Crypto Cards Are Thriving, IPOs Meet DeFi, And A Major Federal Reserve Integration

Welcome to this week’s edition of DeFi In Five!

Each week, we’ll aim to bring you the newest, most notable things happening in DeFi – from tokenization to trading to AI and beyond. 

Here’s what you can expect:

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DeFi legitimization continues to run hot

Tokenized stocks keep expanding

Crypto-linked credit and debit cards are rapidly gaining traction

Crypto cards are one of the hottest trends in DeFi. Major apps with billions of dollars in AUM, such as EtherFi, Jupiter, and Phantom, are launching their own cards.

2025 was the breakthrough year for crypto-linked cards, with over $707M in payment volume generated.

And so far in 2026, volume is on track to exceed $1.7B!

We’ll dive deeper into why this trend is unfolding in this week’s Featured Project segment.

To filter out market noise/dead tokens and avoid heavy concentration of derivatives (staked tokens, vault tokens, etc.), we track our own “DeFi 20 Index,” which equally weights 20 assets from leading DeFi project spanning multiple sectors:

Lending – AAVE, SKY, MORPHO, KMNO, EUL

Trading/Derivatives – UNI, HYPE, PENDLE, JUP, CRV, AERO

Tokenization – ONDO, CFG, SYRUP

Yield/Asset Management – ETHFI, ENA, FF

Infra – CC, ZRO

AI – VIRTUALS

Here are the DeFi 20 leaders and laggards from the past week:

And here’s how the DeFi 20 Index stacks up against the rest over the market over the past week:

DeFi 20: -2.8%

Altcoins (total market w/o top-10 assets): -2.8%

Broader DeFi (based on CoinGecko): -2.6%

Total Market: -2.5%

Tracking the best yields in DeFi for major tokens and stablecoins (pools/vaults w/$5M+ in assets, yields don’t include extra rewards/incentives unless noted)

As you saw in the Chart Of The Week, usage of crypto-linked debit/credit cards is in a parabolic growth phase.

This trend is a clear signal that people are getting comfortable with using stablecoins in place of fiat currencies. 

While the two might seem the same on the surface, there’s a massive difference – stablecoins run on blockchains, and fiat runs on decades-old payment infrastructure.

Stablecoins were the first blockchain-based product (other than BTC) to achieve global product market fit. Even the most conservative estimates of “true” stablecoin volume exceed $4T for 2025, which is over 20% of the total volume processed by Visa.

While their main source of volume today comes from transactions within DeFi apps (trading, borrowing, transfers between wallets, etc.), stablecoins are increasingly used for remittance payments and held as a hedge against local currency inflation.

And now, crypto cards are marking the next stage of stablecoin evolution: people are actually spending them on everyday purchases.

Rain is a project sitting at the center of this trend. In fact, over 190k people and businesses currently use Rain cards – that’s almost ⅔ of all stablecoin card users! 

But Rain does a lot more than just make crypto cards – they’ve partnered with Visa to bring the benefits of blockchain to merchants, institutions, and consumers across 200+ countries around the world. 

This enables Rain-powered cards to work anywhere that Visa cards are accepted.

Here’s how it works:

Transactions are authorized by Rain and approved by Rain, then Visa provides settlement onchain in seconds, 24/7/365.

It doesn’t matter if the merchant wants to accept stablecoins or fiat – they can still send and receive funds at the speed of the internet.

Even if Visa doesn’t accept a particular stablecoin, Rain’s network can transfer their value into an approved stablecoin (such as USDT or USDC). 

From a business standpoint, stablecoins just make sense. Because they run on blockchains, stablecoins make money move at the speed of the internet – it’s as fast as sending an email. 

This is especially helpful for managing B2B transactions and payroll services – especially internationally where multiple fiat currencies are used. With Rain, merchants no longer have to constantly account for various bank holidays and potential settlement delays in specific countries. 

It’s clear that companies are now starting to pick up on this.

Transferring money using “regular” credit/debit cards might seem instant when you’re paying for groceries, but try sending money from any app to your bank account (without paying extra for the privilege) – it’s far from instant! 

Similarly, when you spend money, it usually takes 1-3 days for the merchant to actually access the funds.

Crypto cards also bring new forms of incentives to users, beyond the typical rewards programs of traditional cards.

The permissionless nature of blockchains allows card providers to incentivize usage by rewarding them across all of DeFi – possibilities include:

And since Rain’s cards run on blockchains, you don’t even need to link a bank account to spend or transfer money – just a crypto wallet will do.

One of the first major success stories of the crypto card industry was EtherFi (also a DeFi20 Index project!). In fact, within a month of launching their Rain-powered card, its users had already spent over $1M!

But Rain didn’t just create their card – they helped design EtherFi’s entire “Cash” program, which lets users store and spend money on a crypto-linked Visa card, as well as use it to earn yield directly from various DeFi apps. 

To date, users have spent over $300M using EtherFi’s Cash card, and volume is on track to reach ~$657M in 2026 alone!

Looking beyond “crypto,” the bigger picture for stablecoin-powered transfers is that they can legitimately transform the way money is transacted. 

Blockchains can instantly transfer money anywhere in the world at basically no cost. This is incredibly convenient for people who want to transfer money between apps without waiting days to receive it. It also means that millions of businesses with international supply chains can save massive amounts of time and money.

Over $1B worth of stocks have been tokenized, most of which has happened within the past 8 months. But why?

I covered this trend, and how onchain stocks open up new possibilities for investors, in last week’s Building The Future issue — check it out here.

That’s all for this week’s DeFi In Five! Be sure to let us know what stuck out to you, or if we missed any other key events over the past week.

For any questions, comments, or feedback, please email me at [email protected].

And finally, make sure to subscribe below — see you next week!