Visa processes over $100 million in stablecoin card transactions in July 2026

Over the past few years, stablecoins have primarily addressed the question of how money flows on-chain.

Now, it begins to address another larger issue: how to spend dollars on-chain as easily as money in a bank card.

Paymentscan data shows that global crypto payment card transaction volume reached $1.038 billion in July, up from $339.4 million a year ago—a more than threefold year-over-year increase; during the same period, transaction counts surpassed 10 million. While these figures remain far smaller than those of traditional payment networks like Visa and Mastercard, the shift is already clear: stablecoins are moving from tools for transactions and transfers into everyday spending. And this time, the first to embrace them were not banks, but traditional payment networks like Visa and Mastercard.

Stablecoins no longer lack users. Over the past few years, USD-pegged stablecoins like USDT and USDC have steadily expanded into trading, cross-border transfers, corporate settlements, and on-chain finance. What’s truly missing is the final step: how to spend on-chain money.

If a user holds 1,000 USDC and previously wanted to make offline purchases, they typically needed to first convert it to fiat currency, deposit it into a bank account, and then complete the payment via a debit card—requiring at least one withdrawal step. A stablecoin card compresses this process: users can pay directly from their wallet’s stablecoin balance, while the underlying system automatically converts the stablecoin to local fiat currency at the time of payment; merchants still see it as a standard Visa or Mastercard transaction. For merchants, there is virtually no change.

But for users, the change is significant—bank accounts are no longer the only gateway to holding digital dollars and making everyday purchases. That’s the true significance of stablecoin cards.

Another change in the data: At the beginning of 2024, according to Paymentscan, Crypto Card spending was heavily concentrated in the euro-backed stablecoin EURe, which accounted for approximately 88% of transaction volume. By July 2026, the landscape had completely reversed: USDC now accounts for about 51%, USDT for about 20%, and EURe’s share has dropped to approximately 2%.

Behind the rise of USD stablecoins are two types of users: one group uses stablecoins as a trading tool, while another treats them as a USD account—the latter may hold even greater potential, especially in markets where the local currency is volatile, USD is hard to obtain, or cross-border payment costs are high. Stablecoins have already begun fulfilling part of the roles of value storage and fund transfers. Now, payment cards are adding the spending function, creating a complete digital USD account: deposit, receive, transfer, and spend directly. It may not look like a traditional bank account, but its functionality is increasingly resembling one.

Meanwhile, the underlying settlement networks for stablecoin payments are rapidly evolving—according to Paymentscan data, at the beginning of 2024, Gnosis was nearly the only chain used for crypto card settlements; by July of this year, its share had dropped to approximately 2%, replaced by Base (approximately 30%), Optimism (approximately 17%), and Solana (approximately 13%).

This change, along with the earlier shift in stablecoin share, is essentially the same event. At the beginning of 2024, one of the largest crypto card projects, Gnosis Pay, defaulted to settling in EURe—EURe’s drop from 88% to 2% reflects the same exit of early users and projects as Gnosis’s decline from near-monopoly to 2%.

Beyond this binding history, the fragmentation of chains today also shows that the selection of settlement chains for this new wave of crypto card projects is inherently inconsistent—a decision that is relatively independent of which stablecoin they use for pricing.

But there’s a seeming contradiction here: blockchains are becoming more fragmented, while consumer entry points remain centralized. Users don’t need to know which chain their money is on—they simply need a card. As blockchains grow increasingly fragmented, consumer access points remain highly concentrated. This is precisely what makes Visa and Mastercard truly significant: they don’t need to issue all stablecoins or become the largest blockchain—they only need to be the network through which stablecoins ultimately enter real-world spending.

Visa has been actively expanding this initiative. In 2025, the transaction volume processed through Visa’s stablecoin-linked cards reached approximately $5.2 billion, a 319% year-over-year increase. As of March 2026, Visa had over 130 stablecoin-linked card programs live across more than 50 countries; in June, Visa further announced that more than 160 projects globally were either live or in development.

Visa has even begun moving deeper into the infrastructure. In April this year, its stablecoin settlement pilot reached an annualized scale of $7 billion and expanded to nine blockchains; in July, Visa launched the Visa Stablecoin Platform, a corporate-grade stablecoin platform that further enables capabilities such as stablecoin minting, redemption, wallet management, and more. This goes far beyond merely “supporting crypto payments”—it’s about building the infrastructure that allows stablecoins to integrate into the traditional financial system.

The most intriguing aspect of this is that stablecoins did not first seek to replace Visa, nor did Visa choose to exclude stablecoins—instead, both are mutually integrating.

In March this year, Visa expanded its partnership with stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge, planning to extend its stablecoin-linked cards from the 18 countries currently live to over 100 countries; wallets such as MetaMask and Phantom are already utilizing this infrastructure. Mastercard is pursuing a similar path, having enabled users to spend via stablecoin-linked cards at more than 150 million merchant locations, while also offering additional capabilities such as stablecoin conversion, wallet services, and merchant settlement.

This illustrates that traditional payment networks see an opportunity not in "cryptocurrencies replacing credit cards," but in making card networks the final layer of infrastructure for stablecoins to enter the real economy: stablecoins provide a new form of money, wallets hold user balances, blockchains handle transfers and settlements, while Visa and Mastercard connect these balances to existing consumer payment networks. Whoever controls this layer controls one of the most important gateways for stablecoins to reach mainstream consumer adoption.

This is why stablecoin cards, though still small, are worth paying attention to. At $759 million in monthly transaction volume, they remain a tiny fraction compared to the trillions of dollars in monthly traditional card transactions processed by Visa and Mastercard—Visa itself notes that the $5.2 billion in transaction volume from stablecoin-linked cards in 2025 would account for just 0.04% of its total annual transaction volume of approximately $14.2 trillion. So, discussing “stablecoins replacing debit cards” is clearly premature.

A more tangible change is that stablecoins are creating a new class of people who previously had no traditional U.S. dollar debit cards. This is especially evident in emerging markets—Visa has observed that growth in stablecoin-linked cards is concentrated in markets with high inflation and greater friction in cross-border payments. In June of this year, MiniPay, a stablecoin wallet under the tech company Opera, also launched a Visa card, enabling stablecoin users in select markets across Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia to directly connect to the Visa merchant network. MiniPay already has over 16 million activated wallets.

These users may not need to own a traditional U.S. dollar bank card first; instead, they might start with a wallet containing USDT or USDC, and then convert that digital dollar balance into real-world spending power through a card. This represents a completely different market logic than U.S. users simply swapping one bank card for another.

The United States has enacted the GENIUS Act in 2025, establishing a federal regulatory framework for payment stablecoins and requiring compliant payment stablecoins to be fully backed by highly liquid assets. As regulations become clearer, competition in the stablecoin industry will shift: previously, the focus was on who could issue the most stablecoins; moving forward, the competition may also center on who can get more people to hold, transfer, and spend these stablecoins—because a stablecoin only gains real payment network value when it enters the actual economy. This is why Visa, Mastercard, wallets, payment providers, and even banks are now entering this space.

Stablecoins may not ultimately displace bank cards from the market. More likely, bank card networks will integrate stablecoins into their own systems, while stablecoins will further move the concept of a “dollar account” from banks directly into wallets. If this trend continues, the biggest change in the future may not be the addition of a new payment method, but rather the transformation of the “dollar account” itself—from a bank account to a digital balance that exists directly on-chain. Bank cards will simply be one of several gateways for this balance to enter the real world.

The content in this article is for reference only and does not constitute any investment advice. The market carries risks; investments should be made with caution.