Exchanges Are Taking on the Last Mile of Trading

Crypto has no shortage of capital, liquidity, or transactional activity. What it still lacks, in practical terms, is an easy way to move from holding value to using it. That gap becomes visible at a familiar moment, when a user wants to spend from their portfolio but the path still leads through a bank withdrawal, a waiting period, and a handoff between systems that were never built to work together.

The scale of that mismatch is hard to ignore. Around 716 million people globally now hold crypto, yet only 40 to 70 million are active on-chain.

Ownership has expanded far faster than utility. Digital assets can hold value at scale. Using that value in everyday economic life remains the harder part.

Phemex, a global crypto exchange focused on building a more user-first trading environment, sees this gap clearly in user behavior. The friction shows up when users try to move from holding or trading into spending. That is why Phemex built the Phemex Card, not as just another crypto card but to make that transition more direct. It pairs everyday spending from a user’s crypto balance with an Unlimited Cashback Amount using supported USDT or USDC balances in their Phemex Spot Account.

Trading is no longer the whole job

Across the industry, major players are moving toward card-linked crypto and stablecoin payment products. Coinbase, Stripe, Kraken, and Crypto.com are all moving in this direction, which points to a broader shift in market structure rather than a short-lived product cycle. The spending moment is becoming strategically important because it’s where a user’s relationship with an exchange either extends into daily use or stops at trading.

The business logic is becoming easier to read. Coinbase reported $2.8 billion in subscription and services revenue in 2025, which accounted for roughly 40% of its total revenue.

That mix says something important about where exchanges are heading. Long-term value is no longer built only through transactions on a screen. It’s increasingly built through services that keep users inside a broader financial environment.

All of this is happening within a global payments market that generated $2.5 trillion in revenue in 2024. Payments fintechs alone accounted for $176 billion of that total and grew 23% year-on-year, which shows how actively the payment layer is being contested. As digital asset platforms mature, spending starts to look less like an external function and more like part of the platform itself.

What the Phemex Card is built to do

Phemex developed the Phemex Card so users can spend directly from their crypto holdings at tens of millions of merchants worldwide.

That changes a process users have long been expected to accept. Rather than requiring users to manually move funds into an isolated prepaid balance, the card is designed to reduce that step altogether by referencing the user’s primary Spot balance directly, with mobile support through Apple Pay and Google Pay bringing that balance to the point of sale.

This setup bridges the historical disconnect between crypto and traditional payment rails. The card’s economics are built to reinforce that connection rather than treat it as an afterthought. Eligible purchases earn an Unlimited Cashback Amount, and cashback is returned directly to the user’s Spot account, feeding straight back into the same balance the card draws from. Combined with no issuance or monthly maintenance fees, the structure is built to reward the exact behavior the card is meant to encourage: routine, everyday spending directly from a trading portfolio, rather than treating spending as a detour away from it.

Portfolio balances remain within the broader Phemex ecosystem, where users may already be trading, holding assets in custody, or engaging with yield products. When a purchase is made, value is converted and processed through the payment network at the point of sale.

In that sense, the card does more than extend a feature set by closing a functional gap inside the platform. Trading, holding, earning, and spending begin to sit within the same environment rather than across separate ones.

For an exchange, that matters because utility is no longer confined to market activity alone. It starts to shape how users relate to their assets once trading ends.

The infrastructure behind the shift

For a long time, products like this were easier to describe than to deliver. The technical and institutional conditions weren’t fully there.

That has changed. Major blockchains now process over 3,400 transactions per second, roughly 100 times more than five years ago. The throughput limits that once constrained practical payment use have eased substantially.

At the same time, stablecoin transaction volume reached $33 trillion in 2025, up 72% year-on-year, with USDC alone accounting for $18.3 trillion. Those figures don’t describe a niche payment experiment, but infrastructure already operating at meaningful scale.

Institutional behavior has shifted as well. In 2025, Visa, BlackRock, JPMorgan, Fidelity, Stripe, and Robinhood all launched crypto-related products. That level of participation shows digital asset infrastructure isn’t being treated as peripheral to the financial system anymore. Instead, it’s being integrated into it.

Regulatory conditions have also become more workable for card-linked crypto products across major jurisdictions, which further changes what can now be built and supported.

That doesn’t eliminate operational complexity, and it doesn’t remove compliance obligations. It does mean the old argument that crypto spending products remain stuck in a grey area is becoming less convincing. The constraints that once made this model hard to support have, in large part, started to recede.

Bringing utility closer to the user

What matters in the end is not whether crypto can generate activity inside markets. It clearly can.

The more important question is whether users can carry that portfolio value directly into ordinary life. That is where products like the Phemex Card become relevant, and where a rewards structure without a cap matters more than it might first appear: it removes the incentive to switch back to traditional cards once a monthly earnings ceiling is hit, which is where many rewards programs quietly lose the habit they were built to create.

They respond to a gap that many users have learned to tolerate, even though the underlying conditions no longer justify it. As exchanges evolve into broader financial environments, the ability to connect portfolio capital to real-world spending starts to look less like an optional feature and more like part of the platform’s responsibility.

The last mile of trading, once treated as something outside the exchange, is becoming part of what exchanges are expected to solve. Phemex believes that the Phemex Card reflects that shift by treating the distance between holding digital assets and spending them as part of the exchange experience itself.

The Phemex Card is available only to eligible users residing in supported jurisdictions and is subject to eligibility criteria, applicable local requirements and the applicable Terms and Conditions.