Stripe Plans Stablecoin Cards in More Than 100 Countries

A stablecoin card can look very familiar: plastic, a number, and the reassurance of tapping for coffee. Stripe wants that experience to reach a much larger group of people.

The payments company expects its stablecoin card programs to expand to more than 100 countries by the end of the year. The countries and launch dates were not disclosed.

That is a bold geographic target, but it is also a fairly practical one for Stripe. Rather than building a separate shopping system for crypto users, the company is putting stablecoins into card and payments infrastructure that it already operates.

Familiar Cards, Different Plumbing

A card user may not need to care which stablecoin sits behind the payment. That is rather the point. Many of the current programs use Circle's USDC, while Stripe says it intends to be fully stablecoin and blockchain agnostic.

Stern's view is that businesses should be able to offer stablecoins as another option within products they already use, rather than force customers to learn a separate crypto system. He also wants Stripe's stablecoin products to work together without locking customers into the company's own ecosystem.

It is an open-ended promise, and Stripe has been building in several directions. Its stablecoin offering combines its card issuing business with Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure company it bought for $1.1 billion in 2024. It also partnered with Paradigm on Tempo, a blockchain designed for payments, and is a founding investor in Open Standard, which is developing Open USD to compete with USDC and USDT.

The strategy is broader than a single card. Stripe is also exploring tokenized deposits, decentralized finance use cases and payments in more digital assets. Still, Stern said most of the company's work remains centered on stablecoins.

What Changes for Existing Customers

Three current Stripe customers show different reasons to put stablecoins on a card. Ramp wants to take corporate cards into new countries without rebuilding banking and payments connections one market at a time. Kraken has explored letting customers spend directly from accounts where they already hold digital assets. Morse is another current customer, though its particular use of the product was not detailed in the interview.

These programs carry stablecoins into familiar use cases: business spending, access to assets already held and everyday payments. Card spending remains a small part of the wider card market, but the direction is becoming harder to dismiss. According to Paymentscan, about $1.2 billion of stablecoins were spent through cards last month, three times the amount a year earlier.

That total does not mean cards are taking over the global payments market. It does show that stablecoins are moving beyond trading and cross-border transfers into ordinary purchases.

Why Stripe Can Move Quickly

Stripe says it has issued more than 400 million cards and processed hundreds of billions of dollars in card volume since 2018. The stablecoin programs are meant to use that experience and infrastructure.

The scale matters. A crypto-only route to new markets would require building issuing, compliance, settlement and distribution relationships from scratch. Adding stablecoins through an established card network can make the route shorter, at least for businesses that already rely on Stripe's services.

There are important details the announcement has not answered. We do not yet know which countries are included, when each program will launch, or how fees and card issuer arrangements will work. The spending figure also comes from a third-party estimate, and the brief does not provide a longer series showing how usage has developed beyond the latest month and its year-earlier comparison.

Still, the direction is clear. Stripe is treating stablecoins less like a new place users must visit and more like another option inside payment products they may already use. If the expansion goes ahead, the first sign of success will not be the number of countries on a map. It will be whether people keep using the cards after the novelty has worn off.