Who actually uses crypto cards?
881K wallets traced on-chain — how much they hold, how much they spend, and whether they come back. Measured wallet by wallet, not surveyed.
A few whales carry it — the top 10% of spenders drive 90% of all card spend, and a few hundred wallets hold most of the money.
Cards are rails, not savings — 86% of wallets hold about $0. Money flows in and straight back out; only credit-style cards (Ether.fi, Gnosis) hold nothing by design.
Two kinds of card: sticky daily debit (Gnosis 52 txns, Ether.fi 47 — used like a real bank card) versus massive-but-shallow (RedotPay: 359K wallets, but half never come back).
Who uses each card?
Average balance held, average spend, activity and retention — per card, treasury-scrubbed.
| Card | Holds funds | Lifetime / wallet | Median tx | Avg txns | Returned | Active 30d |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Largest base by far, but shallow — half never return after the first load. | 13% | $4,830 | $170 | 6.1 | 51% | 42% |
Micro-payments — tiny tickets, frequent use. | 1% | $243 | $7 | 18.1 | 78% | 74% |
Heavy daily use; ~$0 stablecoin held — it's a credit card against staked collateral. | ~0% | $3,656 | $19 | 16.3 | 84% | 57% |
Highest-value load card — biggest median top-up of any card. Custodial, so balance sits pooled off-chain, not per-user. Capture began May 2026. | 9% | $3,729 | $225 | 2.5 | 35% | 80% |
| 1% | $1,749 | $97 | 5.2 | 63% | 75% | |
Shallowest per-user — few small taps, short lifespan. | 45% | $431 | $4 | 2.8 | 51% | 57% |
Stickiest daily card, but an aging cohort — low new intake. | ~0% | $2,339 | $26 | 52.1 | 87% | 32% |
June breakout, best retention in the set. 87% hold a yield-bearing USDT0 balance they spend from — a checking-account model, not spend-down. | 87% | $1,356 | $24 | 9.2 | 79% | 96% |
| 21% | $994 | $20 | 20.3 | 79% | 80% |
"Holds funds" = share of wallets carrying any balance (medians are ~$0; averages are whale/treasury-skewed, so we show the share). Self-custody balance cards like Plasma One hold a spendable balance; EtherFi/Gnosis are 0% because they're credit against collateral (no stablecoin sits in the wallet); KAST is custodial so its card balance is pooled off-chain, not per-wallet. "Lifetime / wallet" = total per wallet, all-time — for loadcards (RedotPay, KAST) this is money LOADED, not spent. "Median tx" = typical single transaction, the whale-proof number.
Daily drivers & where they are
Transactions per wallet separate everyday cards from one-and-done; the money skews to the Americas.
Of the ~11% of wallets we can place confidently. Peak spend hour is 19:00 UTC — evening Europe / midday Americas.
How we built this
Every card spend and top-up is indexed on-chain from each card's settlement sink or top-up hub — no surveys, no self-reported numbers.
Current balance is the live stablecoin holding (USDC/USDT/DAI) crawled per wallet across Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, Scroll, Tron and BSC.
Treasury, aggregator and contract wallets are scrubbed — a wallet with a large balance and near-zero activity is flagged as infrastructure, not a user.
‘Returned’ = wallets with more than one transaction; ‘active’ = a transaction in the last 30 days.
RedotPay and KAST are custodial load cards, so their figure is measured on the top-up side; batch-settled Rain brands (Kolo, Avici, Tria…) are excluded from the per-user view because individual users never touch the chain.
On-chain observational analysis of 881K wallets; not investment advice. See also card economics and the card spend tracker.