Stablecoin Payment Battle Heats Up: Crypto Card Annual Growth of 106%, Which of the Three Main Paths Will Break Through?

【Blockchain Rhythm】 Recently, the crypto card infrastructure circle has been quite active. On January 21, Rain completed a $250 million Series C funding round, with a valuation approaching $2 billion, directly boosting the overall enthusiasm for the crypto payments track. The current question is clear: how can stablecoins truly become widely circulated? Various players have different answers.

From the data, crypto card payments have already taken off. Research firm Artemis’s statistics show that this business is growing at a rate of 106% annually, with an annual transaction volume reaching $18 billion. Comparing this figure to peer-to-peer stablecoin transfers, which are also around $19 billion, crypto card payments are not far from becoming the top retail application for stablecoins. Artemis researcher Patrick Kim even predicts that this scenario could be seen by the end of this year.

This competition is currently divided into three main lines:

First is full-stack integration. Rain and Hong Kong’s Reap have both obtained Visa principal membership status. By integrating the entire infrastructure from card issuance to settlement, they bypass traditional banks directly. Rain’s data is quite impressive: the number of card users has increased 30-fold year-over-year, payment volume has grown 38 times, and they now have over 200 clients.

Second is building an orchestration layer. Stripe acquired Bridge for $1.1 billion and bought Zero Hash at a valuation of around $1 billion. The logic of these large tech and financial companies is clear: no matter which blockchain you use, they help you receive and settle stablecoins, making merchants completely ignore the underlying chain.

Third is a more aggressive approach. Some believe that general-purpose chains like Ethereum are not designed for payments at all. Supported by Bitfinex, Stable launched a dedicated payment chain at the end of last year, attracting about $2 billion in funding, with the goal of enabling stablecoin transfers with zero Gas fees.

Geographically, the real growth engine is in emerging markets. Africa, Latin America, and South Asia have much higher demand for stablecoin payments than Europe and America. Currently, Visa accounts for over 90% of on-chain card payments, and the key point is that it supports USDC as a native settlement pilot, while USDT has not yet been integrated into this system, which is also a variable.