EURe’s share of crypto card spending drops to 2% as USDC leads

In early 2024, euro-backed stablecoins accounted for roughly 88% of all crypto card spending. By July 2026, that number had cratered to about 2%. The dollar didn’t just win this race. It lapped everyone else.

Monthly crypto card spending hit $759 million in July 2026, up from $306 million a year earlier, according to data from Paymentscan highlighted in an a16z crypto analysis. That’s roughly a 2.5x surge in twelve months, with nearly 9 million individual purchases at an average transaction size of about $86.

The dollar stablecoin takeover

USDC now commands approximately 58% of all crypto card spend, up from about 48% a year ago. USDT’s climb has been even steeper in relative terms, jumping from around 7% to 26% of the market over the same period.

Together, the two dollar-pegged tokens account for 84% of crypto card transactions. Stablecoins as a category now represent approximately 73% of all crypto card payments.

Meanwhile, EURe, the euro-backed stablecoin that once dominated the space, has essentially become a rounding error. Its collapse from 88% to 2% market share represents one of the most dramatic reversals in stablecoin adoption history.

Gnosis Chain’s decline and the new chain hierarchy

Gnosis Chain was the original infrastructure backbone for crypto card payments, largely because Gnosis Pay built an early system that let users spend EURe directly through self-custodial wallets with licensed euro settlement rails.

That first-mover advantage has evaporated. Gnosis Chain’s share of card volume dropped to roughly 2% in July 2026, mirroring EURe’s decline almost exactly. Optimism now leads all chains with 29% of crypto card spending volume. Solana and Base are tied at 19% each.

MiCA’s role in reshaping the market

The EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation, known as MiCA, has played a significant role in this reshuffling. MiCA created a compliance framework that favored certain stablecoins over others, and USDC, issued by Circle, positioned itself early as a MiCA-compliant option.

That regulatory alignment gave USDC a structural advantage in European markets, which is ironic given that a dollar-denominated token is now the preferred spending instrument in euro-zone economies.

What this means for the payments landscape

The $759 million monthly spending figure still represents a tiny fraction of global card payment volumes. A 2.5x increase in a single year suggests crypto cards are moving past the early-adopter phase. With nearly 9 million monthly transactions already flowing through crypto cards, the infrastructure is no longer theoretical.

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