridge, and Gnosis Pay.

Full-stack issuance platforms such as Rain and Reap, by contrast, offer many of the aforementioned services into a holistic service. These Cards-as-a-Service platforms illustrate how infrastructure providers are positioning for the stablecoin-native future.

As Visa Principal Members, Rain and Reap enable direct card issuance on the Visa network without intermediary sponsors. By collapsing the existing card issuance stack—primarily providing BIN sponsorship, acting as the Lender of Record (LOR), and directly settling to the Visa network—into one holistic product offering, Rain uniquely capitalizes on much of the value often leaked to banks and other intermediaries

The broader implication for white-label program managers: as stablecoin settlement scales and regulatory frameworks mature, infrastructure providers with principal membership and native settlement capabilities are positioned to become essential rails for the next generation of card issuance. Program managers operate a capital-light model that scales with ecosystem growth, capturing volume across dozens of downstream products without bearing significant customer acquisition costs. However, full-stack issuance platforms will likely retain their largest clients and continue to capture inevitable incumbents.

Layer 3: Consumer-Facing Products

The consumer layer encompasses the actual card products that users interact with, including the apps they download, the cards they hold in their wallets, and the brands they associate with crypto spending. This layer can be segmented into four distinct categories, each with different strategic motivations, user bases, and business models.

Category 1: Centralized Exchange Cards

• Coinbase Card, Crypto.com Card, Bybit Card, Binance Card, Gemini Card, Krak Card

• Integrated with exchange wallets; typically prepaid or debit; if credit, they function as regular credit cards that can be paid from bank account or associated exchange holdings and cashback in crypto

Category 2: Self-Custodial / Protocol-Native Cards

• Ether.fi Cash, MetaMask Card, Phantom Card

• Users maintain custody of assets until spend

• Often integrate DeFi yield or collateralized borrowing

Category 3: Crypto-Native Neobanks

• KAST (Solana-based), Offramp (Tron-based), Xapo Bank (BTC)

• Full banking experience built around crypto

• Target crypto-native users seeking primary banking relationship

Category 4: Traditional Fintech Neobanks

• Revolut (EU, India, etc.), Chime (US), N26 (EU)

• Add crypto features to existing fintech platforms

Section II: Making money moves

2.1: Who is making money moves?

The incentives driving the proliferation of crypto-linked payment cards vary across the ecosystem, but they generally fall into three strategic archetypes.

1. Exchanges and DeFi protocols: Cards as User Acquisition Funnels and Monetization Layers

For centralized exchanges (CEXs) and DeFi protocols, card issuance is fundamentally a distribution strategy. Cards function as an incentivized user funnel into the broader platform, enabling companies to convert everyday spending behavior into platform engagement and, ultimately, monetizable balances.

In this model, rewards programs effectively become customer acquisition cost (CAC) instruments. Platforms subsidize cardholders through cashback programs and offset this outlay through subsequent monetization of user deposits and balance sheet float. The degree of subsidy varies sharply by business model.

CEXs paying rewards in fiat or liquid crypto (e.g., Gemini, Coinbase, Kraken) incur real dollar costs and must rely on transaction fees, interest income, and asset yield to recover CAC. Following Gemini’s acquisition of Blockrize in January 2021, they soon began their credit card program with crypto cashback rewards in 2022. Despite continual losses on the Gemini credit card (see below chart on net card revenue in purple), Gemini continues to invest and operate in their card offerings due to its demonstrated strength in user acquisition and retention.

Notably, there are many different design choices for rewards programs to onboard users outside of the centralized exchange space. Token-incentivized platforms (e.g., Ether.fi paying rewards in $SCR, neobanks rewarding users in their native token, etc.) face a near-zero marginal cost of capital for rewards, enabling structurally higher cashback without commensurate cash burn. As of writing, Ether.fi Cash offers approximately 4.08% cashback on average, exceeding the “up to 4% cashback” many CEXs offer.

Ether.fi Cash users who activate “borrow mode” deposit ETH as collateral into Ether.fi’s staking or liquid vault products, increasing protocol TVL and driving management fee revenue. Although Ether.fi’s TVL has fluctuated with broader market conditions this year, the structural flywheel remains intact: cards drive deposits, deposits drive TVL, TVL drives fees.

2. Crypto-Native Wallets: Increasing average revenue per user by issuing cards

Whereas exchanges and DeFi protocols rely on cards primarily as an acquisition tool, crypto-native wallets and fintech platforms issue cards for fundamentally different reasons. Their incentives diverge sharply because their underlying business models differ.

Self-custodial wallets such as MetaMask and Phantom sit atop large, globally distributed user bases but have no access to custodial revenue. They do not earn interest spread on deposits, cannot rehypothecate customer assets, and do not participate in the economics of staking yields without explicit user opt-in. As a result, their revenue mix is concentrated in highly cyclical activities—primarily swap fees, bridging revenue, and partner integrations.

For wallets, payment cards offer a structurally attractive monetization lever. Interchange revenue and subscription fees provide a diversified income stream, while card usage deepens engagement and reduces churn. Cards allow wallets to convert sporadic crypto activity into habitual spending behavior, increasing ARPU and improving retention dynamics. The issuance process with partnered card program managers enables wallets to deploy cards with minimal regulatory burden while capturing upside from users’ on-chain and off-chain activity.

Beyond revenue directly tied to card usage, some of the largest wallet providers in the world have also begun issuing their own stablecoins. In late Q3 2025, MetaMask and Phantom launched native stablecoins, $mUSD and $CASH respectively, designed specifically to serve as the funding mechanism for their respective debit card products. Rather than relying on users to hold USDC or USDT, these wallets are building closed-loop ecosystems where users convert assets into wallet-native stablecoins that then fund card spend.

The early data reveals divergent trajectories. Phantom’s CASH has grown steadily from ~$25M in September to approximately $100M in supply by late December, demonstrating consistent user adoption and retention. MetaMask’s mUSD, by contrast, peaked near $100M in early October before declining to approximately $25M—a 75% drawdown.

Launching native stablecoins offers a multitude of benefits to the wallet providers that would otherwise leak to external parties:

1. Vertical integration: Controlling the stablecoin layer captures additional margin that would otherwise accrue to Circle (USDC) or Tether (USDT)

2. Ecosystem lock-in: Users holding mUSD or CASH have reduced incentive to switch wallets. The stablecoin becomes a retention mechanism, further increasing ARPU

The divergent trajectories of mUSD and CASH underscore a strategic question specific to card issuance: when should a wallet launch a native stablecoin to power its card product versus simply allowing users to fund cards with existing stablecoins?

For card products, integration should be the default. A card funded by USDC works: users likely hold it, liquidity is deep, and the settlement infrastructure already supports it.

Adding a proprietary stablecoin layer introduces friction that supplies to unexisting demand. For wallet providers, the stablecoin may solve a card problem, but should not exist as a standalone monetization layer.

3. Emerging Market and Last-mile Access Providers

A distinct class of fintechs, particularly in Latin America, EMEA, and Southeast Asia, approach crypto-linked cards as infrastructure for accessing digital dollars. These providers target populations facing acute financial frictions: inflationary local currencies, capital controls, unreliable banking infrastructure, and high-cost cross-border payments. Companies such as Redotpay, Kast, Holyheld, etc. are all actively working to bring crypto cards to these users.

In these contexts, stablecoin-linked cards solve a structural market need. They enable users to maintain savings in USD-pegged assets, circumvent local FX constraints, and access global merchants without interacting with unstable domestic banking rails. For many consumers, crypto-linked cards represent a viable on-ramp to financial stability.

The economics for these issuers differ accordingly. Rather than relying on trading revenue or custodial yield, they monetize through:

• FX spreads

• Crypto → fiat conversion fees

• Merchant and cross-border transaction fees

• Interchange revenue

The strategic objective is to deliver last-mile financial access. In doing so, they are able to capture much of the value created from these regions’ informal dollarization process through card-specific fees.

2.2 Where is making money moves?

With merchants increasingly accepting native stablecoin payments, it is essential to understand where stablecoin-denominated commerce is actually occurring and which tokens dominate those payment flows. Native stablecoin settlement—where card networks settle directly in stablecoins rather than fiat—offers advantages in speed, availability, and counterparty exposure. Visa and Mastercard’s native stablecoin settlement networks support only a small set of regulated stablecoins: USDC, USDG, PYUSD, and EURC, with Mastercard uniquely supporting FIUSD. Notably absent is the world’s largest stablecoin by market cap and transaction volume, USDT, whose regulatory uncertainty has kept it off major stablecoin-native rails.

However, the stablecoin mix is less determinative than it might appear. The vast majority of crypto card transactions today settle in fiat regardless of which crypto or stablecoin the user holds. The user’s stablecoin converts to local fiat at transaction time; the merchant sees only local currency. USDT’s absence from native settlement rails does not exclude USDT-heavy markets from crypto card access.

Across nearly all markets, USDT dominates stablecoin volume. However, two countries stand out as true global outliers: India (47.4% USDC) and Argentina (46.6% USDC), the only markets where USDC usage approaches parity with USDT. Both represent significant crypto card opportunities, but the nature of that opportunity differs fundamentally.

India has become the largest crypto market in Asia-Pacific by inflows with $338 billion USD value in the twelve months ending June 2025, representing 48x growth over five years. Yet this volume exists almost entirely outside the formal financial system, creating what may be the world’s largest “debanking gap” between actual crypto activity and regulated, compliant channels.

India’s 2022 Income Tax Act amendment imposed a flat 30% tax on crypto-based income for personal and business use-cases plus a 1% Tax Deducted at Source (TDS) on all transfers. As a result, the majority of crypto activity in India was taken offshore. The Ministry of Finance reported that crypto exchanges collected TDS of $5.67 million USD in FY 24-25, leaving approximately just $567 million of crypto transfer volume through registered Virtual Digital Asset providers. The gap suggests vast latent demand for compliant crypto products, constrained not by user interest but by regulatory friction.

However, India’s crypto card opportunity must be understood in the context of the country’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) that has transformed Indian digital payments since its introduction in 2016.

According to the Reserve Bank of India’s 2025 Payment Systems Report, UPI grew from 19% to 83% of digital transaction volume between 2018 and 2024. The system offers characteristics that closely mirror the crypto card value proposition, such as instant transfer of funds, 24/7 availability, virtual payment addresses, etc. As a result, many crypto card issuers have begun integrating with UPI to reach potential customers where they are.

With strict regulatory scrutiny forcing the vast majority of India’s crypto volume to come offshore, Asia’s top growing country by cryptocurrency adoption could see significant value derived from stablecoin-native card issuing platforms.

Is the U.S. ripe for disruption?

Credit cards in mature economies have continued to grow for users and credit card companies. Users want access to unsecured credit for cashback benefits, points programs, and the many value-add services that come along with them. For issuers, credit card-related fees are much higher than those associated with debit cards or other payment alternatives, especially as developed regions like the US and EU have strict regulatory caps on interchange fees on debit and prepaid cards.

With fintech players such as Robinhood, Revolut, and Coinbase recently beginning to enter the credit card market and legacy players such as American Express, JPMorgan Chase, and Capital One continuing to grow their customer base, credit card revenues, particularly in developed countries, have grown significantly over the past decade.

Stablecoin adoption is no longer confined to early crypto enthusiasts. Total stablecoin supply exceeds $308 billion; monthly active stablecoin addresses have grown consistently, growing to new all-time highs in December 2025; and demographic data suggests crypto adoption is aging into prime earning and spending years.

The stablecoin-holding user base is still small relative to total card users—but it is growing faster than traditional segments, exhibits differentiated behaviors, and is developing expectations around integrated, yield-bearing, digitally-native financial products.

Within this market, a new user segment is emerging: consumers who hold meaningful balances in stablecoins and digital assets, and who increasingly expect to spend those balances seamlessly. Issuers who wait risk ceding this segment to crypto-native competitors who are already building distribution and user relationships.

Although unsecured credit remains absent from the world of crypto and stablecoin-based cards, existing credit products such as the Coinbase One Card and Gemini Credit Card offer payment and rewards alternatives to users denominated in cryptocurrencies or stablecoins through a familiar credit card product line.

Onchain solutions such as Ether.fi Cash Borrow Mode, Nexo Credit Line, Redotpay Credit offers credit to financially sophisticated users who may:

• Demonstrate strong onchain activity, but lack traditional credit history and may struggle to access credit products, regardless of their actual financial capacity

• Seek onchain alternatives to traditional card products in order to maximize their utilization of their onchain funds

The signals emerging from stablecoin-based cards do not suggest imminent disruption of traditional card economics. The US credit card market is large, growing, and structurally advantaged by interchange dynamics and consumer credit demand.

However, the signals do suggest that stablecoin-holding users represent a differentiated segment with characteristics traditional issuers should value:

• Higher financial engagement and sophistication

• Willingness to adopt new financial products

• Growing balances in digital assets that could fund card spend

• Behavioral data (on-chain activity) that enables new underwriting and segmentation approaches

The early movers in this space are crypto-native platforms: Coinbase, Gemini, MetaMask, Phantom, Ether.fi. Traditional issuers have advantages in scale, brand trust, regulatory relationships, and credit underwriting infrastructure. The opportunity exists for incumbents who move to combine these advantages with stablecoin-native capabilities.

Section IV: The Future

As stablecoin adoption accelerates, payments innovation is shifting from card-intermediated digital commerce toward stablecoin-native acceptance rails. Leading global networks, including Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and Stripe, are building architectures that enable merchants to accept digital dollars directly, with lower fees and faster settlement. These developments raise a strategically significant question:

If merchants can accept stablecoins natively, will crypto cards remain relevant?

This question reflects a broader structural tension: the potential transition from card-centric payment networks built on issuer–acquirer economics and interchange revenue, to asset-centric systems, where settlement finality, programmability, and low-cost value transfer occur at the blockchain layer.

While the direction of innovation is clear, the timing and feasibility of full transition to stablecoin-native acceptance remain uncertain. Three structural realities suggest crypto cards will remain strategically relevant for the foreseeable future and are likely to grow faster than the underlying crypto economy itself.

Network effects are exceptionally difficult to replicate

Card networks and issuers operate at over 150 million merchant locations globally, spanning e-commerce, brick-and-mortar retail, hospitality, transportation, and long-tail SME categories. This infrastructure required decades of coordinated investment: POS hardware deployment, merchant agreements, banking relationships, regulatory approvals, and consumer trust-building.

Stablecoin-native acceptance starts from near-zero merchant coverage. Achieving meaningful penetration would require:

• New point-of-sale integrations across hardware and software systems

• Merchant education, onboarding, and support infrastructure

• Changes to accounting, reconciliation, and treasury operations

• Compliance overlays to maintain AML/KYC integrity across jurisdictions

This is a multi-year, potentially decade-long, transition. Until then, crypto cards provide the most seamless bridge between digital asset holdings and merchant acceptance.

Furthermore, card networks and issuers provide more than transaction routing. They bundle services that consumers and merchants have come to expect:

• Fraud protection: Sophisticated detection models and liability frameworks

• Dispute resolution: Chargeback rights that protect consumers from merchant failure or fraud

• Unsecured consumer credit: The ability to spend against future income, with structured repayment

• Rewards programs: Cashback, points, and miles funded by interchange economics

• Purchase protections: Extended warranties, price protection, travel insurance

Stablecoin payments, by design, offer a very few selection of these services. Stablecoin issuers can blacklist known addresses from hacker groups such as Lazarus Group and customers can work with card issuers on refunds, but optionality is limited. To match card functionality, direct acceptance systems must rebuild these services from scratch at significant cost and complexity.

Credit, in particular, represents a durable moat. Consumers globally continue to prefer credit instruments for cash-flow management and rewards accumulation. A payment method that cannot offer credit faces structural headwinds in consumer adoption. Even when new technologies offer cost improvements, merchant adoption lags due to operational constraints:

• POS systems and e-commerce platforms optimized for card acceptance

• Reliance on established acquirer relationships and support infrastructure

• Tax reporting and accounting systems designed for card settlement

The calculus differs at the margin. High-volume, low-margin businesses (remittances, B2B invoicing, cross-border commerce) may find stablecoin economics compelling enough to justify integration investment. But for the median merchant, cards remain the path of least resistance.

Stablecoin-native P2P and B2B payments will continue to expand in cross-border commerce, digital services, and markets underserved by traditional banking. However, direct acceptance fully replacing card networks in the near term is unlikely, as seen by their slow relative growth in volume in comparison to cards. Cards continue to offer unique benefits to customers and merchants alike, such as:

• Everyday consumer spending (retail, restaurants, subscriptions, travel)

• Use cases requiring credit, rewards, or fraud protection

• Merchants unwilling to integrate new payment infrastructure

• Jurisdictions with unclear or restrictive stablecoin regulation

• Users who prefer UX abstraction over direct blockchain interaction

Meanwhile, stablecoin-based P2M payments have their own unique benefits, where there doesn’t exist much overlap with cards, including but not limited to:

• B2B payments and invoicing with high transaction values

• Cross-border commerce where interchange and FX fees are material

• Crypto-native merchants and digitally sophisticated consumers

• Markets where card infrastructure never achieved penetration

• High-frequency, low-margin transactions where 2-3% fees erode margins

Our View

We are optimistic about the future of stablecoins and the broader crypto economy. Stablecoin payment volume will continue to grow, direct merchant acceptance will expand, and infrastructure will improve.

Crypto cards will continue to scale alongside stablecoin adoption, leveraging existing merchant networks, and bridging digital asset holdings into real-world commerce.

Crypto cards are the infrastructure for the next phase of stablecoin adoption.

We will soon be including comprehensive data analytics such as the above into the Artemis Terminal. If you are building within the broader stablecoin payments landscape and would like to be involved in the process, please reach out to us at team@artemis.xyz.