Stablecoin card spending reached a record $1.17 billion in September, according to payments data tracked by Paymentscan. The number is notable less for the headline than for how it got there: transaction counts actually slipped, from 11.07 million in August to 11.0 million in September, meaning the entire increase came from people spending more per swipe.
Cuy Sheffield, who runs Visa's crypto unit, described stablecoin-linked cards as being in "hyper growth mode." The implied average transaction size rose to roughly $107 last month.
Fewer swipes, bigger tickets
The gap between volume and count is the thing to watch. A payments business that grows by getting more users to transact looks different from one that grows because existing users are putting larger purchases on the card. Right now, stablecoin cards are doing the latter.
Active addresses slipped to 283,761 in September from 287,634 in August. That number deserves a caveat — it counts addresses, not people, and it excludes RedotPay, the largest program in the dataset. Treat it as a rough directional signal, not a user count.
Where the money actually moves
Base led all chains with $216.8 million in stablecoin card spending, or 27.5% of the $788.9 million on-chain total for September. Optimism followed at $127 million, Solana at $109.3 million, Stellar at $69.3 million, Polygon at $50.9 million, Ethereum at $49.5 million, and Plasma at $38.3 million.
That distribution is worth pausing on. Ethereum, still the default settlement layer for most of DeFi, sits below Polygon and Stellar in card spending. The chains winning here are the cheap ones, which tracks with how consumer payment flows behave when fees eat into small purchases.
RedotPay's lead is not close
By program, RedotPay was the largest card issuer by volume, with $401.9 million in 30-day spending — about $4.9 billion annualized. EtherFi ranked second at $127.4 million, or roughly $1.5 billion annualized, followed by KAST at $113.1 million, Karta at $48.7 million, and Wirex One at $46.9 million.
RedotPay's volume is more than three times its nearest competitor. Every program in the top five grew over the past 30 days: RedotPay up 3%, EtherFi up 20.3%, KAST up 11.1%, Karta up 14.4%, and Wirex One up 40.1%. Wirex One posted the fastest percentage gain from the smallest base, which is the kind of number that looks better in a chart than it does in absolute dollars.
The question Tiger Research wants answered
Tiger Research argues the key issue is whether crypto-card providers can turn this spending into durable financial relationships. Salary deposits and recurring expenses — rent, utilities, subscriptions — remain outside their control. A card can capture a purchase, but it doesn't capture the paycheck that funds it.
That's the gap between a card program and a bank account, and nobody in this dataset has closed it yet. The next set of monthly numbers will show whether September's record was a step change or a one-off, and whether transaction counts start climbing alongside the dollar volume.
