Spendability Emerges as the Next Test for Digital Assets

For years, digital assets were something to buy and hold—a bet on the future rather than a way to pay for lunch. That calculus is shifting. Cryptocurrencies and stablecoins are increasingly being judged less by what they might be worth tomorrow and more by what they can actually do today. Consumers, businesses and financial institutions (FIs) alike are beginning to treat these assets not as portfolio holdings, but as money they are waiting to spend.

Consumer research shows that the appetite for spending digital currency is strong. More than one-quarter of stablecoin holders already use them to pay for goods and services directly, and nearly three-quarters would reach for a linked debit card if one were on offer. The activity is scaling, too. Crypto card volume has multiplied many times over in just a few years, now running at an annualized pace measured in the billions.

The obstacle is no longer curiosity. It’s plumbing. Plenty of people want to spend digital assets on everything from daily essentials to big-ticket purchases, but limited merchant acceptance, uneven trust and clunky user experiences keep getting in the way. The result is a widening gap between what holders are willing to do and what they can actually do at the register.

Regulation is finally catching up. New frameworks have cleared away years of uncertainty, and banks, card networks and FinTechs are moving faster as a result. But rules alone won’t put digital assets into circulation. That job falls to the emerging infrastructure to connect these assets to the payment rails people already use, so paying with them feels no different than paying with anything else.

Making digital assets easy to spend is the real work ahead—and it’s what will determine whether they become everyday money or stay locked in the portfolio.

About the Payments Innovation Tracker

The July 2026 edition of the “Payments Innovation Tracker®,” a collaboration with Paymentology, examines why demand for spendable digital assets is surging, what barriers remain and how modern issuer-processing infrastructure is turning ownership into everyday spending power.