On this edition of Strata Research, Jacquelyn sits down with institutional research analyst Alex Beaudry to dig into crypto cards, which many assumed were built for consumers but are actually seeing most traction from institutions.

Alex breaks down why the developed market consumer card is basically a feature in search of a need, what Visa is building that could change the equation, and why onchain credit could be the piece of this stack that makes or breaks the whole argument.

When companies dream  about crypto cards taking off, they tend to visualize the same picture: a customer tapping a sleek metal card in a coffee shop, paying with bitcoin instead of dollars. 

That image has done a lot of marketing work over the years, but it does not reflect how crypto cards are used today. Instead of regular people buying lattes, the bulk of crypto card usage is driven by businesses: think logistics brokers settling cargo, steel traders paying suppliers, or corporate treasuries managing working capital. 

While crypto cards were conceived as a way to spur consumer adoption of cryptocurrencies and stablecoins, business-to-business stablecoin payments now account for the majority of crypto-based payments. 

Understanding this crucial shift will allow companies and card issues alike to predict where the real value will accrue. Here’s a deep dive into how the product works, where it falls short, and the opportunities ahead. 

While the term “crypto card” implies that payments are handled over crypto rails, many of these cards actually break transactions down into onchain and offchain components. 

Usually, crypto cards are a Visa or Mastercard product, issued by a bank or fintech, and are used to spend a balance of stablecoins or volatile assets held by the user. When the card is used for a payment, those assets are sold for fiat, and the merchant receives dollars or euros. The merchant never touches crypto, and these cards are more akin to a crypto-to-fiat off-ramp than they are to a novel payments network. 

There are two settlement layers involved in crypto card transactions, and they are moving in opposite directions. The consumer-facing layer works as described above, and that part has not changed. 

The back-office leg, meanwhile, is evolving, especially with settlements between issuers, acquirers, and the card networks themselves moving onchain. 

In December 2025, Visa launched support for USDC settlement in the United States, and last month, Mastercard expanded its settlement capabilities to include USDC, PYUSD, and RLUSD.

The ability to settle transactions onchain is a major upgrade for issuers and acquirers, because it removes the need for pre-funded fiat accounts, which were typically the way they handled on- and off-ramping, and allows the system to run 24/7. 

The crypto card stack can be broken down into five layers:

On paper, retail consumers appear to have a large appetite for crypto cards. 

Around 71% of stablecoin holders say they would use a card to spend their balance, and indeed cumulative stablecoin card spend grew 1,624% over the past year from $116 million in June 2025, to $2 billion at the time of writing. However, it’s important to understand who the real users are and what they are switching from. 

In the United States and Western Europe, the people using crypto cards are overwhelmingly those who already hold crypto. These cards usually don’t attract new users into the system, and instead give existing holders one more way to spend the money they hold onchain. 

Additionally, crypto cards have to contend against deeply rooted consumer habits around credit and debit cards. A user choosing between a crypto card and a comparable Visa credit card is weighing a few percent of token-denominated rewards against an established points ecosystem, fraud protection, and a strong credit system. Crypto cards present marginal benefits, which rarely proves enough to attract the majority of users away from the traditional financial ecosystem.

Crypto cards’ rewards programs also pose a hurdle. Often, the cashback promised by crypto  cards was  paid in the form of token emissions and venture subsidies during the last bull market. Such rewards programs are unsustainable, and tend to disappear when crypto prices fall.

That said, outside of the United States and Western Europe, crypto cards seem to be more useful. In countries with high inflation and capital controls, holding a USD-pegged stablecoin card has real advantages over, and is typically the most practical way to hold U.S. dollars.

Latin America is a perfect case study for this. In 2025, Brazil (Latin America’s largest economy) led the region in terms of total crypto activity, processing $318.8 billion in crypto transactions, with Argentina coming in second at $93.9 billion, according to Chainalysis.

As for stablecoin specific volume, in 2026, Brazil continued to dominate, processing over $20 billion in stablecoin transactions, while Argentina showed the greatest level of adoption in per capita terms, with monthly stablecoin volumes rising above $1.5 billion. 

Crypto cards in this region are gaining traction. Lemon, a Latin American crypto neobank that focuses primarily on Argentina, Peru, Brazil, and Colombia, serves more than 4 million users, and has issued over 2 million cards so far. Additionally, platforms like Belo and Wallbit sell what amounts to a virtual U.S. dollar account — users can hold USDC, earn yield on the balance, and spend it anywhere Visa is accepted. 

Crypto cards certainly have a legitimate consumer use case, but they seem to mostly find success in countries with high inflation, poor credit infrastructure, weak currencies and strong remittance inflows. 

Everywhere else, crypto cards struggle to compete with incumbent alternatives today, and it may take years for any real traction to materialize.

Most crypto businesses have tried to tap the massive retail market for crypto cards, but businesses seem to find them more useful. According to a February 2026 analysis by McKinsey and Artemis, B2B stablecoin payments increased by 733% in 2025 to an estimated $226 billion, and now account for close to 60% of stablecoin payment activity.

And most of the business isn’t coming from crypto startups, as you’d expect.  The biggest spenders are ship brokers, steel traders, and auto-parts suppliers, according to Fireblocks' 2025 stablecoin report. 

Such businesses earn thin margins, which benefit greatly from cheaper cross-border payments. For a steel trader paying an overseas supplier, foreign exchange arbitrage and the ability to send or receive funds immediately instead of over several days can yield real benefits. 

Companies targeting this market include:

These companies tend to focus their products around treasury operations, expense controls, and cross-border payments instead of yields or rewards. 

Over the past few years, the largest deals in the crypto card space have not been made to acquire the card brands themselves, but instead to own the infrastructure that supports them. 

Stripe bought Bridge for roughly $1.1 billion in early 2025, and Bridge now runs an "Open Issuance" platform that helps  businesses spin up their own branded stablecoin with linked Visa cards. Visa and Bridge are offering these stablecoin-linked cards in more than 100 countries. 

Mastercard agreed to acquire stablecoin payments firm BVNK for up to $1.8 billion in early 2026 in a bid to strengthen its digital asset transfer capabilities, and better compete with Visa. 

In May 2026, Rain signed up to offer its cards via Mastercard’s network.

Based on these examples, we can infer that the durable businesses are the ones selling picks and shovels to the companies building cards, not the actual cards themselves.

There’s another trend pushing value into this layer: Visa's Flexible Credential (VFC), first rolled out in 2024, lets a single card draw from multiple sources of capital, so users can choose which account they want to use for a given transaction. 

VFC is still new and hasn’t fully been integrated into the majority of cards on the market, but it is easy to see its implications for crypto card products. For example, a user might be able to use a credit line for purchases over $200, their stablecoin balances when traveling, and spend points when making small, online purchases all on the same card number. 

Today, crypto cards exist largely because users need a special physical or digital vehicle to spend their crypto in the world. However, if any mainstream card product can simply plug a stablecoin or crypto balance in as a source of funding via a layer like VFC, then the need for separate crypto-specific cards disappears. 

This presents further opportunities for the firms building the infrastructure, but bearish for standalone crypto brands hoping to own the customer layer.

While the infrastructure layer is evolving fast, a few areas still pose significant hurdles to crypto card adoption, one of which is onchain credit: it still does not work as well as its traditional counterpart, and comes with a few caveats to boot.

Onchain collateralized credit has been effectively solved, and in some aspects, the blockchain-powered variant is actually better than traditional credit. For example, when a loan is overcollateralized onchain, repayment can be enforced by automatic liquidations, which makes recollections more reliable than with unsecured bank lines. However, such features come at the cost of capital efficiency, as a borrower has to lock up more capital than they can draw. 

Reap's card is a good example of collateralized credit in practice: The company lets a business post USDC or USDT, and take loans out against their collateral. This model also yields tax advantages, as borrowing against crypto is not a taxable event (yet), while selling crypto to fund purchases would count as a sale, incurring capital gains taxes.

On the other hand, offering unsecured credit to pseudonymous users remains risky. Blockchains don’t have a shared credit bureau, there’s no straightforward way to garnish wages, and issuers have no clear legal recourse against anonymous wallets. 

An architecture that implements zero-knowledge proofs could solve the compliance issue while preserving user privacy, however it cannot guarantee that a borrower will repay the loan. Blockchains still need a way to determine borrowers’ credit risk, and enforce penalties for defaulting,  across protocols. 

So, now that we’ve covered the ecosystem, what does the future of crypto look like? Here are  some predictions based on current trends:

Solutions like VFC turn stablecoin balances into just another source of funds that any card can tap, which causes standalone crypto cards to lose their biggest selling point, especially in developed markets. Crypto natives may still choose to use these cards, but the marginal benefits from these offerings are likely to be absorbed into the existing system, further reducing the incentive to use crypto cards.

Acquisitions similar to Stripe’s purchase of Bridge will continue as major operators seek to build stablecoin support into their existing stacks. The thesis for building robust infrastructure for crypto payments, risk  and compliance is strong, and financial companies will be incentivized to tap growing businesses already in the space. . 

As token subsidies dry up and onchain settlement compresses costs, the card providers that survive will fund rewards from their interchange and spread economics. The ones that cannot will either cut their rewards, increase the pricing of their cards, or slowly disappear. 

Crypto cards’ real value is likely to be realized in developing economies where the demand for holding U.S. dollars is high. For institutions, the value doesn’t reside with the card product, but rather the issuance, settlement, and treasury infrastructure that enable the product. 

The picture everyone likes, a person using crypto cards for everyday purchases, doesn’t seem to be materializing. But that doesn’t mean crypto cards have failed as a product. They’ve simply grown into a piece of the plumbing that helps businesses’ move their money across borders using blockchains.