According to a report published by Reuters on Monday, stablecoin payments firm RedotPay forecasts that stablecoin-funded card payments will reach an annual volume of around $50 billion by 2028.
If the projection holds, it would mark stablecoins’ shift from a niche crypto off-ramp into a measurable retail payment channel, particularly in emerging markets where dollar access remains constrained. The forecast comes against a backdrop of a market that has already outpaced most consensus estimates set earlier this year.
On-chain data compiled by PaymentsScan and published by venture firm a16z crypto shows monthly crypto card volume reached roughly $759 million in July, up 2.5 times year on year and from a base of under $1 million when tracking began in October 2023. A separate PaymentsScan dataset, cited by The Kobeissi Letter, put July spending at $1.03 billion across more than 10 million transactions, up 16% month on month and around 200% year on year, with average ticket size rising to $86 from $59.
Dollar-backed tokens now dominate the segment: USDC accounts for about 58% of tracked card spending and USDT around 26%, while the euro-linked EURe token has collapsed from nearly 88% of volume in early 2024 to about 2%. The market remains highly concentrated, with three issuers (RedotPay, Ether.fi and KAST) generating roughly 77% of July’s total. Analysts caution that RedotPay’s contribution is self-reported rather than independently verified on-chain, underscoring a broader lack of standardised reporting across the sector.
Three structural tailwinds underpin the 2028 forecast: rapid issuer expansion, with Visa reporting more than 160 stablecoin-linked card programmes live or in development across over 50 countries; regulatory clarity following the GENIUS Act, which has helped push the US stablecoin market past $304 billion; and a widening product surface as issuers move into tokenised deposits, agentic commerce and merchant acquiring.
Risks remain, however. RedotPay’s own $1 billion US IPO has been postponed until at least 2027 amid litigation with Binance affiliates in Hong Kong and Singapore, while concentration among a handful of issuers leaves the sector exposed to a single regulatory or operational shock. Even at $50 billion, stablecoin card spending would remain a fraction of Visa’s $16 trillion annual processing volume.
Analysts view the projection less as a market-sizing exercise than as a directional benchmark against which future quarterly data can be measured, with the sector’s ultimate ceiling likely to hinge on issuer diversification, regulatory convergence across jurisdictions, and the maturing of reporting standards.
