Rain's $250 million Series C earlier this month, valuing the crypto card infrastructure company at nearly $2 billion, was just the opening salvo. Behind the headline lies a rapidly intensifying battle over how the world's 300 million stablecoin users will actually spend their digital dollars.
Crypto card payments have grown at 106% annually to reach $18 billion in annualized volume, according to new research from Artemis. That now rivals peer-to-peer stablecoin transfers, which have plateaued around $19 billion.
The battle is unfolding across three distinct fronts, each representing a different vision for crypto payments infrastructure.
The Full-Stack Play: Rain and Hong Kong-based Reap operate as "full-stack issuance platforms" that collapse the entire card infrastructure into a single company. By becoming Visa principal members directly, they bypass traditional banking intermediaries. Rain's card base has grown 30x year-over-year, with payment volume up 38x and over 200 companies now using its platform.
The Orchestration Layer: Stripe’s $1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge signaled Big Tech's entry into stablecoin infrastructure. Combined with Zero Hash, valued at $1 billion, these players are betting that chain-agnostic orchestration will win: letting businesses accept and settle stablecoins without worrying about which blockchain powers the transaction.
Purpose-Built Blockchains: A newer cohort argues that general-purpose chains like Ethereum were never designed for payments, and that purpose-built infrastructure is the answer. Stable, a Cayman-based startup backed by Tether investor Bitfinex with $2 billion in pre-deposits, launched its payments-focused blockchain at the end of 2025.
The geographic split reveals why this market is so compelling. While US and European users often view crypto cards as novelty rewards programs (Gemini loses money on its card but uses it as a customer acquisition tool), emerging markets drive genuine spending demand.
The pattern is consistent across regions. In Africa, Sling Money experienced viral growth in Kenya last year after removing its waitlist. Mike Hudak, Sling's founder and former Chief Product Officer of Monzo, identified a gap the traditional system couldn't fill: moving money between neighboring African countries.
In Latin America, the opportunity is even larger. Brazil has 26 million crypto holders, but only 37% of stablecoin holders actually spend them. Tether-backed Oobit is targeting that gap with its DePay feature, letting users tap to pay directly from self-custody wallets. The company has 50,000 beta users, with 92% of volume coming from stablecoins, 86% of that in USDT.
Artemis data shows similar patterns globally: RedotPay draws users primarily from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India, while EtherFi's card has found unexpected traction in Brazil, the US, and Denmark.
One important dynamic: Visa currently dominates on-chain card volume with over 90% market share, despite MasterCard running similar programs. The reason is strategic. Rain and Reap, the largest on-chain issuers, are Visa principal members participating in Visa's pilot program for native stablecoin settlement.
This means transactions can settle directly in USDC on the Visa network rather than requiring liquidation to fiat. Absent from this arrangement: USDT, the market-dominant stablecoin that controls roughly two-thirds of stablecoin supply. Circle's USDC has positioned itself as the compliant choice for payment rails, alongside PayPal's PYUSD.
This creates an unusual situation where the most-used stablecoin in emerging markets isn't the most integrated into Western payment infrastructure, a gap that companies like Stable and Oobit are explicitly trying to close.
Perhaps the most ambitious vision comes from DeFi-native players like EtherFi, whose card offers higher cash back than any centralized exchange competitor by paying rewards in Scroll tokens rather than actual cash. More intriguingly, EtherFi's "Cash Borrow Mode" lets users take loans against their staked crypto rather than selling it, creating secured credit without traditional underwriting.
The incumbents are watching. Even traditional credit card economics favor disruption: Mehler notes that credit cards are "the only mechanism I can think of that does not follow economies of scale," fees keep rising despite growing transaction volumes.
The stablecoin payments market is projected to keep growing at triple-digit rates. Alex Tapscott, author of "Web3" and managing director at Ninepoint Partners, captured the trajectory when he told me: "2025 was the year stablecoins entered the mainstream. 2026 is the year they go mainstream."
The payment stack war continues on multiple fronts. Stripe's Tempo chain hasn't launched publicly yet. Stable is running correspondent banking pilots it can't discuss. Rain is deploying its $250 million toward expanding its 200-company roster.
The winner will be whoever can make spending digital dollars as simple as Venmo—while ensuring the money actually lands in your account, not theirs.