Stablecoin card spend is growing 100% year over year, Rain exec says

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.”