Stablecoin Adoption Surges as Daily Crypto Card Spending Tops $1 Billion

Dollar-backed stablecoins funded roughly 70% of more than 10 million tracked transactions, with USDC representing about half of the volume and Tether's USDT accounting for 20.3%. A year earlier the split was closer to 48% USDC and 7% USDT, putting Tether's share in card channels on a steeper growth curve even as USDC retains the lead.

Settlement Architecture

The transaction flow is worth examining. Cards convert balances to local fiat at the checkout step, so merchants never touch the underlying stablecoin. Stablecoins function as a funding source for cards operating on existing Visa and Mastercard networks, not as a replacement for them. That distinction matters for peg mechanics: the redemption pathway runs through card issuer wallets, which sit above the on-chain mint and burn loop rather than directly interacting with it. Each swipe triggers a conversion event upstream of any token-level supply adjustment.

"The real measure of crypto's progress is not simply how many people own digital assets, but how useful those assets become in everyday life," said Thomas Gregory, vice president of payments and fiat at Binance.

Adjacent Supply Signals

Two headline-level developments frame the broader picture. A market overview circulated by openPR.com referenced combined USDT and USDC supply approaching $257 billion, though underlying figures were not available for independent verification. Separately, Bitget reported that RLUSD's supply on the XRP Ledger has surpassed $1 billion, marking another fiat-backed entrant crossing a round-number threshold and adding a third large issuer to the active settlement layer.

PYMNTS Intelligence, in a separate finding reported by CU Today, noted that more than three-quarters of surveyed consumers would open a crypto or stablecoin wallet through an existing bank or fintech app. Traditional financial providers could therefore become the primary onboarding surface as payment use cases scale.

What to Track

Three variables define the next leg. First, the USDC-to-USDT share inside card-funded channels: if Tether continues compounding from the low single digits, the card layer becomes a measurable secondary demand sink for USDT outside exchange trading. Second, RLUSD's trajectory post-$1B: whether XRP Ledger activity translates into meaningful off-chain redemption pressure or stays concentrated in treasury movements. Third, the conversion path itself. Each card swipe is a peg-test event in miniature. If the fiat conversion step at the card issuer lags under volume, that is a stress signal on the off-ramp, independent of any on-chain mint or burn mechanics.

For traders consolidating exposure across crypto, stock futures, and CFDs under a single USDT balance, a unified account model simplifies margin management when stablecoin funding sits at the center of the stack.