Most crypto card writing is guesswork, because issuers almost never share their numbers. So we opened ours. Across 1,115,446 settled purchases made on SolCard between December 2024 and June 2026, spanning 117 different settlement currencies, the median purchase was just $20 — and after everyday essentials like ride-hailing and food delivery, the single most distinctive category was AI subscriptions: tens of thousands of payments to Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and OpenRouter. This is a look at how people really spend when their card is funded with crypto, drawn from first-party transaction data rather than survey estimates or market-model extrapolation.

Every figure below comes from SolCard's own settled card authorizations. Nothing here identifies a cardholder — it is all aggregated counts, category shares, and currency mixes. Where a number could be read as competitively or reputationally sensitive in isolation, we've left it out; everything published is a spending pattern, not an internal operating metric.

A "purchase" here means a settled card authorization — the moment money actually left the card at a merchant, excluding fee lines, verification holds, voids, and refunds. The window is December 10, 2024 to June 30, 2026. Merchant categories are derived by matching the merchant descriptor string, so the long tail of one-off merchants stays uncategorized; when we cite a category share, it is a share of all 1.1M purchases, which makes the categorized numbers conservative rather than inflated.

Two things jump out immediately. First, this is not a novelty product used once and abandoned: monthly purchase counts climbed from ~52,800 in November 2025 to ~92,200 in June 2026. Second, the median USD ticket is only $20 — people are not making rare, dramatic "spend my crypto" purchases. They are buying coffee, rides, subscriptions, and groceries.

Here are the merchant categories we could confidently attribute, as a share of all 1.1M purchases:

The rest is a very long tail of individual merchants — no single one dominates, which is itself the story: a crypto card gets used like any other card, across thousands of ordinary businesses.

The clearest everyday-use signal. Grab, Uber and Uber Eats, DoorDash, Deliveroo, Careem, Wolt, and Lyft are all among the highest-frequency merchants in the entire dataset. If you want to know what a funded crypto card is for, the honest answer is "getting a ride and ordering dinner." (You can see how this works for specific services in our guides on how to pay Uber with crypto and pay Grab with crypto.)

The finding that has no equivalent on a traditional bank-issued card: AI tools are a top-three identifiable category. Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's ChatGPT, the Cursor AI code editor, and the OpenRouter API are all individually among the most-charged merchants on the platform, together accounting for tens of thousands of payments.

There's a coherent reason. Many AI products bill from the US, price in USD, and are awkward or impossible to pay for from regions with limited card access or currency controls — exactly the users a crypto-funded, globally-accepted card serves best. A developer in Lagos or Karachi topping up with stablecoins to pay for Claude and Cursor is a genuinely new spending behavior, and it shows up plainly in the data. We wrote separate guides on how to pay for ChatGPT Plus with crypto, pay for Claude with crypto, and the best AI subscriptions to pay for with crypto — and you can browse every supported AI merchant or food-delivery service directly.

A crypto card is, structurally, a borderless card — top up in one asset, spend in whatever currency the merchant charges. The data confirms cardholders use exactly that: purchases settled in 117 distinct currencies, and 40.8% of all purchases were cross-border (the card's currency differed from the merchant's country).

USD and EUR together are 63% of activity, but the tail is remarkably deep — Thai baht, Polish złoty, UAE dirham, and Israeli shekel each clear a percent of global volume. This is what real-world crypto spending looks like once it leaves the exchange: small, frequent, local-currency purchases all over the world. For a fuller market picture alongside this first-party data, see our crypto debit card statistics roundup.

The median tells the real story better than the average. In USD the median purchase is $20.00 while the average is $92.86 — the gap is a handful of large purchases pulling the mean up over a floor of many small ones. The same shape holds in EUR (median €15.04). People are not treating the card as a way to move large sums; they are treating it as a daily spending card that happens to be funded with crypto.

Three takeaways from the numbers:

1. Crypto cards have crossed into everyday utility. A $20 median ticket across rides, meals, and subscriptions is ordinary consumer behavior, not speculation.
2. AI access is a real, crypto-native use case. Global, USD-billed AI subscriptions are hard to pay for from much of the world; a stablecoin-funded card solves it, and users are voting with tens of thousands of payments.
3. The card is genuinely global. 117 currencies and 41% cross-border spend is not a US or EU product with a long tail — it's a borderless one.

If you want to spend crypto the way this data describes — small, everyday, anywhere — that's exactly what SolCard is built for. See how the card works or read the crypto debit card overview, and browse the full directory of merchants that accept crypto via SolCard.

Based on 1.1 million real SolCard purchases, ride-hailing and food delivery lead (about 11% of all purchases), followed by e-commerce and — distinctively for a crypto card — AI subscriptions like Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor. The typical purchase is small, with a median of about $20.

The median USD purchase was $20.00 and the average was $92.86 across 391,546 US-dollar purchases, showing a floor of many small everyday transactions with a few larger ones pulling the average up.

Yes. SolCard purchases settled in 117 different currencies, and 40.8% were cross-border, so a crypto-funded card behaves like a fully global card — you top up with crypto and spend in whatever currency the merchant charges.

Many AI products bill in USD from the US and are hard to pay for from regions with limited card access or currency controls. A card funded with stablecoins removes that barrier, which is why AI tools rank as a top-three category in the data despite being niche on traditional cards.