Every second exchange, wallet and neobank now seems to be launching a card. The pitch is familiar — spend your stablecoins anywhere — but the economics behind the boom have very little to do with cryptocurrency and a great deal to do with old-fashioned payments margins.
Card programmes settle in fiat at the network level. What the user experiences as spending USDC is, underneath, a real-time conversion, a standard authorisation message and an interchange fee split between the issuer, the programme manager and the network.
Highlights
- Stablecoin card volumes have roughly tripled year over year.
- Issuers earn on interchange, float and FX rather than on crypto itself.
- Regulatory clarity in the EU has pulled several launches forward.
Where the money actually comes from
Interchange is the headline revenue line, typically running between 0.2% and 1.8% depending on region and card type. On top of that sits a conversion spread charged at the moment of authorisation, and, for programmes that hold user balances, float income on the reserve assets backing those balances.
That stack explains why issuers compete so aggressively on cashback. Rewards are funded from interchange, so a programme with strong cross-border volume can afford headline rates that look uneconomic to anyone reading only the crypto side of the business.
“The card is not a crypto product with a payments wrapper. It is a payments product with a crypto funding source, and it earns like one.”
Regulation pulled launches forward
European rules on electronic money and stablecoin issuance gave programme managers something they had lacked for years: a predictable licensing route. Several launches originally scheduled for next year were brought forward once the supervisory expectations were published.
The flip side is consolidation. Compliance costs favour large programme managers, and a handful of issuers now sit behind the majority of consumer-facing brands. Users choosing between two cards are frequently choosing between two front ends on the same infrastructure.
What it means for users
For everyday spending, the practical questions are unchanged: what is the true conversion spread, what happens to rewards if volume targets are missed, and how are disputes handled when the funding source is a self-custodied wallet rather than a bank account.
Traders in particular should read the fine print on foreign transaction handling. Several programmes advertise zero FX fees while applying a conversion spread at authorisation that can exceed what a conventional multi-currency account would charge.