RedotPay: Stablecoin Card Spending Crosses $10.9B With USDC Leading

Paymentscan Counts $10.9B

Stablecoin-funded payment cards have crossed a new threshold: more than $10.9 billion in cumulative spending worldwide, with USDC — Circle's dollar stablecoin — leading the on-chain share of that volume. Figures published by the payment provider RedotPay on Aug. 25, drawn from the Paymentscan tracker, put the running total above $10.9 billion. July 2026 delivered the largest single month in the tracked dataset at roughly $1.04 billion, against $339.4 million a year earlier — a more than threefold jump — and three years ago the industry processed only about $60,000 per month. RedotPay expects the next $10 billion to take roughly eight months, versus about three years for the first, and projects $50 billion in annualized card spending by 2028 — a company forecast, not an independently confirmed projection. An on-chain-focused dataset counted close to $759 million of July volume across nearly nine million purchases, split about 58% USDC and 26% USDT, with euro-pegged tokens down near 2%; the average transaction was roughly $86, everyday spending rather than trading. RedotPay reports more than eight million users and over $14 billion in annualized payment volume, though those company-reported metrics are unaudited; co-founder Jonathan Chan flags Latin America, then Africa, as the fastest-growing regions. Visa says its network lets stablecoin-linked cards transact at upwards of 175 million merchant locations — distribution that echoes the closed-loop approach PayPal (PAYP) built around its own stablecoin.

ECB Puts Central Bank Money On-Chain

European Central Bank executive board member Isabel Schnabel has made the institution's stance explicit: central bank money 'must be on-chain.' Stablecoins, she argues, cannot independently scale liquidity quickly during financial stress — a gap only a central bank can fill — so tokenization delivers faster, safer, programmable settlement only if the system's safest asset runs on the same rails as everything else. The near-term step is Project Pontes, slated to launch in September. It will connect the ECB's existing TARGET services — the infrastructure euro-area banks use to settle euro payments — with DLT platforms run by market participants, aiming over time for direct settlement finality on the central bank's own DLT infrastructure, smart-contract functionality and round-the-clock operation. The longer horizon is Project Appia, whose mandate — the architecture, technical standards and legal framework for a full European tokenized asset market by 2028 — is set out in the ECB's own project documentation. Interoperability trials have already settled about €1.6 billion across 64 participating institutions in nine jurisdictions, nearly €4 billion in DLT-based instruments have been issued in Europe since 2021, and DLT assets have counted as eligible collateral at the ECB since March 2026. Board colleague Piero Cipollone has framed the destination as a single digital financial market alongside the euro itself. The bank is equally specific on privacy: the retail digital euro would keep offline payment data with the two transacting parties only — a middle ground between card rails and privacy coins such as Monero.

Korea's $3.4B Staking Base

South Korea's retail staking base shows the same pull toward on-platform yield at the exchange level. As of the end of July, the country's four won-based venues — Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone and Korbit — held a combined $3.4 billion in staked crypto assets, serving 1.2255 million staking users who have averaged roughly $7.57 million in monthly rewards this year. By assets, Upbit still leads at about $1.76 billion, a 51.78% share, ahead of Bithumb at $1.48 billion, or 43.41%. By users, however, Bithumb has been ahead since January: approximately 592,700 staking customers, 48.37% of the total, versus Upbit's roughly 359,500. Staking on these venues turns held tokens into yield positions while custody remains with the exchange — the same retail demand for on-platform returns that issuers of yield-bearing stablecoins are chasing globally. For overseas investors, whose main window into Korean equities is the EWY ETF, the takeaway is that competition between Korea's two largest exchanges has shifted from listing breadth toward yield economics, with user counts — not just assets — now the scoreboard. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on MEXC.

Central Banks Race Private Stablecoin Issuers

Read together, the three threads describe one collision. Stablecoin cards are scaling retail payment rails that operate around borders and banking hours; the ECB is racing to give central bank money a role in that tokenized future before private issuers intermediate it away; and Korean staking books show retail demand concentrating wherever yield is paid. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino's rebuttal to the BIS — that fully reserved stablecoins are safer than partially backed tokenized deposits — sharpens the same dispute from the issuer side. In COINOTAG's read, the ECB's Project Appia documentation is the load-bearing record here: a historically conservative institution now treats on-chain settlement as a 2026 deliverable, not a thought experiment. Private stablecoin rails and public digital money are no longer parallel experiments; they are competitors on the same track.