Most "what people buy with crypto" articles are estimates built on surveys and market models. This one isn't. It's first-party data: an analysis of anonymized, aggregated card transactions on SolCard over a recent 90-day window. No personal data, no individual accounts — just the shape of how real people spend crypto when it's loaded onto a card and treated like any other Visa or Mastercard.

The short version: crypto-card spending looks a lot like normal everyday spending, with two twists. Ride-hailing and AI subscriptions are the two biggest categories by transaction count, everyday services (rides, food, streaming) dominate volume, and the largest single tickets are travel. Here's the full picture.

Card networks don't attach a clean category code to every merchant, so we classified transactions by matching the merchant name to known brands. About a fifth of transactions resolve to a clear consumer category; the rest are long-tail or unbranded merchants we don't classify. Among the transactions we can identify, here's the ranking by how often people buy — plus the average ticket size for each.

Two patterns stand out.

Crypto cards are used for the boring, frequent stuff. The top of the list isn't luxury or one-off big purchases — it's rides, AI subscriptions, takeout, and streaming. These are recurring, low-friction payments, exactly the transactions a card is best at. People aren't treating a crypto card as a special-occasion instrument; they're using it as a daily driver.

AI subscriptions punch far above their weight. AI tools are the #2 category by transaction count — extraordinary for a spending category that barely existed two years ago. Many of these services (OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Perplexity) don't accept crypto directly and bill only through card rails, so a crypto-funded card is often the only practical way for a crypto-native user to pay for them. That's a big reason this category over-indexes here versus general consumer spending. (If that's your use case, we have step-by-steps for ChatGPT and Claude.)

Average ticket size flips the ranking on its head:

Streaming and rides are small and frequent (~$18–30). Travel is rare but heavy — an average travel charge is roughly 14× a streaming charge. It's the clearest signal that people trust these cards for real, high-value purchases, not just topping up a subscription. When someone books a $400 hotel on a crypto-funded card, they're treating it as a primary payment method, not an experiment.

Spending is only half the story — the other half is which chain the money comes in on. Across deposits in the same window:

Roughly 70% of deposits arrive on Solana (a mix of SOL and stablecoins), with Ethereum a distant second and BSC third. The rest is spread across Arbitrum, Base, Polygon, and newer L2s. For a category obsessed with fees, that tilt makes sense: moving funds on Solana or an L2 costs cents, so people naturally fund a spending card from the cheapest rail available. Stablecoins (USDC, USDT) make up the majority of non-SOL deposits — people top up in dollars, then spend in dollars.

Over the past year, the number of card transactions on the platform roughly doubled, while the average ticket size drifted down. Both point the same direction: crypto cards are moving from occasional, larger purchases toward frequent, everyday use — more coffees and rides, fewer one-off big spends. That's what mainstream adoption of a payment method looks like.

If your real-world use case looks like this list — subscriptions, rides, food, the occasional trip — a few things matter more than headline perks:

• Fees compound on frequency. If you're making dozens of small transactions a month, a percentage top-up fee quietly adds up. A card with no top-up fee (like SolCard Platinum) matters more the more you use it.
• Recurring billing has to just work. Subscriptions (AI tools, streaming) rebill monthly; a reloadable card that stays funded beats single-use virtual cards that fail on renewal.
• Fund from the cheapest chain you hold. If most deposits are on Solana for a reason, follow the crowd — cheap rails mean more of your money reaches the card.

For a broader market view, see our crypto card statistics and the general what people buy with crypto breakdown. To compare cards for these use cases, see the best crypto debit cards.

• Source: anonymized, aggregated SolCard card transactions and deposits over a recent 90-day window. No personal data, no individual accounts — only category-level aggregates.
• Categories are derived by matching free-text merchant names to known brands; card networks don't provide a standardized category on every transaction. About a fifth of transactions resolve to a clear category — shares above are computed within that identified set, so treat them as directional, not exhaustive.
• Ticket sizes are averages of USD-denominated transactions only (spending happens in many currencies; we don't convert across them).
• These are SolCard's own users, who skew crypto-native and cost-sensitive — the mix may differ from the broader card market.

Based on our first-party data, the most frequent categories are ride-hailing and AI-tool subscriptions, followed by food delivery, online shopping, and software. Everyday, recurring purchases — not luxury or one-off big-ticket items — dominate by transaction count.

Many AI services (ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Perplexity) bill only through card networks and don't accept crypto directly, so a crypto-funded card is often the only practical way for a crypto-native user to pay for them. That pushes AI tools far higher in crypto-card spending than in general consumer spending.

It varies widely by category — from about $18 for streaming and $30 for rides, up to roughly $427 for travel. Everyday services are small and frequent; travel is infrequent but high-value.

In our data, about 70% of deposits arrive on Solana (SOL plus stablecoins), with Ethereum second and BNB Chain third. Lower network fees are the likely reason people prefer Solana and L2s to fund a spending card.

Real data. Unlike survey- or market-model-based estimates, these figures come from anonymized, aggregated transactions on SolCard over a 90-day window — no personal or account-level information.