Crypto card payments set a new record.
In fact, by March 2026, its total transaction value had increased to $584.5 million, an increase of 211% year over year.
This broke the previous monthly record.
encrypted credit card
Crypto cards are actually generally debit cards rather than credit cards.
However, in common parlance, confusion often arises because the term “credit card” has become pervasive in everyday parlance and is frequently used to refer to payment cards in general, not just credit cards.
From a technical point of view, a cryptocurrency payment card is a prepaid or debit card.
In fact, real credit cards allow users to pay with credit up to a daily or monthly limit, and this credit must be paid back later.
In contrast, prepaid cards such as crypto cards only allow you to use funds that are already deposited into the linked account.
Simply put, while traditional prepaid cards allow you to deposit fiat currency into your account, crypto cards also allow you to deposit cryptocurrencies, which are instantly converted to fiat upon payment.
record
Crypto payment cards, which allow you to pay with fiat currencies on major payment networks such as Visa and Mastercard, have been around for several years, while being funded with cryptocurrencies.
According to PaymentScan data, through May 2023, the total monthly payments made on monitored crypto cards did not exceed $1 million.
Consider that the Visa network alone typically processes over $20 billion in payments per month.
However, it has been rapidly increasing since December 2023, and although there was a slight drop in February of this year, it appears to be continuing to rise.
The first month in which crypto card payments totaled more than $10 million was actually January 2024, the very month the first Bitcoin Spot ETF debuted on US exchanges. These two events may not be related, but they illustrate how the world’s perception of the crypto sector has begun to change starting in 2024.
By September of the same year 2024, the monthly total had already exceeded 100 million people, a truly exponential growth that briefly stopped in December of the same year.
However, during 2025, it crossed the 200 million mark for the first time in April, and then the 300 million mark in July. Therefore, exponential growth continued.
The previous highest amount was over $550 million in January 2026, but due to fewer days in February, it settled at $523.
The current monthly record was indeed set last month, when it surpassed $600 million for the first time in history.
crypto card
However, please note that the crypto cards monitored on-chain by PaymentScan only concern crypto protocols whose transactions are fully traceable on-chain.
In other words, the aforementioned data does not include payments made using crypto cards from centralized exchanges. This is because that data is not publicly identifiable on-chain.
Given that crypto cards from major exchanges are likely even more used than crypto cards from these protocols, the actual number is almost certainly significantly higher.
RedotPay is the card that generates the most payments among the cards that PaymentScan monitors, accounting for more than half of the transaction volume alone. In other words, all the other cards combined will not reach the volume of this one card.
The approximately $390 million per month that RedotPay recorded in March is very likely lower than card payments on major centralized exchanges such as Binance, Bybit, and Coinbase.
In fact, the total monthly transaction volume, including exchange cards, is already estimated to be over $1.5 billion, which is more than double the amount recorded on-chain by PaymentScan.
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PaymentScan also monitors which networks and systems are most commonly used for fiat payments with cryptocurrencies.
From this perspective, Visa has a clear advantage among payment networks with a 97% share of the total, while Mastercard only accounts for 3%. However, these percentages may differ if data from central exchange cards that are not publicly available is included.
In terms of crypto networks, the majority of crypto transactions on these cards take place on the TRON network, accounting for 33.5%.
We must not forget that Tron is the most used network for transportation. $USDTto be honest, these days the fees on the Ethereum network are much lower from this point of view, and it has gained a lot of ground.
This does not change the fact that second place among the most used networks for crypto cards monitored by PaymentScan is BSC (BNB Smart Chain) with 15.1%, followed by Solana (12.3%) and indeed Ethereum (10.9%).
$USDT It still makes up a significant 62% of the total volume, with USDC accounting for only 27%.
