In the early days of the digital payments revolution, for example, industry titans like Mastercard, Visa and PayPal built their empires not just by issuing cards or enabling online transactions, but by owning the infrastructure (the gateways, switches and clearing systems) that made those transactions possible.
Today, as the financial world pivots toward blockchain-native infrastructure and eyes stablecoin payments with increasing interest, the same pattern is emerging. Only this time, the infrastructure is programmable, global, transparent and instant.
Three deals crystallized that transformation across FinTech and cryptocurrency. They are Mastercard’s rumored $2 billion acquisition of zerohash’s crypto capabilities last month, Stripe’s $1 billion purchase of Bridge finalized in February, and the Friday (Oct. 31) report that Coinbase is inching closer to acquiring stablecoin infrastructure startup BVNK at a price of $2 billion.
Not to be outdone, Visa has been building out its own global stablecoin settlement service, enabling banking partners to settle cross-border stablecoin payments directly on public blockchains.
Each move reflects a strategic recalibration designed not to replace fiat payments outright, but to expand the underlying tech stack necessary for orchestrating stablecoin payments at scale, while achieving cross-chain settlement and multi-chain compatibility.
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If it sounds like FinTech firms are racing to build their own stablecoin infrastructure and orchestration layers, it’s because they just might be.
See also: Why Stablecoins Are Stuck at the Acceptance Hurdle
How Stablecoins Are Rewriting the Original Payments Playbook
Stablecoins today represent over $250 billion in circulating value, but that’s still a drop in the ocean of global money movement. What has held them back hasn’t been utility, as they already power billions of dollars in daily volume, but orchestration. Most businesses don’t want to hold crypto wallets, deal with gas fees or expose themselves to digital asset regulation. They want the speed and savings of stablecoins with the familiarity of embedded payments systems.
To understand what’s happening today, it helps to revisit the playbook of the past. In traditional digital payments, the most successful players invested in enabling infrastructure. Payment gateways built connective tissue between merchants, banks and card networks. Acquirers handled settlement flows and risk models. Switches moved messages across networks. Clearing systems reconciled transactions across international borders. It was an era defined by proprietary messaging formats, regulatory negotiation and decades-long partnerships.
These systems evolved, but they did so within the constraints of legacy banking rails. Settlement still took days. Cross-border fees remained high. Onboarding into these networks was laden with compliance friction. FinTech firms like Stripe and Square succeeded by abstracting some of that complexity, but ultimately, they still plugged into the same old pipes.
Blockchain, and stablecoins more specifically, have introduced a new plumbing layer where asset transfer and settlement happen simultaneously, without borders and programmatically. But the ability to orchestrate stablecoin payments at scale, all while routing, converting, reconciling and complying, still requires enterprise-grade infrastructure.
Read also: Stablecoins Aren’t Created Equal: Mapping the Issuer Marketplace for CFOs
Beyond the First Mile of Blockchain Payments
A decade ago, if you wanted to move money across borders, you needed correspondent banks, Swift messages and 72 hours. Today, a stablecoin like USDC can settle $10 million in 10 seconds, with programmable escrow and instant finality. However, without orchestration, that’s just a demo.
Just as cloud computing didn’t eliminate data centers but made them programmable, blockchains are making payment systems more flexible. The infrastructure may be decentralized, but the orchestration will likely still be run by the same institutions that have always excelled at it, like those with scale, trust and regulatory fluency.
During Visa’s latest earnings report Tuesday (Oct. 28), for example, the company revealed it is expanding its stablecoin settlement platform to support four stablecoins across four distinct blockchains.
“We are adding support for four stablecoins, running on four unique blockchains, representing two currencies … that we can accept and convert to over 25 traditional fiat currencies,” Visa CEO Ryan McInerney said.
Visa’s ambition, like its peer FinTechs, isn’t to replace card networks with blockchains, but to make its own network blockchain-capable, allowing stablecoins to flow through familiar channels while retaining compliance and anti-money laundering (AML) guardrails.
At the same time, stablecoin issuers like Circle Internet Group, Kraken, Bridge (Stripe), Ripple and more are racing for federal trust or bank charters under the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
The big questions that remain revolve around jurisdictions and regulation. Will stablecoins become regulated like bank deposits? Will governments allow corporates to hold them on balance sheets? How will risk-weighting work for capital adequacy? How will central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) interact with private stablecoins?
In the meantime, the orchestration platforms are being built. Just as importantly, these acquisitions show that enterprise demand is real, not hypothetical. When payment giants and crypto firms are buying the same kinds of infrastructure, it’s no longer a future trend. It’s a present shift.
