Crypto card spending hit $759M in July, up 2.5x YoY. USDC accounts for 58% of volume, while EURe stablecoins fell from 88% to 2%. Visa plans global expansion.
Crypto payment card spending reached $759 million in July, about 2.5 times the $306 million recorded a year earlier. The figures come from on-chain data cited by a16z crypto.
USDC, the dollar-backed stablecoin, now handles 58% of that volume. USDT's share rose to 26% from about 7% a year ago. Almost all card spending is in digital dollars now.
That was not always the case. In early 2024, euro-backed stablecoins led the way. The EURe token, much of it on the Gnosis chain, accounted for about 88% of card volume. By July that share had collapsed to around 2%.
The cards work by converting stablecoins into local currency at checkout. Merchants receive an ordinary card payment. Users can hold stablecoins on-chain in self-custody or deposit them with the card issuer. No traditional bank account is needed.
RedotPay, the largest issuer by volume, reports stablecoin spending directly rather than relying on on-chain observation.
The network that settles these transactions has shifted sharply. Gnosis Pay launched the first Visa card linked to a self-custodial wallet, and in early 2024 nearly all spending was on the Gnosis chain. By July, Optimism accounted for about 29% of the card spend. Solana and Base each had about 19%. Gnosis fell to roughly 2%.
The cards run on Visa's network almost exclusively across the programs tracked.
Visa and Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure firm owned by Stripe, announced in March plans to expand the stablecoin card program to over 100 countries by the end of the year. That would allow holders to use their stablecoin balances at more than 175 million merchant locations that accept Visa.
Visa's push follows similar experiments by Mastercard, which recently tested single-audit stablecoin compliance with Borderless.xyz.
Dragonfly's Haseeb Qureshi said in January that stablecoin cards were "growing like crazy, everywhere in the world."
Sheel Mohnot of Better Tomorrow Ventures said the existing system "isn't actually broken for most merchants and consumers in developed markets." Stablecoin payments lack the rewards and credit incentives that drove traditional card adoption.
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