Table of Contents
Roughly one-third of crypto card payments currently happen on TRON. Of the roughly $650M in card payments processed across 19 chains in April 2026, TRON alone accounts for 32.7%, or about $213M.
TRON's lead traces back to USDT distribution. Crypto cards run mostly on USDT, so payments happen wherever the user's balance sits. As of April 2026, payment assets are roughly 62% USDT and 26% USDC. USDT is more than twice the size of USDC, and about 45% of total USDT supply, or $87B, sits on TRON. Beyond that, RedotPay, which accounts for roughly 70% of cumulative card volume, also routes most of its payments through TRON. Payment assets skew toward USDT, USDT skews toward TRON, and the top issuer skews toward TRON as well. Three distributions stack on the same chain, and that overlap is what gets TRON to 32.7%.
Which Chains Picked Up the 25.7%p TRON Lost?
TRON's share peaked at 58.4% in July 2024, larger than every other chain combined at the time. Over the following 21 months, 25.7%p points have leaked out, and the slide is still ongoing. Solana, on the other hand, has been climbing steadily. Sitting below 1% through September 2024, Solana moved into the 4 to 5% range as users began topping up USDC or USDT on Solana to fund payments. The share settled into the 10 to 12% range entering 2026.
Optimism, meanwhile, held at 1.94% through March 2026 before jumping to 9.7% in April, a nearly 5x move in a single month. The shift is explained almost entirely by a single event. On April 15, 2026, Ether.fi Cash migrated its card infrastructure from Scroll to OP Mainnet, bringing over 70,000 active cards and more than $220M in TVL.
The Next Competition Is Which Chain Ecosystem Captures the Card Payment Flow
As of April 2026, the top five chains (TRON, BSC, Optimism, Ethereum, and Solana) cluster between roughly 10% and 33%. A year earlier, TRON alone held 51.7%, and the market has since moved one step away from single-chain dominance toward a multipolar structure. The driver behind that shift is USDC growth. USDC has grown to roughly 26% of card payment assets, and USDC issuance sits mostly on Ethereum, Solana, Base, and Optimism rather than TRON.
The user-facing experience on the card itself, though, has barely moved. Card payment funds are still almost entirely USDT and USDC, and the fees users see (0% to 1.75% depending on the card) are unrelated to chain choice. With the same card, paying on TRON or on Optimism costs the user the same. What multipolarity actually shifted is not the user-facing price but the flow of capital between issuers and chain ecosystems. The next competition in this market is which chain pulls card payment tokens into its own ecosystem and converts them into stablecoin liquidity and DeFi activity.
