People spent crypto through payment cards at an estimated $18 billion annualized run rate by late 2025 -- and the single most common thing they bought was groceries. According to Artemis research cited by CoinDesk, monthly crypto-card spend grew from roughly $100 million in early 2023 to more than $1.5 billion by late 2025 -- a 106% compound annual growth rate -- and the spending mix now looks less like speculation and more like an ordinary debit-card statement.

That last point is the real story. The question "what do people buy with crypto" used to have a niche answer: NFTs, tokens, and the occasional Tesla. As of mid-2026 the honest answer is groceries, coffee, transit fares, and clothes. This page pulls together the public data on how crypto is actually spent -- what categories dominate, how big the average purchase is, which assets people pay with, and how the picture differs by region. One caveat worth stating up front: the cleanest data comes from crypto-linked Visa and Mastercard settlement, which cleanly captures the card slice but misses gift-card purchases, direct-to-merchant crypto payments, and peer-to-peer spending -- so it undercounts total real-world crypto spending. Estimates also vary because different trackers index different chains and card programs, so where sources disagree, the ranges below are reconciled rather than cherry-picked.

The clearest lens on crypto spending is card volume, because cards translate crypto into ordinary merchant payments that get recorded on-chain and can be measured. Two independent trackers show the same steep climb but disagree on the absolute size -- a gap worth understanding before trusting any single headline number.

Paymentscan, which indexes card-settlement activity across 17 blockchains, tracked this trajectory:

Artemis measures a broader basket and puts late-2025 volume higher still -- more than $1.5 billion a month, or roughly $18 billion annualized, up from about $100 million a month in early 2023 (a 106% compound annual growth rate). Why the gap? The two firms index different chains and different card programs, so neither is "wrong" -- they bracket the real number. Read together, they put annualized crypto-card spend somewhere between roughly $7 billion (Paymentscan's narrower 17-chain view) and $18 billion (Artemis's broader measure) as of late 2025. Either way the growth rate is triple-digit and the direction is unambiguous.

By the broader measure, crypto-card volume now nearly matches the ~$19 billion in annual peer-to-peer stablecoin transfers -- and while P2P transfers grew only about 5% over the period, card spending compounded far faster, according to Artemis and CoinDesk. In other words, a growing share of crypto is moving because someone is buying something, not because someone is shuffling funds between wallets.

Visa dominates the rails. Across the six blockchain-project cards issued in partnership with Visa, total net spend jumped 525% in 2025 -- from $14.6 million in January to $91.3 million in December -- with EtherFi leading at $55.4 million in annual spend, per CoinMarketCap. Across the wider tracked market Visa captured well over 90% of on-chain card volume (some trackers put it at 95--97%), leaving Mastercard a thin sliver, per CoinDesk and Paymentscan.

When you break crypto-card transactions down by category, the pattern is unmistakably everyday. In Crypto.com's 2025 Consumer Spending Report, which analyzes worldwide Visa Card users, grocery is the single largest category at roughly 62% of transaction volume. The fastest-growing categories were also mundane: clothing and footwear, household goods, and transport.

Europe-focused data tells the same story with different weightings. CEX.IO reports that day-to-day items -- groceries, retail, and transport -- account for about 59% of crypto-card spending in the region, with groceries alone at roughly 30% and dining and bars at 19%. Among e-commerce destinations, Amazon led at about 18% of online crypto-card volume (down from 22% in 2024), followed by Uber rides and Uber Eats at 14%, according to Crypto.com.

The takeaway: the top thing people buy with crypto is food and basic household spending, not luxury or crypto-native goods. That mirrors the broader shift covered in our state of crypto payments in 2026 report.

Crypto is being used for small, frequent purchases -- the kind of transactions cash and contactless cards historically owned. CEX.IO found the average crypto-card transaction in Europe was EUR 23.70, meaningfully below the EUR 33.60 average for traditional bank cards (based on Q1 2025 Mastercard data).

Nearly half of all crypto-card purchases came in under EUR 10 -- a micro-spending range where cash has traditionally dominated, per CEX.IO. That is a strong signal that crypto has moved from an investment people hold to a balance people spend down on daily life.

If groceries are what people buy, stablecoins are what they buy it with. CEX.IO reports that stablecoins accounted for roughly 73% of crypto-card transactions in 2025, with volatile assets like Bitcoin and Ether making up the rest. The logic is intuitive: nobody wants to spend an asset that might swing 8% before the transaction settles, and a dollar-pegged token removes that risk. We cover the mechanics in can you spend Bitcoin like cash.

The stablecoin slice is also the fastest-growing part of card spending. Visa's stablecoin-linked card spend reached a $3.5 billion annualized run rate by late 2025 -- up roughly 460% year-over-year and about 19% of all tracked crypto-card volume, according to Artemis and CoinDesk. That single data point captures the shift better than any survey: the money people load onto cards to spend is increasingly dollar-denominated, not speculative.

Which stablecoin? USDT dominates volume across nearly all markets, with notable exceptions where USDC leads -- India (about 47.4% USDC) and Argentina (about 46.6% USDC), per CoinDesk. For a primer on why stablecoins are the default spending asset, see what is a crypto debit card.

Crypto spending is not evenly distributed. Europe has emerged as the everyday-spending heartland: crypto-card users there make about 40% of their transactions online -- nearly double the roughly 21% regional average for card payments -- and new crypto-card orders grew 15% in the first half of 2025, per CEX.IO. Europe also accounted for about 70% of offline travel volume in Crypto.com's travel breakdown.

Emerging markets show a different pattern in asset choice. Where inflation and currency instability bite hardest -- Argentina, for instance -- users lean more heavily on USDC and treat stablecoins as a dollar substitute for everyday purchases rather than a speculative play, consistent with the market-by-market split reported by CoinDesk.

For the first time since tracking began, online spending fell to 51% of crypto-card volume in 2025 -- its lowest share on record -- per Crypto.com. The mirror image of that number is meaningful: offline, in-person spending is catching up. People are tapping crypto-funded cards at the grocery checkout and the coffee counter, not just on e-commerce sites. That is the clearest evidence yet that crypto has crossed from a screen-based, online-only asset into physical, real-world commerce.

Step back from the tables and the behavior is coherent: people are making small, frequent, stablecoin-funded purchases -- a EUR 24 average ticket, nearly half of them under EUR 10, mostly groceries and transport. That is not investing behavior. It is checking-account behavior. And it exposes what actually matters when you spend crypto in the real world: the settlement layer has to be cheap and fast enough that a $6 coffee makes sense, and the funding asset has to be stable enough that the price doesn't move between tap and settlement.

That is the pattern SolCard is built around. Top-ups settle on Solana, where fees run fractions of a cent and confirmation is sub-second -- so funding a card for a small everyday purchase isn't eaten by gas the way it can be on a congested Layer 1. And because you can load USDC or USDT rather than only SOL, your spending balance holds its dollar value, matching the 73%-stablecoin reality the data shows. The card then spends anywhere Visa or Mastercard is accepted, which is the whole point: the crypto layer stays invisible to the merchant. For the adoption and market-size side of this story, see our crypto debit card statistics; for how the options compare, our best crypto debit cards guide; and for a step-by-step, how to pay with crypto.

Everyday essentials. Grocery is the single largest crypto-card spending category at roughly 62% of transaction volume worldwide, according to Crypto.com's 2025 Consumer Spending Report. The fastest-growing categories in 2025 were clothing and footwear (+68%), household goods (+59%), and transport (+20%) -- all ordinary spending rather than crypto-native or luxury purchases.

Crypto-card spending reached an estimated $18 billion annualized run rate by late 2025, up from about $100 million per month in early 2023 -- a 106% compound annual growth rate, per Artemis data reported by CoinDesk. A narrower 17-chain tracker (Paymentscan) puts late-2025 volume at $500M--$600M a month, so the true annualized figure sits somewhere in the roughly $7B--$18B range depending on how many chains and card programs you count.

About EUR 23.70 in Europe, versus EUR 33.60 for traditional bank cards, according to CEX.IO. Nearly half of all crypto-card purchases are under EUR 10, indicating heavy use for small, everyday transactions where cash has traditionally dominated.

Overwhelmingly stablecoins. Roughly 73% of crypto-card transactions were settled in stablecoins such as USDT and USDC in 2025, per CEX.IO, because a dollar-pegged asset avoids the price swings that make spending Bitcoin or Ether awkward. Visa's stablecoin-linked card spend alone hit a $3.5 billion annualized run rate by late 2025, up about 460% year-over-year, per Artemis.

Holding and trading still dominate total crypto activity by dollar value, but the spending share is growing fast. Crypto-card volume of roughly $18 billion annualized is now nearly matching the $19 billion in peer-to-peer stablecoin transfers, and card spending is compounding at triple-digit rates while P2P transfers grew only about 5%, per CoinDesk.

Europe leads everyday crypto spending, with about 40% of transactions online (nearly double the regional card average) and 15% growth in new card orders in the first half of 2025, per CEX.IO. Emerging markets like Argentina and India show heavier reliance on USDC as a dollar substitute, per CoinDesk.

• CoinDesk -- Crypto card spending hits $18 billion annualized as stablecoin use shifts to everyday payments
• Artemis -- Stablecoin Payments at Scale: How Cards Bridge Digital Assets and Global Commerce
• Crypto.com -- Crypto Card Consumer Spending Insights 2025
• CEX.IO via FinTech Weekly -- Crypto Card Spending Suggests a Shift Toward Cashless Payments in Europe
• CoinMarketCap -- Visa Crypto Cards See 525% Spending Surge in 2025
• Coinpaper / Paymentscan -- Visa Dominates as Crypto Card Spending Surges Past $600M a Month