Stablecoin card spend is growing 100% year over year, Rain exec says
Stablecoin-based cards could soon account for double-digit percentages of all cards in some Latin American markets, John Timoney, head of strategic partnerships at Rain, a payments infrastructure platform, said. Retail stablecoin card spend grew about 105% to 106% over the past year, Timoney said during a panel at Consensus Miami 2026. Cards are physical or virtual, allowing users to spend stablecoins such as tether and USD Coin (USDC) directly from a digital wallet for daily purchases. Rain provides stablecoin infrastructure for card issuers and recently became a Mastercard Principal Member, allowing it to offer credit and prepaid cards on the Mastercard network. Rain and Mastercard are also exploring on-chain settlement for some card program flows using regulated stablecoins. The company is not trying to replace card networks, Timoney said. It is trying to make stablecoin balances usable through existing networks that already reach merchants globally. “The card networks over decades have rolled up hundreds of millions of merchants,” Timoney said. “Rain explicitly did not want to reinvent the wheel.” Spend patterns are also becoming harder to distinguish from ordinary card activity, he said. Stablecoin card users are spending across typical merchant categories, including large global merchants and everyday purchases. “Theres nothing too remarkable about that,” Timoney