The card runs on USDC, a dollar-pegged digital currency (known as a stablecoin) held on the Stellar blockchain. It is accessible immediately in digital form through Apple Wallet and Google Wallet inside the MoneyGram app, with a physical card offering ATM withdrawals planned for late 2026. MoneyGram built the product alongside three partners: Rain, which provides the card infrastructure; Crossmint, which handles wallet technology; and the Stellar network, which supplies the underlying blockchain rails.

Why Colombia First

The numbers explain the choice. Colombia receives roughly $40 million in remittances every single day, with more than 53 percent of those transfers originating in the United States. In the first half of 2026 alone, inbound remittances topped $6 billion. The Colombian peso has depreciated persistently against the dollar, making a dollar-denominated stablecoin balance a practical tool for preserving purchasing power, not just a fintech novelty. Stablecoins already accounted for 66 percent of all crypto transactions in Colombia in 2024, and Colombia ranked second globally in the share of centralized exchange stablecoin purchases. Colombia is also considered the second most advanced market in Latin America for digital asset regulation, a factor that made it a commercially viable launch destination beyond its remittance volumes alone. MoneyGram had existing remittance infrastructure in the country, which shortened the path to launch.

CEO Anthony Soohoo described the product's customer benefit plainly. "We're giving customers more freedom and control to manage their money, all in one place," he said in the company's announcement. He has offered a sharper articulation of the underlying corporate thesis as well: "MoneyGram is taking a fundamentally different approach by starting with distribution and using stablecoin as a foundation to build future applications," he said at the MGUSD launch in June 2026. That sequencing, self-custodial wallet first, proprietary stablecoin second, spend layer third, defines what the Colombia card represents in the broader product roadmap.

Three Years of Infrastructure Work Behind One Card

The card did not appear in isolation. MoneyGram has spent the past several years converting a cash-based remittance business into a stablecoin-capable payments network. The company first partnered with Stellar in 2021. In early 2026, it rebuilt its core app to embed a self-custodial wallet, allowing users to hold and convert stablecoin balances directly. In June 2026, it launched MGUSD, its own USD-pegged stablecoin on Stellar, with Bridge (a Stripe company) acting as the regulated issuer, M0 providing smart contract infrastructure, and Fireblocks handling custody. The Visa card represents the spending layer that connects those accumulated digital balances to the real economy.

Luke Tuttle, MoneyGram's Chief Product and Technology Officer, described the approach as making the technical architecture invisible to users. According to statements made at the MGUSD launch in June, the company rebuilt its core infrastructure so digital dollars could move through it as naturally as cash moves through agent networks.

Denelle Dixon, CEO of the Stellar Development Foundation, pointed to the partnership's staying power as evidence of a broader shift. "Our five-year partnership with MoneyGram is proof that stablecoins have moved well beyond pilots," she said, noting that purpose-built blockchain paired with established payments networks can expand financial access at meaningful scale.

The Infrastructure Partner: Rain

Rain, the New York-based company providing the card infrastructure, raised $250 million in a Series C round in early 2026 at a valuation of $1.95 billion. That valuation is roughly 17 times higher than it was ten months earlier. The company now processes more than $3 billion in annualized transactions across over 200 enterprise clients, and stablecoin card spending on its platform has been growing at approximately 100 percent year over year as of the second quarter of 2026. Rain became a Mastercard Principal Member in mid-2026, expanding beyond its previous Visa-only card issuance capability. The technical stack deployed in Colombia, combining Stellar, Crossmint, and Rain, is now proven at meaningful scale.

A Crowded Field

MoneyGram is entering a stablecoin card market that is filling up quickly. Visa and Bridge have stablecoin-linked cards active in 18 countries as of March 2026 and are targeting over 100 countries by year-end. Visa separately partnered with Yellow Card to bring USDC-powered payments to 20 African nations. In Colombia specifically, Oobit (backed by Tether) launched crypto payment services in May 2026, and Meta quietly rolled out stablecoin payouts for select creators in Colombia and the Philippines earlier this year.

The regulatory environment in the United States has also shifted in favor of the model. The GENIUS Act, signed into law in July 2025, established the first federal framework for fiat-backed stablecoins, clarifying reserve requirements, establishing redemption rights and disclosure standards, and confirming that compliant stablecoins are neither securities nor commodities. MoneyGram's MGUSD issuer, Bridge, was designed from the start to meet those requirements. Full enforcement under the act begins no later than January 2027.

What Comes Next

MoneyGram has stated plans to expand the card to additional Central and South American markets before the end of 2026. Support for MGUSD as a card balance currency, alongside USDC, is described as coming in the near future. The more consequential milestone is the physical card rollout in late 2026: ATM access is what determines last-mile utility in markets where digital point-of-sale infrastructure remains thin.

MoneyGram operates nearly 500,000 retail locations across more than 200 countries, including significant coverage in Sub-Saharan Africa and, according to the company's existing network, parts of South Asia. Those two regions most closely mirror Colombia's combination of high remittance volumes, persistent currency pressure, and accelerating stablecoin adoption, and they represent the clearest path for replicating the Colombia model at scale. India received an estimated $129 billion in remittances in 2024, making it the world's largest recipient by volume, though a 30 percent capital gains tax on crypto assets and similar restrictions in Bangladesh present compliance hurdles that MoneyGram would need to clear before meaningful deployment. In Sub-Saharan Africa, cities such as Nairobi and Lagos share Colombia's structural profile: large diaspora-driven inflows, weakening local currencies, and rapidly growing stablecoin usage. Dhaka and Colombo present a comparable picture in South Asia. Colombia, for now, is where the model is being proven.