introduction
2025 was a landmark year for crypto cards, transforming them from a niche entry-level tool into an increasingly widely used payment method. Whether for deposits or spending, crypto cards demonstrated strong growth momentum that year, driven by improved 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), with a focus on analyzing the observable on-chain behavior of leading crypto card providers.
Execution Summary
• From trial to practical application : By 2025, encrypted cards will move from the trial stage to practical application, with both deposits and consumption showing a continuous exponential growth trend.
• Deposits dominate consumption : Stablecoins dominate deposit behavior, accounting for almost all of the collateral assets, further reinforcing the low-volatility consumption pattern similar to debit cards.
• @Rain Card Usage Leads : The @Rain series of encrypted cards leads in usage, but most users still primarily use them for small transactions, indicating "wallet top" behavior mainly for daily consumption.
• Future growth potential : This growth trend is expected to continue into 2026, with profitability, exchange economics, and credit-related factors being further developed, rather than being limited to the single goal of user acquisition.
Methods and Scope
This report analyzes cryptocard activity using verifiable data on the blockchain, prioritizing observable economic behavior over self-reported metrics.
• Card coverage area:
• Type 1 Cards: On-chain verifiable deposits and spending (such as Rain series cards, Gnosis Pay cards, MetaMask cards)
• Type 2 Cards: Only support on-chain verifiable deposits (such as WireX cards, RedotPay cards, Holyheld cards)
• Type 3 Cards: Cards issued by centralized exchanges (CEXs) (such as Binance cards, Bybit cards, Nexo cards) → Not included in the analysis due to data access limitations.
• Analytical methods:
• Deposit analysis: Includes Type 1 and Type 2 cards to capture broader liquidity inflows.
• Consumption 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 deposits in the analysis to maintain consistency. Non-stablecoin balances are normalized using the average price over the past 12 months and expressed in USD equivalents for all transaction volumes.
Deposits: How does liquidity enter the system?
Deposits expanded first, with the fastest growth rate.
In 2024, monthly secured deposits for crypto cards grew exponentially, and this growth accelerated further in 2025.
Card projects based on the Rain series of crypto cards have consistently maintained a leading position in terms of deposit volume because they serve as the core infrastructure for many popular crypto card projects, including @ether_fi Cash, @KASTxyz, @OfframpXYZ, and Avalanche (@avax) cards.
Market share: First concentrated, then dispersed
@wirexapp held the majority share of deposits for most of 2024, but since the second half of 2025, Rain series crypto cards have taken the lead in market share.
Key Insight : Since the second half of 2025, a wave of new crypto card projects have launched, selecting Rain as their core infrastructure partner. This trend has driven higher deposit inflows and accelerated the acquisition of new users.
Stablecoins have almost universally taken the lead.
Throughout the dataset, nearly 100% of the deposit collateral consists of USD-denominated stablecoins, with USDT and USDC being the main leaders.
This phenomenon further demonstrates that current encrypted cards are closer to international payment accounts than speculative consumer instruments, even for non-US users.
@ethereum and @0xPolygon are the deposit-centric chains, and the use of multiple chains is gradually increasing.
While 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 : This lowers the barrier for users to recharge more frequently.
• Card service providers optimize routing : users are no longer forced to use a single chain, and multi-chain deposits have gradually become a "basic function".
Consumer behavior: How encrypted cards are actually used
Monthly active users (MAU) will continue to grow rapidly in 2025.
As of October 2025, the number of monthly active card users (MAU) has reached approximately 40,000, indicating that users are increasingly accepting the encrypted card as a reusable payment tool, rather than just as a one-off experimental tool.
The crypto card industry is still in the early stages of user adoption-driven growth, indicating that the adoption curve is still in its early stages and distribution and accessibility are still expanding.
Rain cards, by virtue of their role as a shared infrastructure (card-as-a-service) for various crypto card projects, account for a major share of transaction volume. The data for this Rain card series is best interpreted from a trend perspective.
Overall spending remained at a low level, which may indicate that the encrypted cards were mainly used for everyday spending.
Low-value card usage patterns may also indicate that users are using crypto cards as a tool for withdrawing fiat currency, thus directly eliminating the need for manual conversion from stablecoins to fiat currency.
It's worth noting that @gnosispay cardholders have higher monthly spending, suggesting that its users tend to use it more consistently as their primary payment card.
Over time, the transaction frequency of active cardholders has increased year by year; similar to the consumption pattern, @Gnosis Pay cardholders have the highest activity level, with an average of more than 30 transactions per month, which fully reflects the behavioral characteristics of daily payments.
Key Insights
• Increased user activity : More and more people are actually starting to use the encryption card, rather than just registering, and spending and activity are steadily increasing in 2025.
• Primarily for small daily purchases : Users rely more on stablecoins for small, routine purchases rather than large or speculative transactions.
• The core role of infrastructure providers : The shared “card-as-a-service” model drives the concentration of transaction volume and determines how the ecosystem expands.
Looking ahead to 2026: From experimentation to sustainable scaling
Data from 2025 indicates that crypto cards have moved from the experimental stage to early adoption. Despite significant growth in deposits, spending, and active usage, user behavior remains cautious, resembling a prepaid card model centered around stablecoins rather than a complete replacement for traditional credit cards.
Currently, crypto cards primarily serve as a bridge between on-chain liquidity and real-world payments, rather than a complete replacement for traditional credit cards.
Looking ahead to 2026, growth is expected to be driven more by economic sustainability and product design than by sheer user acquisition momentum. As usage scales, card service providers will need to find a balance between expansion, the economics of cross-border and domestic traffic exchange, routing efficiency, and increasingly complex operations management.
Key issues to note:
1. Privacy issues remain: Transaction records are publicly available on the blockchain, potentially exposing spending behavior. Once addresses are clustered or linked to deposit addresses on centralized exchanges, tracing ownership becomes easy based on on-chain behavioral traces (such as time and amount).
2. The double-edged sword of public data: While public data is easy to analyze, it can also be exploited by competitors. Competitors can monitor traffic, mimic incentives, and even attack high-value users with predatory offers.
3. Risks of non-vertical integration: Most crypto card projects rely on issuers, payment processors, and a few "card-as-a-service" providers. This model can lead to single points of failure or be subject to restrictions from upstream compliance events or policy changes, potentially resulting in sudden limitations or shutdowns.
4. High-Risk Merchant Categories: High-risk merchant categories such as gaming, online casinos, and adult entertainment often face higher fraud and dispute/chargeback rates, which may lead to stricter controls by card networks and issuers. Furthermore, these categories may face more stringent anti-money laundering (AML) scrutiny in different jurisdictions.
5. Homogenization Issue: Most crypto cards on the market currently offer similar core functionalities, with limited differentiation beyond select cardholder rewards such as cashback or points. Continued reliance on prepaid structures and a few card-as-a-service providers (such as Rain) could pose a long-term challenge for crypto card issuers seeking to compete with large traditional global banks.
Future trends worth noting:
• An extension from a prepaid model to a credit card-related design, similar to the @Coinbase One AMEX card.
Stablecoins continue to dominate their role as the primary unit of account.
• As competition intensifies, greater emphasis is placed on profitability and unit economic efficiency.
Cryptographic cards are gradually becoming a fundamental tool for embedded payments in wallets and applications. Market demand has been established by 2025, while 2026 will determine which models can achieve sustainable scalability.
Click to learn about BlockBeats' job openings.
Welcome to the official BlockBeats community:
Telegram subscription group: https://t.me/theblockbeats
Telegram group: https://t.me/BlockBeats_App
Official Twitter account: https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia
