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 they’d spend any other card, through the existing Visa or Mastercard rails sitting underneath.
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 Chain’s $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, and now accounts for well over half of all identified top-ups, settling more than twice $USDT’s card volume despite $USDT remaining the far larger token by total supply.
That split lines up with how each stablecoin is positioned. Circle holds a MiCA e-money license in the EU, something $USDT lacks an equivalent for, and $USDC is directly integrated into Visa and Mastercard settlement programs, making it the natural default for regulated, consumer-facing card products.
Why Visa and Mastercard Might Be the Real Winners Here
Rather than being disrupted, both major card networks spent July building infrastructure to sit directly underneath the stablecoin economy. Visa launched the Visa Stablecoin Platform on July 16, a managed environment letting institutions mint, store, transfer, and redeem stablecoins, starting with Open USD, a new consortium-backed stablecoin announced June 30 and backed by more than 140 companies, including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, and Coinbase.
Mastercard moved even more aggressively. On August 3, just days after July closed, Mastercard completed its acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure firm BVNK for up to $1.8 billion, a company that connects fiat and stablecoin payments across more than 130 countries. Mastercard said it plans to use the technology for cross-border remittances, business payments, payouts, settlement, and treasury operations, effectively absorbing stablecoin rails directly into its own network rather than competing against them.
The New Competition: Which Stablecoin Becomes the Default
With card networks now actively building stablecoin infrastructure rather than resisting it, the real competitive question may no longer be crypto versus cards at all. It’s increasingly about which stablecoin becomes the preferred funding layer sitting behind everyday card spending. Ripple pushed its own answer to that question on July 23, launching Ripple Mint, a web and API tool letting institutions mint, redeem, and monitor RLUSD, while expanding the token to five additional blockchain networks the same month.
Meanwhile, the broader stablecoin market told a more complicated story. Total stablecoin market cap ended July near $308.3 billion, down about 1% from June, with the market posting its third straight month of net outflows, roughly $13.3 billion leaving between May and July, the longest outflow stretch since the Terra collapse in 2022.
Yet the institutional and regulated corner of the market, tokens like BlackRock’s BUIDL and the Global Dollar, kept growing throughout the same period, suggesting the stablecoin market isn’t shrinking so much as consolidating around the tokens built specifically to plug into networks like Visa and Mastercard.
Related: $USDT Supply Shrinks $4B as Crypto Investors Cut Market Exposure
