Stablecoin payment track erupts: three major paths compete, crypto card annual growth rate exceeds 106%

【Crypto World】Recently, the infrastructure provider Rain completed a $250 million Series C funding round, with a valuation approaching $2 billion. This signals a clear trend — the competition for stablecoins to truly flow from wallets to merchants and consumers has become fierce.

According to the latest data from Artemis, the scale of crypto card payments is growing at an annualized rate of 106%, with annual transaction volume reaching $18 billion. It’s worth noting that this level is close to the approximately $19 billion in peer-to-peer stablecoin transfers, indicating that payment scenarios are becoming the most important real-world application for stablecoins. Artemis researcher Patrick Kim even predicts that by the end of this year, crypto cards are likely to become the primary retail payment scenario for stablecoins.

The current competitive landscape roughly divides into three paths.

Full-stack integrated model is the most aggressive. Rain and Hong Kong-based Reap bypass traditional banks by becoming Visa’s principal member, integrating the entire infrastructure of card issuance and settlement. Rain’s data is impressive — the number of card users has increased 30-fold year-over-year, payment volume has grown 38 times, and the platform now has over 200 clients. In other words, they are rewriting the payment logic for stablecoins in their own way.

Layered orchestration solutions take a different approach. Stripe acquired Bridge for $1.1 billion and integrated Zero Hash at an estimated valuation of around $1 billion. These large tech and financial infrastructure companies are betting on “chain-agnostic” solutions — merchants don’t need to care about which blockchain underpins the stablecoin, only to receive and settle stablecoin payments, with the platform handling the complexity behind the scenes.

Dedicated payment chains is the newest route. Some new players believe that general-purpose chains like Ethereum are not designed for payments. Supported by Bitfinex, Stable plans to launch a dedicated payment-focused blockchain by the end of 2025, which has already secured about $2 billion in pre-commitments. The goal is to achieve a stablecoin transfer experience with zero additional Gas costs — sounds very attractive.

From a global perspective, the real growth drivers come from emerging markets. Africa, Latin America, and South Asia have much higher demand for stablecoin payments than Europe and North America, which aligns with the original purpose of stablecoins — solving the issues of unbanked populations and high remittance costs.

Interestingly, Visa currently controls over 90% of on-chain card payment share, mainly because it has been leading in supporting USDC native stablecoin settlements. USDT, however, has not yet been integrated into this system. This also reflects another dimension of stablecoin payment competition — it’s not just about technology and infrastructure, but also about the cooperation between different stablecoins and payment networks.