Visa Captures 90% of Crypto Card Spend as Stablecoins Dominate

Crypto-card spending hit roughly $600M per month with $7.2B in cumulative on-chain volume across 24M transactions and 1.36M wallets, and roughly 90% of those transactions route through Visa. USDT accounts for 62.5% of settled volume, while Jupiter Global's USDC-backed Visa card grew 660% month-over-month. The figures, reported by The Kobeissi Letter, sketch an industry in which stablecoins are scaling fast — but the consumer front end is still a card swipe.

Why it matters

Stablecoins were sold on a thesis of disintermediation: bypass the card networks, route value peer-to-peer, and let on-chain dollars replace interchange-heavy rails. The checkout data breaks that story. Holding USDC and tapping Visa converts stablecoin balances into spendable money at scale, but Visa still sits between the user's wallet and the merchant, capturing interchange, data, and the consumer relationship. The GENIUS Act reinforces the pattern by favoring card networks as the natural compliance interface between on-chain balances and consumer commerce. Where stablecoins damage incumbents most is in B2B settlement, FX corridors, correspondent banking, and deposit bases — McKinsey pegs B2B stablecoin payments at roughly $226B annually, around 60% of total stablecoin payment volume, while card-linked stablecoin spending reached $4.5B in 2025, up 673% year-over-year.

Market impact

Visa's stablecoin settlement pilot hit a $7B annualized run rate as of Apr 29, up 50% quarter-over-quarter across nine blockchains — still a rounding error against Visa's FY2025 volume of $14.2T, but compounding fast. Bridge-enabled stablecoin-linked Visa cards went live in 18 countries in March with expansion planned to 100+ countries by year-end, covering 175M Visa merchant locations, with Phantom and MetaMask already distributing cards. The current $7.2B in cumulative crypto-card volume is roughly 2.2% of the $322.6B stablecoin market cap (USDT at $189.2B, USDC at $76.6B, per DeFiLlama), and Standard Chartered forecasts supply at $2T by end-2028 while JPMorgan's bear case lands around $500B. Even Standard Chartered's bull case at current 2.2% penetration implies $45B in annual crypto-card volume — under 1% of Visa's current run rate. Mastercard is moving on the same logic, announcing plans to acquire BVNK for up to $1.8B and saying consumers can already spend stablecoins across 150M+ merchant locations. The contest that actually matters is deposits, prefunding, and FX corridors, not the checkout terminal; the checkout terminal is exactly where Visa is choosing to fight.