Crypto Payment Cards in 2025: 40k Monthly Active Users, Less Than $100 Average Spend Per User

marsbitPubblicato 2026-01-07Pubblicato ultima volta 2026-01-07

Introduzione

In 2025, crypto payment cards transitioned from niche experimentation to practical adoption, showing exponential growth in deposits and spending. Monthly active users reached 40,000 by October 2025, with average spending under $100 per user, indicating use for small daily transactions rather than speculative purchases. Stablecoins, primarily USDT and USDC, dominated deposits (nearly 100%), reinforcing a debit-like, low-volatility spending model. The @Rain card series led in usage, supported by its role as infrastructure for multiple card projects. Ethereum and Polygon remained top chains for deposits, though multi-chain usage grew due to lower costs and improved routing. Key challenges include privacy risks from on-chain traceability, reliance on centralized service partners, and limited product differentiation. Looking to 2026, growth is expected to focus on economic sustainability, potential credit-based models, and profitability beyond user acquisition.

Author:@bobthedegen_、@samoyedscribes and@ahboyash

Compiled by: Deep Chao TechFlow

Introduction

The year 2025 was a milestone for the development of crypto cards, as they transitioned from a niche onboarding tool to an increasingly widely used payment instrument. Both in terms of deposits and spending, crypto cards demonstrated strong growth momentum this year, a trend driven by improvements in user experience, broader blockchain support, and increasing user acceptance of stablecoin-denominated spending.

This report provides an ecosystem-level overview of crypto card activity over the past two years (December 2023 to October 2025), focusing on the observable on-chain behavior of leading crypto card providers.

Executive Summary

From Experimentation to Practical Application: In 2025, crypto cards moved from the experimental phase to practical application, showing sustained exponential growth trends in both deposits and spending.
Deposits Dominate Spending: Stablecoins dominated deposit behavior, accounting for almost all collateral assets, further reinforcing a low-volatility spending model similar to debit cards.
@Rain Card Usage Leads: The @Rain series of crypto cards led in usage rates, but most users still engaged in small-amount spending, indicating their primary use for everyday "top-of-wallet" behavior.
Future Growth: This growth trend is expected to continue into 2026, with further development in profitability, interchange economics, and credit-related factors, moving beyond the singular goal of user acquisition.

Methodology and Scope

This report analyzes crypto card activity through verifiable on-chain data, prioritizing observable economic behavior over self-reported metrics.

Card Coverage:
Type 1 Cards: On-chain verifiable deposits and spending (e.g., Rain series cards, Gnosis Pay card, MetaMask card)
Type 2 Cards: Only on-chain verifiable deposits (e.g., WireX card, RedotPay card, Holyheld card)
Type 3 Cards: Cards issued by Centralized Exchanges (CEX) (e.g., Binance Card, Bybit Card, Nexo Card)→ Excluded from analysis due to limited data availability
Analysis Methods:
Deposit Analysis: Includes Type 1 and Type 2 cards to capture a broader picture of liquidity inflow.
Spending Analysis: Limited to Type 1 cards, as their transaction behavior can be directly observed on-chain.

For wallet-native cards whose spending does not follow the traditional deposit process, their spending activity is treated as a deposit in the analysis to maintain consistency. Non-stablecoin balances are normalized using the average price over the past 12 months, and all transaction volumes are expressed in USD equivalent.

Deposits: How Liquidity Enters the System

Deposits Expand First, Show Fastest Growth

Monthly collateral deposit volume for crypto cards grew exponentially throughout 2024 and accelerated further in 2025.

Card projects based on the Rain series of crypto cards consistently maintained a leading position in deposit volume, as they serve as the core infrastructure for multiple popular crypto card projects, including @ether_fi Cash, @KASTxyz, @OfframpXYZ, and the Avalanche (@avax) card.

Market Share: First Concentrated, Then Diversified

@wirexapp held the majority share of deposit volume for most of 2024, but since the second half of 2025, the Rain series of crypto cards has taken the lead in market share.

Key Insight: Since the latter half of 2025, a wave of new crypto card projects has launched, choosing Rain as their core infrastructure partner. This trend has driven higher deposit inflows while accelerating new user onboarding.

Stablecoins Dominate Almost Entirely

Throughout the dataset, almost 100% of deposit collateral assets consisted of USD-denominated stablecoins, with USDT and USDC as the main leaders.

This phenomenon further proves that current crypto cards are closer to international payment accounts rather than speculative spending tools, even for non-US users.

@ethereum and @0xPolygon are the Leading Deposit Chains, Multi-Chain Usage Gradually Rising

Although Ethereum (@ethereum) and Polygon (@0xPolygon) remain the primary deposit networks, other secondary chains (such as @base, @arbitrum, @Optimism, and @solana) are also steadily increasing their market share.

The rise of the multi-chain trend reflects the following factors:

Lower Transaction Costs: Reduces the barrier for users to top up more frequently.
Card Provider Route Optimization: Users are no longer forced to use a single chain; multi-chain deposits have gradually become a "basic feature."

Spending Behavior: How Crypto Cards Are Actually Used

Monthly Active Users (MAU) Continued Rapid Growth in 2025

As of October 2025, the number of monthly active card users (MAU) has reached approximately 40,000, indicating rising user acceptance of crypto cards as a repeatedly used payment tool, rather than just a one-time experiment.

The crypto card industry is still in the early "user acquisition-driven" growth stage, suggesting the adoption curve is still in its infancy, with distribution and accessibility continually expanding.

The Rain series of cards, by virtue of their role as shared infrastructure (Card-as-a-Service) for multiple crypto card projects, accounts for the majority of transaction volume. Data from this Rain series is more suitable for interpretation at a trend level.

Spending amounts generally remain low, possibly indicating that crypto cards are primarily used for everyday expenses.

The low-value card usage pattern might also indicate users are utilizing crypto cards as an off-ramp tool for fiat withdrawal, directly bypassing the manual step of converting stablecoins to fiat.

Notably, @gnosispay cardholders show higher monthly spending amounts, suggesting their users are more inclined to use it as a primary payment card consistently.

Over time, the transaction frequency of active cardholders has increased year-over-year; similar to spending patterns, @Gnosis Pay cardholders are the most active, with an average of over 30 transactions per month, fully reflecting daily payment behavior.

Key Insights

Increasing User Activity: More people are genuinely starting to use crypto cards, not just registering, with spending and activity volumes rising steadily in 2025.
Primarily Small Daily Expenses: Users rely more on stablecoins for small, routine expenses rather than large or speculative transactions.
Core Role of Infrastructure Providers: Shared "Card-as-a-Service" models drive the concentration of transaction volume and dictate how the ecosystem expands.

Outlook for 2026: From Experimentation to Sustainable Scaling

Data from 2025 indicates that crypto cards have moved from the experimental phase into early adoption. Although deposits, spending, and active usage saw significant growth, user behavior remains cautious, resembling a stablecoin-centric prepaid card model rather than a full replacement for traditional credit cards.

Currently, crypto cards primarily serve as a bridge between on-chain liquidity and real-world payments, not as a complete substitute for traditional credit cards.

Looking ahead to 2026, growth is expected to be driven more by economic sustainability and product design, rather than relying solely on user acquisition momentum. As usage scales, card providers will need to balance expansion, the interchange economics of cross-border and domestic traffic, routing efficiency, and increasingly complex operational management.

Key Issues to Note:

Privacy Concerns Persist: Transaction records are public on-chain, potentially exposing spending behavior. Once addresses are clustered or linked to centralized exchange deposit addresses, tracing ownership becomes easy based on on-chain behavioral traces (e.g., time, amount).
The Double-Edged Sword of Public Data: Public data facilitates analysis but can also be exploited by competitors. Competitors can monitor traffic, mimic incentives, or even attack high-value users with predatory offers.
Risks of Non-Vertical Integration: Most crypto card projects rely on issuers, payment processors, and a handful of "Card-as-a-Service" providers. This model can lead to single points of failure or be constrained by upstream compliance events or policy changes, causing sudden restrictions or shutdowns.
High-Risk Merchant Categories: High-risk merchant categories like gaming, online casinos, and adult entertainment often face higher fraud and dispute/chargeback rates, potentially leading to stricter controls from card networks and issuers. Additionally, these categories may face harsher Anti-Money Laundering (AML) scrutiny in different jurisdictions.
Homogenization Issue: Most crypto cards on the market currently offer similar core functionalities, with limited differentiation beyond selected cardholder rewards like cashback or points. Continued reliance on prepaid structures and a few Card-as-a-Service providers (like Rain) may pose long-term challenges for crypto card issuers seeking to compete with large traditional banks globally.

Future Trends to Watch:

Expansion from prepaid models to credit card-related designs, similar to the @Coinbase One AMEX card.
Stablecoins continue to dominate as the primary unit of account.
Increased focus on profitability and unit economics as competition intensifies.

Crypto cards are gradually becoming foundational tools for embedded payments within wallets and applications. 2025 established market demand, and 2026 will determine which models can achieve sustainable scale.

Letture associate

GPT-5.6 Countdown: Abandon the Illusion of a Single API, Computational Iteration Can't Outpace a Single Page of Compliance

In mid-June, three seemingly independent industry events—the compliance-driven throttling of Fable 5, the open-sourcing of GLM-5.2, and the leaked release timeline for GPT-5.6—are pushing the global AI industry toward a watershed moment. These shifts signal a fundamental restructuring of the industry's underlying logic. First, **"usability" has substantially overtaken "advanced capabilities"** as the primary weight, pushing the global large language model (LLM) supply chain into a "dual-track" phase of controlled closed-source and local open-source coexistence. Second, **the competitive moats of closed-source giants are shifting**. Their technical focus is moving from "language intelligence" toward "spatial intelligence (world models)"—a domain heavily reliant on computing power. Third, faced with常态化 transnational compliance risks, **a "model-agnostic" decoupled design has become a survival necessity for application-layer developers to maintain business continuity.** The article details how Anthropic's Fable 5, despite its advanced engineering feats, was restricted for non-U.S. citizens within 72 hours of launch, highlighting how geopolitical compliance can instantly limit even the most advanced models. In response, the open-source camp, exemplified by Zhipu AI's MIT-licensed GLM-5.2, is gaining market share by offering stable performance improvements and significant cost advantages (up to 70% savings for enterprises), while achieving full adaptation with domestic semiconductor platforms. Meanwhile, closed-source leaders like OpenAI are pivoting. The anticipated GPT-5.6 reportedly shifts focus from language to spatial intelligence and world models, aiming to rebuild a generational gap in areas like 3D understanding, simulation, and industrial design that demand immense compute. The core conclusion is that the LLM supply chain's logic has changed. Enterprises must now evaluate infrastructure based on a composite of technical performance and policy compliance. For developers, complete reliance on a single closed-source API poses unacceptable risk. Implementing a truly model-agnostic architecture—enabling swift switches to compliant, locally deployable open-source alternatives—is no longer just good practice but a fundamental baseline for business continuity.

marsbit1 h fa

GPT-5.6 Countdown: Abandon the Illusion of a Single API, Computational Iteration Can't Outpace a Single Page of Compliance

marsbit1 h fa

Is the 'Token Subsidy War' Among AI Giants Almost Over?

The article discusses the ongoing "token subsidy war" among AI giants like OpenAI and Anthropic, questioning whether it's nearing its end. It reveals that current AI subscription prices are heavily subsidized, with some plans offering tokens at up to 70 times the actual cost to attract and retain heavy users, especially developers and enterprises. This strategy mirrors past internet-era subsidy battles, but with a key difference: AI tokens lack "lock-in" effects. Unlike ride-hailing or food delivery apps, users can easily switch between AI providers as APIs become standardized, making it difficult for companies to raise prices post-subsidy. The piece highlights a structural asymmetry in the competition. Giants like Google, with massive advertising revenue, can afford to subsidize tokens indefinitely, akin to using "tokens as a weapon." In contrast, venture-backed companies like OpenAI and Anthropic face pressure to become profitable, especially as they approach IPO. The article cites Google Ventures founder Bill Maris, who suggests Google could slash token prices by 80%, putting immense pressure on competitors. Two potential endgames are presented: the "internet service" model (subsidize, monopolize, then raise prices) and the "utility" model (tokens become a standardized, low-margin commodity like electricity). Given the low switching costs, the latter seems more likely. The competition may not have a single winner but could instead accelerate AI's evolution into a foundational, infrastructure-level technology, akin to a public utility. For now, users continue to benefit from heavily subsidized token costs.

marsbit1 h fa

Is the 'Token Subsidy War' Among AI Giants Almost Over?

marsbit1 h fa

Beyond the Stadium: The Profitable Games Surrounding the World Cup

"Beyond the Pitch: The Profit Game Around the World Cup" The FIFA World Cup transcends being a sporting spectacle, evolving into a massive global arena for speculation and profit-seeking. The 2026 tournament has amplified this dynamic, creating a multi-layered ecosystem of financial opportunism alongside the football. **Prediction markets** have surged into the mainstream. Platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi saw trading volumes for World Cup contracts soar, attracting new users with their financial trading model and high-profile, chain-based wealth stories that overshadow traditional sports betting in terms of growth and narrative. However, **traditional sportsbooks** remain the dominant force, leveraging established user habits, legal markets, and comprehensive product offerings to handle the vast majority of speculative wagers, with projections suggesting record-breaking betting volumes. Capital markets also react. **"Concept stocks"** in countries like South Korea and Japan experience volatile price swings based on team performance and anticipated fan spending on items like chicken, beer, and viewing parties, effectively becoming a stock market reflecting fan sentiment. The **ticket resale market** has become a sophisticated arena for arbitrage. Prices fluctuate wildly based on team draws and star power, with sellers sometimes listing tickets they don't yet own in a practice akin to short-selling, while FIFA's own "Right to Buy" tokens add another layer of speculative trading. **Collectibles and merchandise** offer another avenue. Panini sticker albums, with their inherent scarcity and nostalgic value, can become high-value collectibles. Limited-edition or locally themed jerseys command significant premiums on secondary markets, and even counterfeit vendors profit from fans' desire for affordable match-day identity. The **cryptocurrency** space has seen a frenzy of speculative, unauthorized World Cup-themed meme coins on chains like Solana. These tokens, often exploiting team names and player imagery, experience extreme pump-and-dump cycles, creating stories of massive gains for a few early entrants and steep losses for many others. Finally, an entire industry thrives on **providing information and tools** to other speculators. Developers create platforms like SeatSidekick to track ticket inventory and prices, while paid Telegram groups and subscriptions sell betting tips and predictions, monetizing the widespread desire for an informational edge. In essence, the World Cup has become a compressed, global laboratory for speculation. While the games determine champions on the field, a parallel, complex network of financial transactions—spanning prediction contracts, bets, stocks, tickets, collectibles, crypto, and information services—settles its own scores in the global market.

marsbit1 h fa

Beyond the Stadium: The Profitable Games Surrounding the World Cup

marsbit1 h fa

Hyperliquid ETF Claim Draws Attention As HYPE Narrative Builds On X

A social media claim has brought attention to Hyperliquid (HYPE) and the growth of its related ETF products. According to a June 20 post on X by AlphaOnChain, three Hyperliquid ETFs launched in May 2026 have collectively amassed $158 million in assets under management, led by a Bitwise fund with $88 million and a 21Shares fund with $66 million. The article notes this claim is from social media and not verified by official issuer data, advising caution. Nonetheless, the report highlights that HYPE is gaining traction as a notable altcoin narrative. Its focus on on-chain perpetual trading and exchange infrastructure places it at the intersection of DeFi and derivatives, attracting traders looking for high-conviction plays beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum. The key takeaway is that while social momentum can influence short-term markets, sustainable growth for HYPE would require confirmed demand, liquidity, and continued ecosystem development.

bitcoinist3 h fa

Hyperliquid ETF Claim Draws Attention As HYPE Narrative Builds On X

bitcoinist3 h fa

How Does Codex Use a Computer? Three Entry Points and Permission Boundaries

This article explains the three primary methods for Codex to interact with a computer, each with distinct use cases, permission boundaries, and trust levels. **1. Computer Use:** This offers the broadest access, allowing Codex to visually control and interact with the graphical user interface of authorized macOS/Windows apps, system settings, and even iOS simulators. It's ideal for tasks lacking APIs or structured tools, such as operating legacy software or multi-app workflows. However, it's the slowest method and has the widest permission scope, requiring careful supervision for sensitive actions. **2. Chrome Extension:** This grants Codex access to the user's logged-in Chrome browser state, including cookies, profiles, and open tabs. It's best for tasks requiring user identity across websites like Gmail, LinkedIn, Salesforce, or internal dashboards. Its key advantage is multi-tab control for complex workflows. While more powerful for browser-based tasks than Computer Use, it carries higher sensitivity as actions are performed under the user's identity. **3. In-App Browser:** This is a browser isolated within the Codex thread, separate from the user's personal browsing data. It excels in web development and debugging scenarios—previewing local servers, testing responsive layouts, or annotating designs directly on the page. Its isolation is a strength for development but a limitation for tasks requiring login sessions. The core principle is to choose the narrowest, safest, and most structured interface for the task. Use plugins or MCPs first, resort to visual control (Computer Use) only for GUI-dependent tasks, employ the Chrome extension for identity-reliant browser work, and prefer the In-App Browser for isolated development. **Appshots** are clarified as a fourth, complementary tool for *inputting* context—capturing a screenshot of a window to point Codex to something—rather than a method for Codex to *act*. Together, this layered approach highlights a key to AI agent productization: not granting unlimited permissions, but constraining them within clear boundaries for specific tasks while preserving user oversight.

marsbit3 h fa

How Does Codex Use a Computer? Three Entry Points and Permission Boundaries

marsbit3 h fa

Trading

Spot

Futures