Crypto card payments have just set a new record.
In fact, by March 2026, their total transaction volume rose to $584.5 million, marking a 211% increase compared to the previous year.
This marks the new all-time monthly high ever recorded.
Crypto Credit Cards
Crypto cards are actually debit cards, generally, and not credit cards.
However, in common language, there is often confusion because the term “credit card” has now entered everyday vocabulary and is frequently used to generally identify payment cards, not just credit cards.
From a technical standpoint, cryptocurrency payment cards are prepaid cards, or debit cards.
In fact, actual credit cards allow their users to pay using credit, up to a daily or monthly spending limit, and then this credit must be repaid at a later time.
In contrast, prepaid cards, such as crypto cards, allow you to spend only the funds already deposited in the account to which they are linked.
Simply put, traditional prepaid cards allow you to deposit fiat currency into the account, while crypto cards also allow you to deposit cryptocurrencies, which are instantly converted into fiat currency at the time of payment.
The Records
Crypto payment cards, funded in cryptocurrencies but allowing payments in fiat currencies on major payment networks like Visa and Mastercard, have been around for several years now.
According to PaymentScan data, until May 2023, the monthly total of payments made with monitored crypto cards had not even surpassed one million dollars.
Consider that on the Visa network alone, payments exceeding 20 billion dollars are typically processed in a single month.
However, starting from December of the same 2023, there has been a surge, which appears to be ongoing, despite a slight dip in February of this year.
The first month in which crypto card payments collectively exceeded $10 million was actually January 2024, precisely the month when the first Bitcoin spot ETFs debuted on US exchanges. It is possible that these two events are not connected, but they demonstrate how starting from 2024, the world’s perception of the crypto sector began to change.
By September of that same 2024, the total monthly figure had already surpassed 100 million, with truly exponential growth that, however, temporarily halted in December of the same year.
During 2025, however, the 200 million mark was first surpassed in April, and then the 300 million mark in July. Therefore, the exponential growth continued.
The previous all-time high was reached in January 2026, with over 550 million dollars, while in February, partly due to the fewer number of days, they settled at 523.
The all-time highest monthly record, for now, was indeed set last month, when for the first time in history, $600 million was surpassed.
Crypto Cards
It should be noted, however, that the crypto cards monitored on-chain by PaymentScan pertain only to those crypto protocols whose transactions are fully trackable on-chain.
In other words, the previously mentioned data does not include payments made with crypto cards from centralized exchanges, because their data is not publicly identifiable on-chain.
Given that it is highly likely that the crypto cards from major exchanges are used even more than those from these protocols, it is almost certain that the actual figures are significantly higher.
The card that generates the most payments among those monitored by PaymentScan is RedotPay, which alone accounts for more than half of the volumes. In other words, all the others combined do not reach the volumes of this single card.
The monthly volume of approximately $390 million recorded in March by RedotPay is very likely lower than that generated by payments made with cards from major centralized exchanges like Binance, Bybit, or Coinbase.
In fact, it is estimated that the total monthly volume, including exchange cards, has long surpassed $1.5 billion, which is more than double the amount recorded on-chain by PaymentScan.
The Networks
PaymentScan also monitors which networks and systems are most used for fiat payments powered by cryptocurrencies.
Among the payment networks from this perspective, Visa clearly dominates, with as much as 97% of the total volume, while Mastercard holds only a small 3%. However, these percentages could be different if data from centralized exchange cards were included, which are not publicly available.
Regarding crypto networks, the majority of cryptocurrency transactions on these cards have been conducted on the Tron network, accounting for 33.5%.
It should not be forgotten that Tron is the most used network for moving $USDT, although to be honest, lately the Ethereum network has significantly lower fees from this perspective and is gaining a lot of ground.
This does not change the fact that in second place, among the most used networks by crypto cards monitored by PaymentScan, is BSC (BNB Smart Chain) with 15.1%, followed by Solana (12.3%) and indeed Ethereum (10.9%).
$USDT still accounts for a significant 62% of the total volume, while USDC stands at 27%.
