Beyond the Hype: The Real World Use Cases for Stablecoins
We came back from Stablecon with a lot of notes from partners, teams we're onboarding, and new companies, all describing what they're building.
Three use cases kept showing up: cards, payouts, and global accounts. Our site traffic says the same thing. Global accounts is where visitors go first. Cards and payouts are next.
Here's each one, the data behind it, and what you can build.
Cards and everyday spend
A Visa card that spends a dollar balance, accepted at 175M+ merchants.
- Wallets that already hold a balance
- Platforms whose sellers want to spend what they earn
- Remittance and P2P apps adding a card
Platform payouts
Pay people in 65+ countries from one dollar balance, over local rails. You set your own fee and keep it.
- Marketplaces paying sellers
- Creator platforms paying creators
- Payroll paying teams abroad
Global accounts
A branded dollar account your users can hold, send, and spend anywhere.
- Dollar balances for users outside the US
- Remittance from a phone to anyone
- Payouts into markets like China, Israel, and Colombia
1. Cards: spend a dollar balance anywhere
Someone holds a dollar balance and wants to spend it. Online or tap to pay.
This is the fastest-growing part of stablecoins. Monthly card spend crossed $1B in July 2026 and hit $1.12B in August. A year earlier it was $380M. Active card users went from 68K to 288K.
Monthly stablecoin card spend
Spend on stablecoin-linked cards each month, March 2023 to August 2026
Unique addresses spending each month
Onchain addresses with card spend, March 2023 to August 2026
One caveat: a single program is more than half of that spend. The market is younger than the curve looks.
Most teams we onboarded this year already had the balance. A wallet, a creator platform, a payments app. They were missing the card.
So that's what we built. Visa debit cards, virtual or physical, funded by your users' dollar balance and accepted at 175M+ merchants. Cards are issued through licensed partners, so you're not tied to one issuer or one bank. And the bonus is you keep the economics.
2. Payouts: pay people everywhere, at once
Marketplaces, creator platforms, payroll, gig apps. Same problem: lots of people in lots of countries who are owed money for their services, and a finance team managing six banking relationships to pay them.
Slow payouts aren't an accounting problem. They're an infrastructure problem. Every extra day is a day the money sits in a bank between the platform and the person who earned it. Stablecoins remove that middle. The money lands when it's sent.
The old way is expensive. International transfers run $15 to $50 per payout before FX. Conversion adds another 2 to 4 percent. A creator earning $10,000 a month loses $1,200 to $1,500 a year to fees. And a payout that takes three days is three days of support tickets.
Platforms coming to us ask for Europe, the UK, Brazil, and Canada first, paid from one dollar balance, at $10M to $50M+ a month per platform. The corridors already moving the most money on Lightspark are different: remittance markets in Latin America, Africa, and South Asia.
Payouts on Lightspark cover 65+ countries over local rails like PIX, UPI, SEPA, Faster Payments, and Bre-B in Colombia. We pick the best rail, handle FX, and settle in real time.
Platforms want to make money on this too. So we shipped platform fees. You set your fee on top of ours. We price it into the quote, collect it in the transaction, and credit it to you at settlement. No separate invoice. You keep the fee and the customer.
3. Global Accounts: a dollar account, anywhere
The oldest problem in payments. Someone wants to hold, send, or receive dollars, and where they live makes that slow or expensive. The World Bank puts the average cost of a $200 remittance at 6.49 percent. Through a bank, 14.99 percent. The G20 has been chasing 3 percent for a decade.
What it costs to send $200
Average fee as a share of the amount sent and in dollars, Q3 2025
This is the most varied of the three. Remittance from a phone to anyone. Dollar accounts for users in Latin America and South Asia. Payouts into China and Colombia. A merchant in Bogotá prices in pesos. A developer in Tel Aviv pays contractors in shekels. They all need dollars to just be there.
Global Accounts is a branded dollar account for your users. Card-enabled and spendable in 65+ countries. USD everywhere, local currency when they need it. China launched last month. Colombia and Israel this month, with 24/7 settlement to any bank.
What the three have in common
Nobody we work with is building a stablecoin product. They're building a card, a payout, or a dollar balance their customers use every day. We're the infrastructure underneath.
Information moves across the internet instantly, to anyone, without asking permission. Money should move the same way. David Marcus made that argument on stage at Stablecon and we've been making it since the beginning. When we started, we could settle in two countries. End of last year, about 50. Today, 65+.
We've stayed open and independent so you decide how money moves. If you're building one of these three things, try it in the Playground, or drop us a line.
Sources
Stablecoin card spend and active users: Paymentscan, March 2023 to August 2026.
Remittance costs: World Bank, Remittance Prices Worldwide, Q3 2025.