Payment Networks Hold the Key to Stablecoin Scale

The stablecoin market, in an evolution that belies its own prefix, is entering a period of flux.

While the stablecoin market’s first phase rewarded issuance and liquidity, this week’s headlines suggest the bigger competition is moving somewhere else. Twenty-one major financial institutions are moving forward with plans for a jointly backed stablecoin venture. The Securities and Exchange Commission is preparing transfer-agent rules for a market in which blockchain can underpin securities ownership records, while SoFi has joined forces with Payward, parent company of cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, to link together banking and digital asset markets.

Banks, custodians, payment networks and infrastructure providers are simultaneously building the systems needed to move tokenized money and assets between otherwise fragmented ecosystems.

The common thread is interoperability.

As more banks, FinTechs and financial institutions issue their own forms of digital money, the scarce asset may stop being the stablecoin and become the network capable of making all those stablecoins usable together. That’s where the market starts looking familiar to payment veterans.

Read more: The G20 Is Coming for Stablecoins’ Best Cross-Border Sales Pitch

More Stablecoins Create a Bigger Networking Problem

Visa and Mastercard don’t issue most of the cards carrying their brands. Their strategic position comes from providing the connective infrastructure that allows enormous numbers of issuers, merchants, acquirers and consumers to transact across a common network.

Stablecoins are beginning to search for their equivalent. This week’s announcement from 21 international financial institutions makes that proliferation tangible. The group intends to establish a company supporting a dollar-denominated stablecoin targeted for the first half of 2027, followed potentially by additional G7 currencies. For institutional users, however, more credible tokens do not automatically create a better payment system.

Data from the report, “Waiting for Certainty: Why Most CFOs Are Holding Back on Crypto and Stablecoins,” the March installment of PYMNTS Intelligence’s 2026 Certainty Project, showed that most middle market companies remain cautious about digital assets. Usage is limited, with 13% of firms using stablecoins and 5% employing other cryptocurrencies.

A multinational doesn’t necessarily want 20 varieties of digital dollars sitting across separate wallets, blockchains, banks and liquidity pools. It wants to move value to the right counterparty, in the right currency and jurisdiction, at the right cost — without caring about the infrastructure underneath.

That creates the same problem card networks solved decades ago: How do you make thousands of fragmented endpoints behave like one payment system?

That question shifts attention toward what sits between stablecoin issuers and their users.

Someone needs to determine which assets are accepted. Someone needs to provide liquidity and conversion. Someone needs to route transactions between blockchains. Someone needs to connect wallets, banks and merchants. Someone needs to manage compliance and identity across those transactions.

Read also: Nobody Told the ERP That Blockchain Won

The Stablecoin Prize Is Moving Toward Who Owns the Middle

Stablecoin issuance creates the instrument, but asset interoperability creates the market. If businesses eventually have dozens of credible dollar-denominated tokens to choose from, the token with the best reserve structure may not automatically win. Distribution, acceptance, liquidity and connectivity become increasingly important.

The SEC’s transfer-agent proposal gives that trend another dimension. Tokenized securities make interoperable digital money more useful because transactions require both sides of the trade. A tokenized bond that can move instantly still needs money capable of settling against it. Stablecoins become more valuable when they can interact with securities, deposits, currencies and other assets. And the infrastructure connecting those instruments becomes more valuable as the number of instruments grows.

Cards, for example, became powerful because networks created common acceptance across huge numbers of banks and merchants. Their scale reinforced itself: more cardholders attracted merchants, while more merchants made cards more useful to consumers. Thousands of issuing institutions can coexist because the networks make their cards interoperable at the point of transaction.

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