Who earns fees when you pay with a stablecoin card

Stablecoin cards grow, and so does the fee chain

Payment cards linked to stablecoins are spreading quickly, and every purchase sends money to a chain of businesses that most customers never see. A stablecoin is a digital token designed to hold a steady value; USDC is one that tracks the US dollar.

When someone buys lunch with such a card, the restaurant does not need to accept crypto at all. The customer's digital dollar balance pays for the purchase, while the merchant receives regular money through its normal payment provider. A conversion service sits in the middle, turning the stablecoin balance into the currency the merchant actually receives.

Key numbers behind the growth

• On Oct. 1, Visa reported more than 160 stablecoin-linked card programs.
• Visa said payment volume for those programs was up nearly 200% from a year earlier.
• Wirex co-founder and CEO Pavel Matveev told CryptoSlate that programs running on the company's infrastructure process more than $200 million in monthly spending, including partner activity.

How Visa and Bridge make the payment work

Visa enables the arrangement through a partnership with Bridge, letting customers in Colombia spend stablecoins while merchants receive Colombian pesos. Bridge handles the conversion, so neither the restaurant nor its payment provider has to touch cryptocurrency, and customers can spend without first moving funds to a bank account.

Bridge was acquired by Stripe in 2025. The company advertises a card product that lets program operators keep 100% of interchange, plus charge extra transaction fees. Interchange is the fee a merchant's bank or payment provider pays to the card issuer.

Who takes a cut of each swipe

The name printed on the card rarely shows every company involved. A consumer app manages the customer relationship, a regulated issuer provides the card, a card network connects the financial institutions, and the merchant's provider handles acceptance. Sometimes another business supplies conversion or settlement services. These roles can overlap, and the fees are not necessarily charged separately on every transaction.

Each participant earns differently. The issuer collects interchange. The wallet or card brand can take a share of interchange, subscriptions and transaction fees. The card network earns network and processing fees. The merchant's provider collects merchant service charges. A settlement lender, when one is used, earns interest.

The new revenue source has not removed the usual costs of running a card program. Disputed purchases can turn into chargebacks weeks later, fraud needs investigating, and customer support costs continue regardless of what a single purchase earns. How much a program keeps after processing, fraud prevention and compliance depends on each program's own arrangements.

Credit Coop funds the gap between payment and settlement

Card payments create obligations that are not settled the moment a customer taps the terminal. Authorization lets the merchant accept the purchase, but the institutions involved must settle with each other later, sometimes before the customer's funds have finished moving. Stablecoins can move around the clock, yet card programs still need money on hand when settlement comes due, which creates demand for short-term financing.

Rain, a provider of stablecoin-linked card infrastructure, uses a revolving credit facility from Credit Coop to meet its Visa settlement obligations. Rain draws on the facility to fund payments, then routes incoming cardholder proceeds through smart contracts — programs that run automatically on a blockchain — that help repay the borrowing plus interest. Credit Coop earns income for supplying money during the gap between payment and repayment.

Revolving credit also lets the same capital fund batch after batch of payments as earlier advances are repaid, so cumulative processing volume can far exceed the amount borrowed at any one time. As an illustration of how timing affects cost, borrowing $1 million at an annual rate of 10% would cost roughly $274 for one day, or about $68 for six hours. CryptoSlate noted these are not Rain's disclosed terms; they only show why faster settlement can lower financing costs.

What is confirmed and what is not

Visa's reported program count and volume growth, the Visa-Bridge arrangement in Colombia, Bridge's ownership by Stripe, and Rain's use of a Credit Coop facility are reported facts. Wirex's monthly processing figure is a company statement, and Wirex has not provided the requested breakdown of transaction fees and revenue sharing, so the reported volume does not show how much of it Wirex keeps.

Why the fee split matters

Adoption of these cards, according to CryptoSlate's analysis, depends on whether rewards and convenience outweigh fees and currency conversion costs. Because so many companies share the revenue, the amount a provider actually keeps from any single purchase is set by the contracts between the parties, not by the use of stablecoins itself.

Sources

• CryptoSlate