KAST's $2 Billion Is Top-Ups, Not Card Spending
KAST passed $2 billion in all-time deposits, a figure Paymentscan reports as cumulative top-ups. On the same page, tracked issuer settlements for the KAST card stand at $818M. Both are onchain and both are labelled clearly, so the gap is not an error. It is what happens when a card program is measured at two different points.
Top-ups measure money arriving, settlements measure money clearing
Paymentscan puts cumulative KAST top-ups at $2.019B across 2,500,721 transactions and 295,415 addresses. That works out to roughly $807 per top-up and about $6,800 in lifetime funding per address.
The settlement series counts something else: transfers between KAST and card issuer Rain that clear what cardholders actually spent. There, the cumulative total is $818M across 732 transactions. The transaction counts are not comparable at all, because settlements are batched by the issuer. Twenty-six settlement transactions in September against hundreds of thousands of top-ups is a difference in accounting granularity, not in activity.
The $1.2B gap is not a measure of idle balances
Subtracting one series from the other is the obvious move and the wrong one. Paymentscan states that its settlement data excludes payments processed through Rain's legacy contracts and through other card issuers. Spending before the current contracts, or routed through any issuer other than Rain, does not appear in the $818M at all.
So the distance between $2.02B and $818M contains at least three things mixed together: balances still sitting in KAST accounts, spending that settled outside the tracked contracts, and money that was topped up and later withdrawn. Cumulative deposits only ever rise, and they do not fall when funds leave. A reader treating the difference as unspent balance is reading a methodology limit as a bank statement.
What top-ups do measure well is funding demand and reach. A count of 295,415 distinct addresses, against no address count on the settlement side, is the clearest thing in the dataset: it says how many wallets have funded a KAST account, and deposit growth over five consecutive weeks says the number is still climbing.
Monthly settlements have grown every month but two since launch
The tracked settlement series starts in March 2025, nine months after the card launched in June 2024, and rises almost without interruption: $12.76M in September 2025, $42.69M in December, $57.71M in January 2026, $76.24M in May, $89.6M in July and $104.8M in August. February 2026 dipped against January, and September 2026 stands at $98.81M against August's $104.8M, a month that is still incomplete at the time of writing.
August is therefore the first month above $100M of tracked settlement, and the trend under it is steady rather than spiky. That is a different story from the deposit milestone, and a more useful one for judging whether a card is being used rather than funded.
For a cardholder, the fee line matters more than either total
Neither number changes what a transaction costs. Paymentscan lists the KAST card at 2% base cashback rising to 3%, with no cashback cap, an FX fee of 0.5% to 1.75%, and ATM withdrawals at $3 plus 2%. Borrow-to-spend is not offered, and Apple Pay and Google Pay both are. Settlement runs across nine chains, including Arbitrum, Base, Ethereum, Polygon, Solana and TRON.
The FX band is the part worth reading twice. A spread of 0.5% to 1.75% is not a single rate, and where a given transaction lands inside it is not something a volume milestone answers. Deposit totals describe how much the program has attracted; the ATM and FX lines describe what a specific purchase costs, and those are the numbers that show up on a statement.
Sources: Paymentscan KAST card metrics, Paymentscan announcement.
