Crypto Card Spending Nears $760 Million a Month

The market for cards that let users spend digital assets is growing rapidly.

On Aug. 9, a16z Crypto, the digital-asset arm of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, wrote on X that "digital asset payment cards have grown from a niche product into a large market." Monthly spending on digital-asset cards reached $759 million in July.

Digital-asset cards allow users to spend their crypto holdings through traditional card payment networks.

Usage is also climbing quickly. Payments made with digital-asset cards totaled about 8.8 million transactions in July, up about 69% from roughly 5.2 million a year earlier. The average transaction size was about $86. a16z Crypto said the rise in card payment transactions is tracking closely with growth in overall payment volume.

The blockchains processing those payments are also becoming more diversified. At the start of 2024, Gnosis accounted for most of the digital-asset card payment market, driven by Gnosis Pay, a Visa card linked directly to self-custody wallets. But a wave of new card programs has begun to spread payment infrastructure that had been concentrated on a single chain.

As of July, Optimism processed about 29% of total digital-asset card payment volume, the largest share among blockchains. Solana and Base followed at about 19% each, while Gnosis, which previously led the market, saw its share fall to about 2%.