“Payments companies are adopting stablecoins” hides three different strategies: defend the network, own the interoperability layer, or turn stablecoins into merchant financial infrastructure.

The thesis: same technology, different profit pools

Stablecoins are becoming a new payments rail, but Visa, Mastercard and Stripe are not making the same bet on what that rail should do. Visa is treating stablecoins primarily as a new settlement and funding asset that can make its existing network more flexible without changing what consumers or merchants see. Mastercard is betting that the winning layer will be interoperability: the software and network services that connect fiat money, stablecoins, tokenized deposits, wallets and existing card rails. Stripe is going further down the stack, trying to turn stablecoins into a programmable financial operating system for businesses — issuance, wallets, treasury, payouts, cards and even the blockchain execution layer.

That distinction matters because the economics are different. Visa can benefit even if stablecoins stay invisible in the back office. Mastercard benefits if the future is fragmented across many forms of money that need to interoperate. Stripe benefits most if merchants and software platforms begin to hold, issue and move stablecoins as part of their day-to-day financial operations. The same technology can therefore be defensive for one company, connective for another and aggressively vertical for the third.

The strategies are also converging. Visa has launched the Visa Stablecoin Platform, Mastercard bought stablecoin infrastructure company BVNK, and Stripe now supports stablecoin issuance, wallets, merchant balances, cards and OUSD across its product suite. The question is no longer which company ‘supports stablecoins.’ It is which parts of the stablecoin value chain each company wants to own — and how much of its existing economics it is willing to disrupt in the process.

Figure 1. Strategic value-capture map. Source: company announcements; Dave Finances analysis.

Visa: make stablecoins another settlement asset inside VisaNet

Visa’s strategy starts from an unusually strong position: it does not need stablecoins to replace cards. It needs stablecoins to make VisaNet more useful to issuers, acquirers, fintechs and cross-border payment providers. The cleanest expression of that strategy is settlement. U.S. partners began settling Visa obligations in USDC in late 2025, and Visa has since expanded the program across more chains and institutional use cases. The annualized stablecoin settlement run rate climbed from $3.5 billion at the end of November 2025 to $7 billion in April 2026 and more than $20 billion by September. That is more than a fivefold increase in roughly nine months.

Yet the scale needs context. Visa reported $17 trillion of total payments and cash volume in fiscal 2025. A $20 billion annualized stablecoin settlement run rate is only about 0.12% of that figure. The comparison is not apples-to-apples — settlement obligations are not the same metric as cardholder payment volume — but it shows why stablecoins are still strategic optionality rather than a core earnings driver. Visa can experiment aggressively without needing stablecoin volumes to replace the economics of the card network today.

The network’s incentive is to make stablecoins disappear into the plumbing. A consumer can hold stablecoins, a fintech can fund a card program with them, and an issuer can settle onchain while the merchant still receives local fiat through familiar Visa acceptance infrastructure. That preserves Visa’s role in authorization, credentialing, fraud controls, dispute management and acceptance even when the asset moving behind the scenes changes.

Visa is nevertheless moving beyond pure settlement. In July it introduced the Visa Stablecoin Platform, bundling wallets, on/off-ramps, mint/redeem connectivity and approval controls in a Visa-managed environment. It has also pushed stablecoin-linked cards, Visa Direct funding and payouts, stablecoin advisory services and onchain settlement financing. More than 160 stablecoin-linked card programs were live globally by fiscal Q2 2026, with payment volume nearly tripling year over year; by October, Visa said about 17% of year-to-date stablecoin-linked card volume came from business and commercial programs.

That expansion creates a subtle strategic tension. Visa historically benefits from being the neutral network connecting banks, acquirers and merchants. As it moves into wallet infrastructure and stablecoin operations, it begins competing with some of the fintech infrastructure providers that also feed volume into Visa. The upside is more revenue per client and stronger control of the stablecoin stack. The risk is that Visa becomes less neutral precisely as stablecoin ecosystems become more fragmented.

Figure 2. Visa annualized stablecoin settlement run rate. Sources: Visa, Nov. 2025 / Apr. 2026 / Sep. 2026 disclosures.

Mastercard: own the interoperability layer in a multi-money world

Mastercard’s language is revealing. It repeatedly describes the future as a ‘multi-money’ environment in which fiat currencies, stablecoins, tokenized bank deposits and tokenized assets coexist. That leads to a different strategy from Visa’s settlement-first approach: Mastercard wants to be the router that makes all those forms of value interoperable.

The clearest evidence is its acquisition of BVNK. Mastercard agreed in March 2026 to pay up to $1.8 billion, including $300 million of contingent consideration, and completed the acquisition in August. Relative to Mastercard’s $32.8 billion of 2025 net revenue, the maximum purchase price is roughly 5.5%. That is not a forecast of financial impact, but it is a meaningful capital commitment for infrastructure whose value lies largely outside the traditional card transaction.

BVNK gives Mastercard stablecoin-native capabilities that are difficult to build quickly: fiat-to-stablecoin conversion, treasury flows, onchain payouts, wallet connectivity and regulatory coverage across markets. Those capabilities sit beside Mastercard Move, the Multi-Token Network, Crypto Credential and the core card network. In June 2026, Mastercard also announced stablecoin settlement options spanning USDC, PYUSD, USDG, USDP, RLUSD and SoFiUSD across networks including Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Base, Arbitrum, Canton, Tempo and XRPL.

That multi-coin, multi-chain design is the point. Mastercard is not betting that a single stablecoin or blockchain wins. It is betting that fragmentation itself creates a valuable orchestration problem. If a corporate treasurer holds tokenized deposits, a supplier wants USDC, a consumer spends through a card and an acquirer settles in fiat, Mastercard wants to sit in the middle and make those instruments composable.

The revenue logic follows. The card network can still earn from conventional payment volumes, but stablecoin infrastructure can also feed cross-border money movement, B2B payments, payouts and higher-margin value-added services. Mastercard’s Q2 2026 results show why that matters: value-added services and solutions revenue grew 20% year over year, faster than payment-network revenue. Stablecoins can therefore fit naturally into a broader effort to make Mastercard less dependent on card swipes alone.

Stripe: turn stablecoins into merchant financial infrastructure

Stripe’s bet is the most vertically integrated of the three. It is not primarily trying to protect a legacy network or connect existing bank rails. It is trying to give businesses a programmable stack in which stablecoins can be accepted, issued, held, converted, paid out, spent and embedded inside third-party products without the end user needing to understand the blockchain underneath.

The foundation is Bridge, which Stripe acquired in 2025 after a transaction reported at about $1.1 billion. Bridge’s volume more than quadrupled during 2025, according to Stripe’s annual letter. Stripe then added wallet infrastructure through Privy, launched Open Issuance so businesses can create their own stablecoins, built digital asset accounts, expanded Treasury to stablecoin balances and rewards, enabled stablecoin-backed cards, and developed Tempo for high-throughput payment settlement. On September 30, 2026, OUSD became available by default across multiple Stripe products, including Treasury, Issuing, Global Payouts, Crypto Onramp and Payments.

This is a different monetization model. Stripe can potentially earn at several points in the same customer relationship: payment acceptance, conversion and orchestration, treasury services, cards, payouts, embedded wallets, compliance tooling and software fees. Open Issuance adds another layer by allowing platforms to participate in the economics of reserves rather than simply building on a third-party stablecoin. In other words, Stripe is not only moving stablecoins; it is productizing the balance sheet and software around them.

The size of Stripe’s existing merchant base makes that strategy important. Businesses on Stripe generated $1.9 trillion in total volume in 2025, up 34%, and the company says it supports more than five million businesses directly or through platforms. Stablecoin payment volume across the broader market doubled to roughly $400 billion in 2025, with about 60% estimated to be B2B. Stripe does not disclose how much of that volume ran through its own systems, but Bridge’s rapid growth shows that stablecoin services are becoming a meaningful product category inside Stripe rather than an experimental checkout option.

The trade-off is execution risk. Stripe is owning more components — wallet infrastructure, issuance, treasury, cards and blockchain settlement — so failures or regulatory constraints can propagate across more of its stack. It can also cannibalize some card-processing economics if customers migrate from card acceptance to cheaper stablecoin flows. Stripe’s bet is that owning the replacement rail is better than defending the old one.

Figure 3. Strategic focus by layer. The scoring is an analytical framework, not disclosed company market share.

What each company is actually betting on

Where the strategies collide

These are not three isolated ecosystems. Visa and Stripe are already partners: Bridge can issue stablecoin-linked Visa cards, letting Stripe own the stablecoin wallet and orchestration while Visa owns global merchant acceptance. Mastercard’s BVNK purchase is, in part, a move into the same orchestration territory that Bridge occupies. Visa’s Stablecoin Platform pushes Visa into capabilities that look increasingly like fintech infrastructure. The companies can therefore be partners on one transaction and competitors for the surrounding economics.

The biggest strategic battleground may be the merchant balance, not the checkout button. If a business starts keeping working capital in stablecoins, the provider controlling that balance can sell treasury, payouts, FX, cards, credit and software around it. Stripe is explicitly building toward that model. Mastercard’s BVNK acquisition gives it a route into the same treasury and cross-border workflows. Visa’s response is to make stablecoin settlement and working-capital financing native to its network so that fintechs do not need to leave the Visa ecosystem as they scale.

This is why the eventual stablecoin winner may not be the company processing the largest number of blockchain transactions. The higher-value position could be the one that controls the relationship, identity layer, compliance, liquidity and adjacent financial services while allowing the blockchain to become an interchangeable backend.

Four stablecoin futures — and who benefits

Regulation makes the race easier to enter — but harder to fake

The U.S. regulatory backdrop changed materially with the GENIUS Act, signed in July 2025. It created a federal framework for payment stablecoins, including one-to-one reserve requirements and disclosure obligations, while Treasury and the banking regulators have spent 2026 writing implementing rules. Treasury currently expects the core regime to become effective on January 18, 2027 unless final rules trigger an earlier statutory date.

Regulatory clarity helps all three companies because banks and large merchants can engage with stablecoins without treating every project as a bespoke legal experiment. But the burden also shifts toward compliance infrastructure: issuer licensing, sanctions controls, reserve management, redemption, wallet screening and cross-border eligibility. That tends to favor companies able to turn compliance into a reusable platform — one reason Visa, Mastercard and Stripe are all moving above the raw blockchain rail into managed enterprise infrastructure.

The regulation also reduces one potential source of differentiation. If regulated stablecoins increasingly converge on similar reserve, disclosure and redemption standards, the coin itself can become more commoditized. Value then migrates to distribution, liquidity, software, risk controls and the ability to connect the stablecoin to real economic activity. That is precisely where the three companies are concentrating their strategies.

What matters financially

For Visa, stablecoins are currently more important as a strategic defense and growth option than as a standalone revenue pool. The >$20 billion annualized settlement run rate is growing extremely quickly, but it remains small next to Visa’s core scale. The important investor question is whether stablecoins generate incremental cross-border, commercial, Visa Direct and value-added-services revenue while preserving network economics.

For Mastercard, the clearest financial signal is capital allocation. Paying up to $1.8 billion for BVNK means management is willing to buy stablecoin-native infrastructure rather than wait for the market to mature. The payoff will depend on whether BVNK’s rails can be distributed across Mastercard’s bank, enterprise and money-movement relationships rather than remaining a specialized crypto product.

For Stripe, stablecoins can expand revenue per merchant more directly. A single customer can use Stripe to accept money, hold it, issue a stablecoin, pay suppliers, run wallets, distribute cards and move balances cross-border. That gives Stripe the broadest potential value capture, but also the largest exposure to a world in which stablecoin financial services face margin compression or become heavily regulated.

The practical takeaway: stablecoins are becoming invisible infrastructure

The most important thing for merchants and end users is that successful stablecoin adoption may become increasingly hard to see. A contractor paid through Deel can receive a dollar-denominated balance without thinking about Bridge, Privy or Tempo. A Visa cardholder can spend from a stablecoin balance while the merchant receives fiat. A Mastercard client can choose stablecoin settlement without changing how the consumer checks out.

That invisibility is strategically important. It suggests the payments industry is not necessarily heading toward a world where consumers choose between ‘Visa’ and ‘USDC’ at checkout. Instead, stablecoins may become a lower-level settlement and liquidity technology embedded inside the products people already use. If that happens, the winners will be the companies that make the new rail feel boring — while still owning the valuable services wrapped around it.

Conclusion: three bets, one direction

Visa, Mastercard and Stripe all believe stablecoins will matter, but they disagree about where the durable economic moat will sit. Visa is betting that its network remains the universal acceptance layer even as settlement assets change. Mastercard is betting that a fragmented world of fiat, stablecoins and tokenized money needs an interoperability layer. Stripe is betting that businesses increasingly want stablecoins embedded directly into accounts, wallets, treasury, cards and software — and that one provider can own much of that stack.

The most likely outcome is not a single winner. Stablecoins can simultaneously modernize Visa settlement, increase demand for Mastercard orchestration and create new Stripe merchant products. The competitive question is what happens if stablecoins move from being a backend efficiency tool to becoming the place where businesses actually keep and manage money. That shift would pull the highest-value battle away from the payment transaction itself and toward the financial operating system around it.

Methodology and sources

Research current through 6 October 2026. Quantitative comparisons use company-reported figures unless otherwise noted. The Visa 0.12% scale comparison divides the $20B annualized stablecoin settlement run rate by Visa’s FY2025 $17T payments-and-cash volume; the metrics represent different stages of the payment flow and are used only to illustrate relative scale. Mastercard’s 5.5% calculation divides the maximum $1.8B BVNK purchase price by 2025 net revenue of $32.8B; it is not an earnings-impact estimate.

1. Visa: stablecoin settlement surpassed $20B annualized run rate (Sep. 8, 2026)

2. Visa: business stablecoin-linked card data (Oct. 1, 2026)

3. Visa: adds five blockchains; $7B settlement run rate (Apr. 29, 2026)

4. Visa: launches Visa Stablecoin Platform (Jul. 16, 2026)

5. Visa FY2025 Form 10-K

6. Mastercard: BVNK acquisition agreement, up to $1.8B (Mar. 17, 2026)

7. Mastercard: completes BVNK acquisition (Aug. 3, 2026)

8. Mastercard: stablecoin settlement expansion (Jun. 3, 2026)

9. Mastercard: end-to-end stablecoin capabilities (Apr. 28, 2025)

10. Mastercard FY2025 Form 10-K

11. Stripe 2025 annual update: $1.9T volume; Bridge volume >4x

12. Stripe Sessions 2026: digital asset accounts, Treasury, stablecoins

13. Stripe / Bridge Open Issuance

14. Stripe: OUSD available by default across Stripe products (Sep. 30, 2026)

15. Stripe: Ramp stablecoin payments and accounts (Jul. 21, 2026)

16. Stripe: Deel stablecoin wallet stack (Jun. 3, 2026)

17. White House: GENIUS Act signed into law (Jul. 18, 2025)

18. U.S. Treasury: GENIUS Act proposed implementation rule (Aug. 17, 2026)

Johan Shamshad

Financial Markets Analyst and Journalist at Dave Finances |  More PostsBio ⮌

Johan Shamshad is a financial markets writer at Dave Finances covering cryptocurrencies, trading platforms, brokers, fintech, financial regulation, and developments across global markets. He previously worked at Gulf News, adding newsroom experience to his coverage of fast-moving financial and digital-asset markets.

His work focuses on identifying market-moving events, company developments, regulatory changes, product launches, and shifts in trading and financial infrastructure.

Johan contributes news and analysis designed to help readers understand not only what happened, but why a development matters and how it may affect the wider financial landscape.

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