Stablecoin Cards for Midmarket Crypto
Farooq Malik and Charles Naut, co-founders of Rain, on stablecoin-backed credit cards
This shows Rain found its real wedge in companies with crypto operating cash flow, not crypto branding. The smallest startups often still ran like normal venture backed software companies, with dollars in a bank and spend flowing through standard cards. The stronger fit was mid sized crypto businesses, like NFT marketplaces and protocols, that earned fees onchain and needed to pay for SaaS, travel, payroll, and vendors without first moving money back through banks or exchanges.
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Brex and Ramp win by selling finance teams control over employee spend, approvals, reimbursements, and bill pay. Rain learned that copying that long tail playbook into crypto did not work, because the smallest crypto teams often did not actually hold much treasury onchain.
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The better customer was the middle of the market, teams with meaningful onchain revenue and more complex operations. Those customers had enough stablecoin balances for a card product to remove a real daily pain, buying software, flights, or paying global workers without repeated off ramps.
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That segment also made distribution easier. Larger crypto companies tended to share the same accounting firms, legal advisors, and treasury workflows, so trust could spread through service provider networks instead of pure self serve acquisition.
Going forward, this pushes stablecoin card infrastructure upmarket first, then outward. As more businesses earn or hold dollars onchain, the winning providers will be the ones that make those balances usable in ordinary finance workflows, while plugging into the same controls and processing layers that mainstream card programs already use.