Card networks are moving from carrying stablecoins to owning one
Victoria Shinder1 min readThree items from the last two days describe the same shift from different sides: stablecoins are being absorbed into the existing payments industry rather than replacing it.
The owners. Open USD went live natively on Solana this week. Its five founding partners, with equal stakes, are Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa, and together they committed more than $1 billion for liquidity. The issuer is Bridge, with reserves at BlackRock, Lead Bank and BNY. A token co-owned by both major card networks, a checkout platform and a payments processor is a payments-industry instrument, not a crypto-native one. Source: https://solana.com/news/open-usd-is-live-on-solana
The rails. Card spending funded by stablecoins reached about $1.17 billion in September, a record in Paymentscan's data, on slightly fewer transactions than in August. Most of it runs on card networks that merchants already accept, with the token only on the funding side. Visa's crypto chief calls it "hyper growth"; the more sober reading is that existing users are spending more per purchase. Source: https://cryptoslate.com/stablecoin-cards-enter-hyper-growth-mode-as-monthly-spending-hits-record-1-17-billion
The rules. In its response to the MiCA review, ESMA asked for explicit rules that would stop regulated crypto firms from offering services linked to stablecoins that do not comply with MiCA, alongside stronger powers against unauthorised firms from outside the EU. If adopted, that would make compliance status, not market share, the deciding factor for which stablecoins a licensed European platform can touch. Source: https://www.esma.europa.eu/press-news/esma-news/esma-calls-changes-make-mica-clearer-safer-and-ready-emerging-services
The pattern. Each step pulls stablecoins closer to the institutions they were once expected to bypass: owned by card networks, spent through card networks, and filtered by regulators at the point where licensed firms touch them. For users that means more acceptance and more oversight at once. For issuers outside that perimeter, the question is no longer whether payments will use stablecoins but whose.