MoneyGram just turned 85 years of cross-border money transfers into a stablecoin-backed Visa card running on USDC, and Colombia gets to try it out first.
MoneyGram switched on the MoneyGram Card today, and underneath the plastic-styled app screen sits a stablecoin balance instead of a regular bank account. Customers load USDC, spend it anywhere Visa is accepted, and don’t have to think about the conversion happening underneath.
Anthony Soohoo, the company’s chairman and CEO, framed it as an extension of something MoneyGram already does well. “We’re giving customers more freedom and control to manage their money, all in one place,” he said in the announcement, adding that the card “builds on the power of our global payments network.”
MoneyGram — product image of the MoneyGram Card and its in-app setup flow.
A Stablecoin Balance, Not a Bank Account
The mechanics run through three separate partners. Rain supplies the card infrastructure, the kind of plumbing a handful of other fintechs already use to turn a stablecoin balance into something a merchant terminal recognizes. Crossmint handles the wallet layer underneath it. Stellar, the blockchain network, is what actually moves the funds.
None of that shows up to a regular user, and that seems to be the point. Add the card to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet, tap to pay at a register, and it behaves like every other card sitting in the phone. Existing MoneyGram app users never have to leave that app to start spending.
Colombia gets first access.
MoneyGram says other markets will follow “in the coming months,” without naming a single one yet.
Cash Pickup Still Works the Old Way
Somewhere in the app menu sits a feature carried straight over from the pre-stablecoin version of this business. Customers can transfer funds from their card balance back toward a cash pickup at one of nearly 500,000 retail locations worldwide. Eighty-five years of running physical payout counters doesn’t disappear just because a stablecoin balance sits under the hood now.
A physical version of the card is coming too, planned for late this year, mostly so people can pull cash at an ATM or pay somewhere that still doesn’t take a digital wallet. Until then it’s phone-only.
USDC is the only stablecoin live on the card right now. MoneyGram’s own MGUSD token, announced earlier this year, is supposed to join later, though the company hasn’t said exactly when that happens.
Part of a Wider Pattern
This isn’t MoneyGram’s only move onto blockchain rails this year. Its Ramps product, built more for developers than everyday customers, went live on Solana a few weeks ago, adding another chain to what had been a narrower setup. The Card and Ramps solve different problems, but both lean on the same idea: run stablecoins through infrastructure people already trust instead of asking them to learn a new wallet from scratch.
Other companies are testing similar ground right now. Uzbekistan launched a pilot just yesterday for a som-pegged stablecoin called HUMO, a smaller and far more government-driven version of the same idea. A tokenized private credit fund out of the Gulf, aimed at closing a $250 billion SME financing gap, landed just hours ago too, part of the same broader push to route real money through crypto rails rather than around them.
Card programs like this now sit inside a broader stablecoins category that’s been filling up with bank pilots, tokenized funds and payment company launches almost every week. MoneyGram’s version might be the most consumer-facing one yet, mostly because it doesn’t ask anyone to actually understand what a stablecoin is before using it.
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