Industry Trends: How the World's Leading Payment Companies Are Building with Crypto and Stablecoins
- Pat Duffy
- 3 hours ago
- 7 min read
The world's largest payment companies are no longer experimenting with stablecoins. They're building.
Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Shift4, Worldpay, Checkout.com, Fiserv, PayPal, Nuvei, and Paysafe are all moving past pilots and announcements. They're integrating stablecoins into core infrastructure, acquiring crypto companies, and offering settlement capabilities that didn't exist 18 months ago. The shift from "if" to "when" has already happened.
The Turning Point: 2025
For years, stablecoins lived in a regulatory gray zone. Banks were cautious. Exchanges offered them. But mainstream payment infrastructure treated them as an experiment.
That changed in 2025.
The U.S. passed the GENIUS Act, establishing a comprehensive regulatory framework for stablecoin issuance. The EU operationalizedfinalized MiCA, laying out clear requirements for crypto-asset issuers. Singapore, Hong Kong, and the UAE all rolled out institutional frameworks to pave the way for stablecoins. Suddenly, banks and payment networks no longer need permission to move forward; they had clarity to do so.
The results are immediately visible in two numbers:
Stablecoin supply crossed $300 billion in 2025, doubling in just 18 months.
Stablecoin transaction volumes hit $27 trillion annually, putting them on par with major payment networks for the first time.
But volume alone doesn't tell the story. The shift from holding for value to spending changed everything. When stablecoins became a medium of exchange instead of just a store of value, they became economically relevant to everyone. And this is only the beginning, as stablecoins even at this scale represent a fraction of a percent of global money movement.
We are witnessing rapid acceleration of the flywheel, as payments industry adoption inspires stablecoin usage, which in turn inspires more payments industry adoption and so on down the line.
What the Payments Giants Are Actually Building
Visa: $3.5B in Annualized Stablecoin Settlement Volume
Visa didn't wait for the market. They are moving faster than ever and expanding their capabilities. It is now a common topic on each of their earnings calls and clearly listed in their strategy documents. They’re working with banks like Cross River and Lead Bank and acquirers like Shift4, Worldpay and Checkout.
The scale is staggering. As of November 30, Visa's monthly stablecoin settlement volume passed a $3.5 billion annualized run rate. This isn't a pilot anymore. This is operational infrastructure moving real money.
But Visa went further. Visa launched the Visa Tokenized Asset Platform (VTAP), enabling clients to mint, burn and transact in stablecoins, and has expanded stablecoin-linked cards that allow consumers to spend stablecoin balances at Visa-accepting merchants. Visa-issued crypto card spending jumped 525% in 2025.
What's critical here: Visa isn't replacing its network with blockchain. It's embedding stablecoins as an optional settlement layer for institutions that want faster, 24/7 settlement without weekend or holiday delays.
Mastercard: Multi-Stablecoin Network Architect
Mastercard took a different approach. Instead of launching one settlement platform, it became a multi-stablecoin network orchestrator.
Mastercard enables millions of people to spend stablecoin balances at over 150 million Mastercard merchant locations worldwide, thanks to partnerships with MetaMask, Crypto.com, OKX and Kraken. Merchants, gig workers and creators can receive their payouts in the stablecoin of their choice, regardless of the currency used at checkout.
The company deepened this commitment through major partnerships. Mastercard partnered with Fiserv to integrate its FIUSD token across a range of Mastercard products and services, enabling seamless on/off-ramping and allowing merchants to settle in FIUSD across Mastercard's global payments network.
Most aggressive of all: Mastercard was in late-stage talks to acquire Zerohash, a crypto and stablecoin infrastructure startup for what could have resulted in a multibillion dollar merger. Though the deal ultimately fell through, this demonstrates Mastercard's commitment to making big bets on stablecoins moving forward.
What Mastercard realized early: stablecoins aren't a threat to card networks. They're a new layer that works alongside them. By supporting multiple stablecoins, Mastercard positioned itself as the infrastructure that bridges traditional finance and digital assets.
Stripe: The $1.1B Conviction
In October 2024, Stripe announced the acquisition of Bridge for $1.1 billion—its largest acquisition ever. This wasn't incremental. It was a declaration.
In February 2025, Stripe completed its acquisition of Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure platform. Within weeks, Stripe announced Open Issuance, a platform that enables any business to launch and manage their own stablecoin with just a few lines of code.
The impact was immediate. In its first week of offering stablecoin payments, Stripe saw more stablecoin volume than in its entire history of offering bitcoin transactions.
By mid-2025, Stripe launched Stablecoin Financial Accounts, enabling businesses in 101 countries to hold balances in stablecoins, receive funds on both crypto and fiat rails, and send stablecoins globally. Bridge became the backbone of Stripe's Stablecoin Financial Accounts, now offered in 100+ countries and regions.
Stripe's strategy is clear: make stablecoins invisible infrastructure. Merchants never see crypto. Customers choose to pay in stablecoins. The entire payment rail operates on blockchain. By the time settlement happens, friction is gone.
Shift4: The Merchant Enabler
Shift4 took a merchant-first approach. In December 2025, Shift4 launched its stablecoin settlement platform, allowing hundreds of thousands of merchants globally to receive settlement in popular stablecoins such as USDC, USDT, EURC and DAI across networks including Ethereum, Solana, Plasma, Stellar, Polygon, TON and Base.
But Shift4 didn't stop at settlement. The company also built crypto payment acceptance. Shift4 allows merchants to accept payments from all major wallets and exchanges in cryptocurrency and stablecoins, eliminating chargebacks and fraud.
What makes Shift4's approach powerful: it's simple. Merchants toggle stablecoin acceptance and settlement in their dashboard. No new vendor. No additional integration. No blockchain knowledge required. The technical complexity is completely abstracted away.
Checkout.com, Worldpay and Nuvei: The Early Movers
Before Stripe's Bridge acquisition made headlines, Checkout, Worldpay and Nuvei were some of the earliest large PSPs to support stablecoin settlement. They saw the trend early and moved. Today, they're processing real settlement volume through stablecoins—not pilots, but operational flows.
PayPal and Fiserv: The Issuers
PayPal and Fiserv have gone a step further and issued their own stablecoins (PYUSD and FIUSD, respectively) in partnership with Paxos.
This is the most aggressive move: create your own stablecoin, control the supply, earn the spread. PayPal's PYUSD launched in 2023 and has become one of the major stablecoins in circulation. Fiserv's FIUSD, announced in partnership with Mastercard, represents an even deeper integration—banking infrastructure companies are now issuing digital currency.
What This Means for PSPs Still Deciding
The payment industry's largest players aren't debating whether to build stablecoin capabilities. They're debating how fast they can scale them.
Stablecoin supply topped $300 billion in 2025, while usage shifted from holding to spending, making the digital assets economically relevant beyond cryptocurrency. Clear rules drove major banks, card networks and FinTechs to launch and integrate stablecoin payment and settlement products.
The competitive advantage has moved from "do you offer stablecoins?" to "how well do you integrate them?" Settlement speed matters. Customer experience matters. Regulatory compliance matters. Vendor fragmentation—the industry's biggest problem—is being solved by companies willing to invest billions.
Stablecoin payment volumes are projected to hit $140-195B in 2026, with B2B and B2C flows driving adoption. Cross-border payments, treasury management, customer payouts, and merchant settlement are the primary use cases. These are exactly the flows that PSPs need to own.
The Stablecoin Payments Divergence
Here's what's important: the leaders aren't all following the same playbook.
Visa and Mastercard are building settlement rails—they're not replacing their networks, they're adding a new option alongside existing ones.
Stripe is making stablecoins invisible through the entire checkout experience, from acceptance to settlement.
Shift4 is focusing on merchant simplicity—give them one dashboard, abstracting out the complexity.
Fiserv and PayPal are issuing their own stablecoins to control the stack.
Worldpay and Nuvei are enabling choice—give your customers multiple stablecoins and chains to choose from.
All of them are taking positive steps towards adopting stablecoins. But their strategies diverge based on customer segments. The point: there's no single "correct" way to build. There are multiple routes to scale, and all of them assume stablecoins are inevitable infrastructure.
What 2026 Looks Like
The momentum is clear.
Mastercard outlined six payment trends for 2026, with stablecoins identified as a key growth area, stating that regulatory clarity around stablecoins in the US and Europe is enabling the financial sector to explore more practical use cases.
Every major payment company now has a stablecoin strategy. Many are past the strategy phase and into operational deployment. The vendors that were fragmented across custody, compliance, liquidity, and settlement in 2023 are consolidating. Integration is becoming easier. Regulatory clarity is broadening access.
For PSPs still evaluating stablecoin infrastructure, the question is no longer "should we?" It's "how fast can we move?"
The companies that answered that question in 2024 and 2025—Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Shift4, and a few other outliers—are now operating at scale. They're processing billions in settlement volume, integrating stablecoins into core infrastructure, and building products that customers actually use.
The companies that wait another year will be fighting for market share against infrastructure that's already operational.
The Bottom Line
Stablecoins aren't disrupting payment companies. They're improving them with:
Faster settlement ✅
Lower costs ✅
Global infrastructure ✅
24/7 operation ✅
Programmability ✅
These aren't theoretical benefits—they're operational reality for the world's largest payment networks right now.
The question isn't whether stablecoins will become core to payments infrastructure. The question is which payment companies will lead, and which will spend the next three years catching up to what Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe are already doing.
The revolutionary nature of stablecoins and crypto is now undeniable. The companies built to deliver it are already live with paying customers. Those who are still taking a wait-and-see approach will be left behind.
Cyclops is built for this moment.
PSPs and payment processors who want to offer stablecoin settlement, crypto acceptance, and global payouts without building or managing blockchain infrastructure have a single platform option: proven infrastructure purpose-built for payment companies. No vendor patchwork. No million-dollar engineering teams. No waiting for regulatory clarity. One integration. Operated by people who've built payments infrastructure for 8+ years.
The platform of the future is here. The only question is whether you'll build it yourself—or use infrastructure already proven at scale.