Visa and Mastercard Are Building the Stablecoin That Competes With Their Own Customers

A Visa Mastercard stablecoin platform, backed with Stripe, is in development with Coinbase reported to be considering participation, aimed at a market where Circle holds roughly a quarter of $291 billion.

On this page

• Why Visa and Mastercard build the stablecoin they already support
• The competing groups
• What Circle can still defend
• The precedent that should worry the consortia
• The regulatory clock
• What to watch
• Why Circle's position is stronger than it looks

Visa, Mastercard and Stripe are among the backers of a stablecoin platform in development, with Coinbase reported to be considering participation.

Circle, whose USDC currently holds roughly a quarter of a $291 billion stablecoin market, is the incumbent this would compete against. It is also a company whose product Visa already supports in its own stablecoin payout pilot.

That contradiction is not an accident. It is the strategy.

Why Visa and Mastercard build the stablecoin they already support

A payments network makes money on the movement, not the instrument. Visa serves over four billion account holders and more than 130 million merchants, and its economics depend on being the rail.

Stablecoins are a rail. Every dollar that settles in USDC rather than through card networks is a dollar of settlement volume that accrues to Circle instead of to Visa. Supporting USDC in Visa Direct keeps Visa in the flow. Building an alternative means Visa also owns the instrument.

Doing both simultaneously is what an incumbent does when it cannot predict which layer captures the value. It is expensive, and it is cheaper than being wrong.

The competing groups

Visa and Mastercard appear in two of these. That is not indecision; it is optionality purchased in parallel.

Open USD is the strongest hand on paper. Card networks provide acceptance, Stripe provides merchant integration, and BlackRock provides the tokenised Treasury products that any dollar token needs for backing. That covers distribution, integration and reserves — the three things a stablecoin actually requires.

What Circle can still defend

Circle's position rests on integration, not brand.

USDC is embedded across DeFi protocols, listed on essentially every venue, supported by every custodian, and now included in the FHFA's mortgage reserve guidance alongside bitcoin. Visa's own payout pilot supports it. That footprint took years and does not transfer to a new entrant because a consortium announces one.

The stablecoin market sits near $291 billion. Tether and Circle hold the large majority. A new token starts at zero regardless of who is behind it, and the history of payments consortia suggests starting at zero is where many of them stay.

The precedent that should worry the consortia

Bank and payments consortia have a poor delivery record. Blockchain settlement networks, trade finance platforms and interbank digital cash projects were announced repeatedly between 2016 and 2022, and most were quietly discontinued. The technology usually worked; the governance did not.

What is different now is that the alternative is not inaction. It is watching Tether and Circle keep a $291 billion market that grew without them, while twenty-one banks build a competing token for the first half of 2027.

Competitive pressure has resolved consortium deadlock before where a shared interest in doing nothing had not.

The regulatory clock

GENIUS Act enforcement begins in January 2027, or 120 days after final rules are published, whichever comes earlier. The Act classifies payment stablecoin issuers as financial institutions under the Bank Secrecy Act, requiring risk-based AML programmes, suspicious activity reporting and examination.

For Visa, Mastercard and Stripe that is marginal — all three already run those functions at scale. For a mid-sized independent issuer, industry estimates put compliance costs at 11% to 15.5% of payroll.

The regime does not name a winner. It does make scale considerably more valuable, and every participant in these consortia has it.

What to watch

Whether Coinbase joins. It would bring the largest US retail distribution and a custody business, and it would place Coinbase in competition with Circle, its long-standing USDC partner.

A named entity and launch date. Consortia announcements without either are common.

Whether Visa's payout pilot adds a consortium token. That would be the clearest signal of which horse it is actually backing.

Circle's response. Fee compression, revenue sharing with distributors, or its own bank partnerships are the available moves.

Why Circle's position is stronger than it looks

Incumbency in a settlement instrument is unusually durable, and the reason is that liquidity begets liquidity.

USDC is a quote currency across venues, a collateral type across DeFi protocols, and a supported asset in essentially every custody arrangement. Each of those integrations was a separate engineering and compliance decision made by a separate organisation, and none of them will be redone quickly for a new token with no track record.

A consortium can mandate its own members' adoption. It cannot mandate the thousand external integrations that make a stablecoin useful.

The historical parallel is interbank messaging, where incumbents survived multiple well-funded consortium challenges for exactly this reason. Displacing a settlement standard requires either a decade or a regulatory change that forces migration, and the GENIUS Act does neither.

About this report. Participant details for the Stripe-backed platform are from CoinDesk's June 2026 reporting; Coinbase's involvement is described there as under consideration and is not confirmed. Open USD and 21-bank consortium details are from DailyCoin and PYMNTS. Stablecoin market size is from CoinGabbar's 9 September 2026 summary; other trackers using different criteria have reported $314.68 billion as of June 2026. GENIUS Act dates and compliance cost estimates are from Value Add VC.

Not investment advice. Consortium timelines and participation frequently change.

Related reading

• Visa Stablecoin Payouts Settle in Under 30 Minutes
• RWA Tokenization: BUIDL Past $2.5bn, Market Above $20bn
• Crypto VC Funding: 93% of $292M Went to Payments
• Stablecoin Market Cap $291bn With $76bn Daily Volume

Sources

• Payment giants Stripe, Visa, Mastercard said to be among backers of soon-to-debut stablecoin platform — CoinDesk
• Why Visa And Mastercard Are Building The Stablecoin That Could Sink Circle — Forbes
• Visa, Mastercard join another stablecoin group — Payments Dive
• 21 Banks Are Not Just Building a Stablecoin — DailyCoin