Crypto Card Volume Hits $2.5B as Visa, Mastercard Push Spendability

The question around digital assets is shifting from what they might be worth tomorrow to what they can actually do today. Consumer research suggests the appetite is already there. More than one-quarter of stablecoin holders use them to pay for goods and services directly. Nearly three-quarters would reach for a linked debit card if one were on offer.

Crypto card volume has multiplied several times over in just a few years. Visa reported processing $2.5 billion in crypto-linked card volume in the first quarter of its fiscal 2025, up from roughly $1.6 billion a year earlier. Mastercard has launched programs allowing banks to issue crypto-enabled cards without holding the assets themselves. PayPal's $2.8 billion PYUSD stablecoin, expanded onto Polygon in 2024, gives the payments giant a native spending instrument for its 200 million active wallets.

The obstacle is no longer curiosity. It is plumbing. Limited merchant acceptance, uneven trust and clunky user experiences keep getting in the way. The result is a widening gap between what holders are willing to do and what they can actually do at the register.

Regulation is finally catching up. New frameworks in jurisdictions such as the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation and clearer guidance in the U.S. have cleared away years of uncertainty, the July 2026 edition of the Payments Innovation Tracker, a collaboration with Paymentology, found. Banks, card networks and FinTechs are moving faster as a result. Rules alone will not put digital assets into circulation. That job falls to issuer-processing infrastructure that connects these assets to the payment rails people already use.

Visa's head of crypto, Cuy Sheffield, told analysts the firm sees "a growing demand for crypto-linked card products that enable consumers to use the digital assets they already hold to make purchases wherever Visa is accepted." Mastercard's executive vice president for digital assets, Raj Dhamodharan, said the network's Multi-Token Network, tested with Ethereum wallet operator Metamask, was designed to bridge the gap between self-custodied assets and merchant settlement.

For banks and FinTechs, the read-through is about differentiation. A wave of neobanks and incumbent card issuers are competing on tokenized spend features. They are betting that frictionless off-ramp technology – letting a consumer convert or spend stablecoins at the till without manual exchange – will drive card activation and customer retention. Those that solve the user experience stand to capture a share of the roughly $6 trillion market for digital-asset transaction value forecast by Bernstein for 2026.

Making digital assets easy to spend is the real work ahead. It will determine whether cryptocurrencies become everyday money or stay locked in the portfolio.