Stablecoins have for much of their history existed in the margins of global finance. Considered useful, intriguing but not quite essential, they were the lubricant for crypto markets, not the engine for global payments.
That view may be changing.
This week’s headlines suggest an ongoing shift: from North Dakota’s plan to issue a state-backed digital token, to Fiserv’s new digital asset layer for banks, to merchant payment startups raising tens of millions to take on Stripe, and to legacy giants like Citi, Mastercard and Coinbase circling BVNK’s cross-border rails.
The emerging goal of stablecoins appears to be to make “crypto” disappear as a standalone concept.
Just as few people today think about TCP/IP when they send an email, few will think about stablecoins when they make an instant international payment. The technology will recede into the background, embedded in the pipes of everyday finance.
The great infrastructure grab of 2025 isn’t about which specific token wins market share. It’s about who defines the transaction layer beneath them.
Advertisement: Scroll to Continue
The Legacy Titans Circle the Rails
On Friday (Oct. 10), news broke that Coinbase and Mastercard are in advanced negotiations to acquire BVNK, a FinTech providing enterprise-grade stablecoin payments infrastructure. The potential price tag of between $1.5 billion and $2.5 billion would eclipse any prior deal in the stablecoin space, surpassing Stripe’s $1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge.
Acquiring BVNK gives the buyer not just software but connectivity to banks, payment networks, and enterprise clients already using BVNK’s rails. BVNK claims to process over $20 billion annually and supports clients including Worldpay, Flywire, and dLocal. Reportedly, Coinbase is believed to currently lead the process, although Mastercard — keen to deepen its tokenized payments footprint — is still very much in the running.
Notably, BVNK recently raised capital from Citi’s venture arm, Citi Ventures. Though the precise sum was not disclosed, Citi’s entry underscores how traditional banks are no longer passive observers but active participants in building the rails of digital money.
The prize here is not the coins themselves but the rails they run on. Whoever controls those rails will control the flow of digital liquidity between banks, FinTechs and merchants. In payments, ownership of infrastructure has always meant leverage. In the emerging world of tokenized finance, that leverage is being redrawn.
In other news, on Friday, a group of leading international banks that includes Banco Santander, Bank of America, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Citi, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, MUFG Bank Ltd, TD Bank Group and UBS announced they are jointly exploring the issuance of a 1:1 reserve-backed form of digital money that provides a stable payment asset available on public blockchains, focused on G7 currencies.
Read more: Treasury Guidance Charts Compliance Course for CFOs in Crypto
Issuance and Custody Shape the Market
The stablecoin battleground is no longer confined to private Silicon Valley FinTechs and Wall Street banks. A U.S. state is entering the ring. A second U.S. state. The Bank of North Dakota, the only state-owned bank in the country, on Wednesday (Oct. 8) announced a partnership with Fiserv to issue a sovereign stablecoin called Roughrider Coin, scheduled for 2026.
The goal: service interbank transfers, merchant payments, and broader tokenized flows within the state. Roughrider will be fully backed by U.S. dollars and will be interoperable with the FIUSD system built by Fiserv — a modular infrastructure Fiserv launched alongside its own stablecoin platform.
The Roughrider initiative follows Wyoming’s Frontier Stable Token, another state-level experiment in programmable money.
In other news, Anchorage Digital Bank has selected U.S. Bank to custody the reserves backing its payment stablecoins.
Custody of reserves is no trivial matter. By law, stablecoin issuers must hold backing assets securely and transparently. Choosing a regulated custodian helps signal to regulators and institutional participants that the project is layering compliance and trust into its architecture. It is also a subtle bet on the model that tokenized “dollars” will increasingly flow through hybrid custodial models — crypto rails underpinned by traditional financial safeguards.
Read also: 3 Things Businesses Should Know About Issuing a Branded Stablecoin
The Competitive Frontier
Meanwhile, smaller but indicative initiatives are pushing stablecoin utility deeper into payments and settlement. Coinflow, a payments startup, recently raised $25 million to promote stablecoin-powered settlement mechanisms.
Underpinning all this is regulatory maturation. The GENIUS Act, stablecoin reserve rules, and national charters for digital-asset banks are turning stablecoins from Wild West innovation into regulated infrastructure.
Yet challenges remain. Interoperability between stablecoin systems is not solved; liquidity fragmentation could hamper utility. Regulatory consistency across jurisdictions is far from assured. And questions around governance, decentralization, reserve transparency and central-bank pushback remain live.
