Crypto card spending hit $1.5B a month in late 2025, but most of it settled on fiat rails

Came across an Artemis report on how stablecoin cards actually work and it changed how I think about “spending crypto.” In most programs, the merchant never receives crypto at all. Your stablecoin gets sold, either when you top up or at the moment you pay, and the merchant gets regular fiat through the card network.

The report estimated crypto-card spending grew from about $100 million a month in early 2023 to over $1.5 billion by late 2025, but said the vast majority of that settled on fiat rails. So the growth is real, but the crypto part mostly happens on the funding side, not at checkout.

I get why it’s built this way, since it lets these cards work at any terminal. But it makes me wonder whether stablecoin cards are actually pushing crypto payments forward, or just acting as a nicer on-ramp to the same old card rails?