While $BTC consolidates around $105K, stablecoins quietly processed over $14 trillion on-chain in 2024, sliding past Visa’s annual volume for the first time. Yeah, quietly. No headlines, just billions moving block by block.
Visa noticed. Fast. Their USDC-on-Solana pilot now lets issuers settle card transactions in real time - directly on a public blockchain.
That’s not a concept—it’s live plumbing connecting crypto rails to Visa’s back-end.
🔍 Meanwhile, regulators are catching up. Europe’s MiCA rules kick in at the end of 2024, treating euro-based stablecoins as e-money across all 27 member states. It’s the clarity payment startups have been begging for.
But let’s be real: most users don’t think in protocols. They think in perks.
▪ Coinbase Card works at 40M+ Visa merchants
▪ WhiteBIT Nova offers up to 10% cashback and zero fees
▪ Nexo Card shelled out $6M in rewards last year while letting users flip between credit and debit in one tap
📍 So I asked fintech KOL Sarah Nogler the obvious thing:
“By 2026, will we still say ‘crypto cards’? Or will they just be... cards?”
📍 Her take?
“By 2026, the terminology will fade. Users won’t care whether their liquidity comes from a euro balance, a USDC vault, or ETH yield. What will matter is trust, speed, and UX. The real frontier is invisible integration. The brands will still matter — just like Visa or Mastercard still do — but “crypto card” will sound like “online banking” does today: a useful distinction we no longer need to make.”
Hard to argue. When blockchains do what they do best quietly, maybe we stop naming them at all.
🤔 So what do you think: ready to drop the label and just call it a card?