Rain ran an experiment that most payment companies would hesitate to publicize if it failed. For five months, the stablecoin card issuer tested whether moving loyalty rewards inside the same infrastructure that processes transactions would actually get people to spend more. The results, according to the company, were striking enough to build an entire product around.
During a 30-day trial involving nearly 2,500 users of the Avalanche Card, cardholders who turned on the rewards feature spent roughly 25 percent more than those who didn't. That's the kind of lift that makes a CFO pay attention—assuming it holds up across different markets and demographics.
On June 15, Rain made the feature broadly available. Called simply "Rewards," it's a loyalty engine woven directly into the company's card-issuing platform, now accessible to any of the more than 100 card programs Rain says run on its infrastructure. The pitch: partners can deploy fully branded rewards without hiring a separate loyalty vendor or wrestling with reconciliation headaches between two different ledgers.
It's a straightforward value proposition in theory. Whether it works at scale is another matter entirely.
The Technical Wager
What Rain built is less a bolt-on feature and more a rethinking of how loyalty points should live in the first place. The system mints points on-chain, but only after a transaction settles—a deliberate design intended to sidestep the liability trap that ensnares programs issuing points before money actually changes hands. Stranded liability, the industry calls it, and it's a quiet problem that grows expensive over time.
Partners configure everything themselves: they name the points, decide whether to use flat rates or category multipliers, run merchant-funded campaigns. The cardholder sees a completely branded experience. At launch, redemption options include statement credits and travel bookings through a white-labeled portal. Rain says more are coming, though it didn't specify when or what.
The underlying technology traces back to Uptop, an on-chain rewards platform Rain acquired late last year. Uptop had been powering loyalty programs for NBA teams—the Cleveland Cavaliers and Detroit Pistons among them—using Avalanche's blockchain. That DNA now runs inside Rain's issuing stack.
A Crowded Field, Different Angles
Rain CEO Farooq Malik framed Rewards as a solution to what he describes as integration friction. "Programs with built-in rewards drive the most spend and retention," Malik said, "but the economics and complexity of traditional loyalty vendors have kept them out of reach for most card programs."
Perhaps. But the claim invites scrutiny, particularly in a market where stablecoin card issuance has become unexpectedly competitive. Nium rolled out its own stablecoin card platform earlier this year, targeting both Visa and Mastercard networks. Striga—acquired by Lightspark last fall—markets crypto-enabled rewards card templates. And Stripe's acquisition of Bridge in early 2025 added stablecoin card capability to an ecosystem that already touches millions of merchants.
None of those platforms, however, have publicly positioned a native loyalty subsystem integrated at the issuer level. That's Rain's wedge. Whether it's enough of one depends on how many card programs actually feel constrained by traditional loyalty providers—and whether the depth of specialized vendors like Marqeta or i2c ultimately matters more than simplicity.
The Bigger Picture, and the Unknowns
Rain's broader trajectory suggests the company is betting heavily on infrastructure consolidation. The firm holds Visa principal membership and recently announced plans to issue on Mastercard rails as well. It expanded into Asia-Pacific in March. A January 2026 funding round—$250 million led by ICONIQ at a $1.95 billion valuation—came with growth metrics that turned heads: active cards up 30-fold year-over-year, annualized payment volume up 38-fold. The company reported processing north of $3 billion in annualized transactions for more than 200 clients.
All of which creates context for Rewards. Rain isn't just adding a feature; it's consolidating another piece of the value chain that card programs typically outsource. The 25 percent spending lift from the Avalanche Card trial is compelling—if replicable. One beta, even a well-designed one, doesn't necessarily predict how behavior shifts across geographies, user segments, or program structures with wildly different economics.
And there's a trade-off embedded in the model that Rain hasn't fully addressed: specialized loyalty vendors exist because building sophisticated rewards programs is genuinely hard. Points expiration policies, tiered redemption catalogs, coalition partnerships—these aren't trivial. Rain's approach offers control and simplicity, but it may also hand partners a toolkit that requires more internal expertise than some teams possess.
For now, Rain is making a straightforward wager. Card programs want to own loyalty economics without the overhead of managing separate vendors. Points should live on-chain. Redemption should happen in-app. Reconciliation should disappear as a problem.
Whether that thesis resonates broadly will become clear in the coming months, as more partners activate the feature and the data accumulates. Rain has built the engine. The question is how many programs actually want to drive it themselves.
