Stablecoins Were Supposed to Kill the Card Networks, They Didnt
Stablecoins were supposed to route around card networks entirely, cutting out the middleman fees that Visa and Mastercard have collected for decades. Instead, the data from July suggests something opposite is happening. Milestone That Actually Matters Stablecoin card top-up volume hit $1.084 billion in July, a 15.9% monthly gain, marking the first time this figure has crossed the billion-dollar mark. That number measures something specific, like how stablecoins are loaded onto crypto-linked cards, which users then spend the same way theyd spend any other card, through the existing Visa or Mastercard rails sitting underneath. Source: X The activity is concentrated on cheap, fast blockchains rather than the networks that dominate DeFi. TRON alone handled $311.2 million in stablecoin card top-ups in July, per data, close to 30% of total identified volume. Combined with BNB Chains $140.9 million, those two networks alone accounted for more than 40% of all card top-up activity, ahead of Optimism, Ethereum, Solana, Base, and Polygon. $USDC Is Winning the Card Race? The most interesting shift in July came from which stablecoin is actually being used to fund cards. $USDC card top-ups jumped 46% in July, versus just 7% growth for $USDT, data show. $USDC alone added more volume than every other stablecoin combined,