Observation: stablecoins are becoming an everyday payment instrument, not just a trading balance.
Evidence (DIA Research Ch. 1, citing Paymentscan, Sep 2026): monthly card spending rose from $403M (Sep 2025) to $1.227B (Sep 2026); 11.7M transactions at about $105 each. Where funding traces onchain, USDC pays for 53% and USDT 18%, settling mainly on Base, Optimism, Solana and Stellar. Over the same year to 20 Oct 2026, crypto-backed dollars grew 17% to $15.1B while synthetic dollars fell 45% to $7.0B.
Limitation: card totals include some issuer-reported offchain data; the funding-token split covers onchain programmes only, so the 53%/18% shares describe the traceable portion, not all spending. Nothing here is payment, investment or price advice.
Question: which use case do you think will define stablecoins next — cards and payments, exchange settlement, DeFi, or yield products?
#Stablecoins #Payments
Evidence (DIA Research Ch. 1, citing Paymentscan, Sep 2026): monthly card spending rose from $403M (Sep 2025) to $1.227B (Sep 2026); 11.7M transactions at about $105 each. Where funding traces onchain, USDC pays for 53% and USDT 18%, settling mainly on Base, Optimism, Solana and Stellar. Over the same year to 20 Oct 2026, crypto-backed dollars grew 17% to $15.1B while synthetic dollars fell 45% to $7.0B.
Limitation: card totals include some issuer-reported offchain data; the funding-token split covers onchain programmes only, so the 53%/18% shares describe the traceable portion, not all spending. Nothing here is payment, investment or price advice.
Question: which use case do you think will define stablecoins next — cards and payments, exchange settlement, DeFi, or yield products?
#Stablecoins #Payments
