People are buying groceries with stablecoins now. $10.9 billion worth.
The average transaction is $86. The merchant has no idea it's crypto. And it's growing faster than almost anyone expected.
August 30, 2026
This article is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered financial or investment advice. Crypto trading involves risk.
Last month, nearly nine million times, someone tapped a card at a register and paid with stablecoins. Not Bitcoin. Not Ethereum. USDT and USDC, the digital dollars that barely make headlines anymore because they're designed to be boring.
The average purchase was $86. Groceries in São Paulo. A subscription renewal in Lagos. A train ticket in Manila. The kind of spending nobody posts about on X. But the money behind every one of those swipes came from a stablecoin balance, converted into local currency somewhere between the card reader and the merchant's bank account. The merchant never knew the difference.
That quiet milestone is the real story here. Stablecoin cards have now processed more than $10.9 billion in total spending, according to data firm Paymentscan, and July was the first month the industry cleared $1 billion on its own. Three years ago, this entire category was processing about $60,000 a month. It now moves that amount in roughly four minutes.
So how do these cards actually work?
The mechanics are simpler than they sound, and that simplicity is the whole reason this is growing as fast as it is.
You hold USDT or USDC in an account linked to a Visa or Mastercard. When you tap your card to pay for something, the provider converts your stablecoins into whatever currency the merchant accepts. The merchant receives a completely normal card payment. You spent crypto. Nobody at the register had to learn anything about blockchains, wallets, or gas fees.
That's it. There's no adoption curve on the merchant side, which removes the biggest barrier that has held back crypto payments for years. Visa says stablecoin-linked cards can already reach more than 175 million merchant locations worldwide, and the company has been expanding that reach into over 100 countries through a partnership with payments firm Bridge since March. Mastercard is building similar infrastructure with a focus on Africa and the Middle East.
The result is a payment system that looks and feels identical to any other card transaction on the outside, while running on entirely different rails underneath.
The numbers are real, but read the fine print
Here's where it's worth slowing down and looking more carefully at the data.
The $10.9 billion figure comes from Paymentscan's dataset, which includes numbers that card companies report about themselves. RedotPay, the largest provider in the stablecoin card space (and the company that publicized the milestone), is one of them. Its spending data is self-reported rather than independently verified on a blockchain.
a16z crypto looked at the same month through a different lens. Counting only the spending that's independently visible on-chain, their analysis put July's total at $759 million, not the $1.04 billion figure that's making headlines. Same underlying data source. Two very different ways of reading it. One takes companies at their word, the other only counts what anyone can verify on a public blockchain.
Neither number is wrong, and the gap between them isn't a scandal. But it's the difference between a company's own scorecard and an audited one. That distinction matters when you see RedotPay projecting $50 billion in annual stablecoin card spending by 2028. That's a forecast from an interested party with skin in the game, not a figure that Visa, Mastercard, or Paymentscan have endorsed.
The dollar took over, and it wasn't even close
One trend the data does show clearly, regardless of which dataset you use: digital dollars have completely taken over stablecoin card spending.
- USDC now accounts for roughly 58% of card spending (up from about 48% a year ago)
- USDT handles about 26% (up from just 7% a year ago)
- Euro-backed stablecoins (EURe), which made up nearly 88% of this entire market in early 2024, have collapsed to around 2%
The blockchains carrying this activity have shifted just as dramatically. Gnosis, once the default network for crypto-linked cards when most of this was a European experiment, now handles about 2% of volume. Optimism leads with roughly 29%, followed by Solana and Base at 19% each.
In two years, stablecoin card spending went from a small, euro-denominated niche on a single blockchain to a dollar-denominated payment habit spread across multiple networks and over 100 countries. That's a complete infrastructure overhaul, and it happened without most people noticing.
RedotPay co-founder Jonathan Chan told Reuters that Latin America leads adoption right now, with Africa close behind. His explanation for why is probably the least crypto-native thing you'll hear from a crypto company CEO: it's not enthusiasm driving this growth. It's people who need a dollar-denominated account that their local bank won't give them.
Let's put this in perspective
Traditional cards will process more than $20 trillion in spending this year. Against that, $10.9 billion is a rounding error. Anyone telling you stablecoins are about to replace Visa is selling something, and you should probably walk the other way.
But the growth curve is hard to dismiss. Monthly volume went from less than $1 million when Paymentscan started tracking in October 2023 to $759 million (on-chain) or $1.04 billion (total reported) in July 2026. The number of individual transactions nearly doubled year over year, from 5.2 million to almost 9 million. And the average transaction size held steady at $86, which tells you this is real spending on real things, not a handful of whales making large one-off purchases.
The question going forward is straightforward: does monthly spending stay above $1 billion? And do the self-reported numbers and the independently verifiable ones start to converge? If both of those things happen, this stops being a crypto story and starts being a payments story. That's a much bigger deal.
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This article is for informational and educational purposes only. Cryptocurrency trading involves risk, and past performance is not indicative of future results. Always do your own research.
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