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 (USDT) 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.

“There’s nothing too remarkable about that,” Timoney said. “And I think that is what is remarkable.”

Despite their growth, stablecoin cards account for less than 1% of global card spend, senior vice president of business development at Consensys Ray Hernandez said during the same panel.

Crypto card adoption

Latin America has become one of the clearest markets for adoption, Timoney added. Stablecoin cards are being used across custodial and non-custodial wallets, crypto exchanges and products that abstract the stablecoin experience from users.

The merchant still receives fiat in many of those transactions. That separates card-based stablecoin spending from direct crypto push payments, where merchants may have to manage crypto settlement, volatility and transaction risk more directly.

The bigger change may be behind the scenes. Rain says stablecoin settlement lets card programs settle on weekends and holidays, reducing trapped capital by more than 40% in some cases.

Traditional card programs often need to pre-fund network obligations or borrow from networks when banking rails are closed. Stablecoins can move outside bank cut-off times.

That can make rewards and card economics more flexible, Timoney said. Capital that would otherwise sit idle can be used elsewhere in the business.

Mastercard has been moving deeper into stablecoin payments. Earlier this year Binance, PayPal and Ripple joined Mastercard’s broader blockchain payments push. That push saw the payments giant agree to buy stablecoin infrastructure firm BVNK for up to $1.8 billion.

Christian Rau, Mastercard’s senior vice president of digital assets and blockchain, said mainstream adoption will depend on making the technology invisible to consumers.

“Other than the people in this room, nobody says ‘oh, I just did an onchain payment’,” Rau said. “The normal benchmark these days is you have a card sitting on your iPhone or on an Android. You tap it, the money is gone.”

The consumer-facing pitch is not an onchain payment, he added. It is the ability to spend any asset in real time, with the network protections users already expect.

Hernandez said the next stage depends on easier on-ramps, abstracted network fees and more local payment infrastructure. Today’s crypto card users are still mostly crypto-native consumers who already hold assets on-chain.

MetaMask is expanding its card strategy around self-custody, Hernandez said. The MetaMask Card, developed with Mastercard and Baanx, lets users spend from a self-custodial wallet while assets are converted into fiat at the time of purchase.

“If all we’re doing is replicating the Apple Pay experience, I think it’s going to be okay, but I don’t think we’re going to overtake,” Hernandez said.

Paying in crypto

That view drew a challenge from GoMining CEO Mark Zalan, who argued that stablecoins and card infrastructure add unnecessary intermediaries to crypto payments.

Zalan said users want to hold bitcoin in self-custody and spend it without converting into stablecoins or relying on off-ramps. He described conversion layers and payment intermediaries as “little helpers” taking small fees from each transaction.

“Protection is another word for rent-seeking,” Zalan said, referring to the consumer protections embedded in card transactions.

Timoney pushed back, saying payments are not only money movement. Card networks also handle chargebacks, merchant risk and other protections consumers and merchants expect.

Rau made a similar point. Most consumers were “socialized with deposit insurance” and chargeback protection, he said.

“Payment is more than moving money from A to B,” Rau said. “From a consumer perspective, the experience of payment is interoperability, safety and security.”