Stablecoin payments are about to really take off.

On January 21, Rain completed a $250 million Series C funding round, with a valuation approaching $2 billion. This move by the crypto card infrastructure provider has directly ignited the entire payments sector. In simple terms, everyone is now competing to figure out how stablecoins can be truly spent offline, rather than just being transferred between currencies.

The data is quite straightforward. Research firm Artemis reports that the annual growth rate of crypto payments has reached 106%, with transaction volumes already hitting the $18 billion mark. This is not far from the $19 billion scale of peer-to-peer stablecoin transfers. Some researchers even predict that by the end of this year, crypto cards will become the main gateway for stablecoin retail payments.

This competition is playing out along three main routes:

**First: Full-stack card issuance.** Rain’s approach is the most direct—becoming a Visa principal member, handling card issuance, settlement, and all infrastructure in-house. As a result, their user base has increased 30-fold year-over-year, payment volume has grown 38 times, and they serve over 200 merchants. This is a real-scale operation.

**Second: Orchestration layer.** Stripe acquired Bridge and Zero Hash (the latter valued at around $1 billion), investing $1.1 billion in a “chain-agnostic” solution. The idea is that merchants don’t need to worry about which underlying blockchain is used; they can directly accept and settle stablecoins, with these platforms handling the intermediary connections.

**Third: Dedicated chain.** Some players believe that general-purpose chains like Ethereum are not optimized for payments. Stable (backed by Bitfinex) launched a dedicated payment chain in 2025, securing $2 billion in pre-allocated funds, aiming for zero-Gas-cost stablecoin transfers.

Interestingly, the real growth driver for stablecoin payments comes from emerging markets. Africa, Latin America, and South Asia have far greater demand for stablecoin payments than Europe and North America. Visa currently accounts for over 90% of crypto card payments, mainly because they pioneered support for USDC native settlement, while USDT has not yet been integrated into this system. There are many business battles and strategies to watch in this space.