Visa and Mastercard are not being disrupted by stablecoins. They are absorbing them
Spending on stablecoin-linked cards is surging and both networks now own pieces of the stack. What that means for fees, fintechs and crypto.
FINTECHSTABLECOINS & CBDCANALYSIS
Hana Kimura
10/28/20263 min read
For years the standard crypto pitch held that stablecoins would route around card networks and their fees. In 2026 the networks have answered by making themselves part of the route. Visa said on October 27 that spending on its stablecoin-linked cards roughly quadrupled year over year in its fiscal fourth quarter, Mastercard closed its acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure firm BVNK in August, and both are founding members of the Open USD consortium. The disruption story has turned into an absorption story, and the economics behind it are worth unpacking.
The numbers behind the pivot
Visa's disclosure is the clearest signal. Alongside the fourfold rise in stablecoin-linked card spending, the company says it runs well over 100 stablecoin card issuing programs in more than 40 countries, and it has been rolling out cards with Stripe's Bridge across Latin America, including Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Chile. In July it launched the Visa Stablecoin Platform, which lets banks and crypto firms mint, burn and hold stablecoins through Visa's infrastructure.
Independent data agrees on direction. Allium's third-quarter report counted about $482 billion in stablecoin payments through September, up 45% year over year, and found that card-based stablecoin spending grew roughly tenfold, with purchases under $50 accounting for 84% of the increase. Small-ticket retail spending is exactly the territory where card networks are strongest.
Mastercard took the acquisition route. It agreed in March to buy BVNK for up to $1.8 billion and completed the deal on August 3, gaining a platform that lets businesses send and receive payments across major blockchains. Mastercard says it will use BVNK for business-to-business payments, payouts, settlement and treasury, the areas where stablecoin usage has grown fastest.
Why the networks want to be the bridge
A stablecoin card solves a real problem. A user holds dollars on-chain, while the merchant wants local currency through the terminal it already has. The network sits in the middle and converts at the moment of purchase. The merchant sees nothing new, and the network keeps its interchange economics. For a user in Buenos Aires or Lagos, the appeal is holding dollars without a US bank account while still paying anywhere that accepts cards.
On the back end, settling in stablecoins lets issuers and acquirers move funds outside banking hours and across borders without long correspondent chains. That is a cost and liquidity gain for the networks' clients rather than a threat to the networks themselves. Visa's and Mastercard's role as design partners of Tempo, the payments blockchain incubated by Stripe and Paradigm, points the same way: they would rather shape the new rails than compete against them.
Where the margins move
Absorption does not mean nothing changes. Merchant-facing interchange survives on cards, but cross-border fees and foreign-exchange spreads come under pressure when a stablecoin can move between countries for cents. The networks are betting that new revenue from settlement services, token issuance tooling and risk and compliance products will offset that erosion.
Open USD complicates the picture. The token, governed by a company called Open Standard and led on an interim basis by Bridge chief executive Zach Abrams, plans to return most reserve income to its more than 140 partners and to charge nothing for minting or redemption. If it launches by year-end as planned, distributors from card networks to fintechs would earn a share of the float, an economic model that has so far mostly benefited Circle and Tether. Circle's share price fell 18% the day after the July announcement, a sign of how seriously investors took the threat.
What to watch
Three things will show whether the absorption strategy works. First, whether stablecoin card growth holds up beyond crypto-native users, especially in emerging markets where Visa and Bridge are expanding. Second, whether merchants start accepting stablecoins directly, which would bypass the conversion step that keeps networks central. Third, Open USD's launch details, from its reserve structure to the way it splits income among distributors.
For fintechs, the practical takeaway is that in 2026 the path to stablecoin payments more often runs through card networks than around them. For crypto purists, it is an uncomfortable lesson: the incumbents did not need to win the technology argument. They only needed to own the point where on-chain dollars meet the checkout counter.