Mastercard has placed a nearly $2 billion bet on its stablecoin payments future, while the Bank of England says stablecoin issuers unhappy with fiat reserve requirements should consider themselves fortunate it’s not worse. On Tuesday Mastercard announced that it had reached a definitive agreement to acquire BVNK, a stablecoin infrastructure firm, in a deal valued at up to $1.8 billion, including $300 million in contingent payments. The closing is expected later this year and will broaden Mastercard’s end-to-end support of digital assets and value movement across currencies, rails, and regions.
Mastercard said the key to supporting stablecoin use cases—cross-border remittances, payouts, P2P and B2B payments, and more—is connecting stablecoin rails to existing fiat rails. The union of the two firms will deliver trusted interoperability at scale that can seamlessly connect across systems.
Mastercard’s chief product officer, Jorn Lambert, said most financial institutions and fintechs will in time provide digital currency services, be it with stablecoins or tokenized deposits, and adding on-chain rails to our network will support speed and programmability for virtually every type of transaction. BVNK handled $30 billion in stablecoin payments last year, but co-founder and CEO Jesse Hemson-Struthers claimed we have only scratched the surface of what’s possible. This deal brings together complementary capabilities to define and deliver the future of money.
BVNK and Mastercard were discussing some kind of tie-up last year, but these talks were thought to have been mothballed. BVNK’s other suitors included the Coinbase exchange, which reportedly offered $2 billion to acquire the firm last year after Coinbase Ventures took a stake in BVNK in December 2024. Meanwhile, Visa, which has its own stablecoin ambitions, is both a BVNK partner and investor.
Last week Mastercard announced its new Crypto Partner Program, a global initiative that brings together more than 85 crypto-native companies, payments providers, and financial institutions to create a forum for meaningful dialogue and collaboration as this space continues to mature. Mastercard said program participants will engage with Mastercard teams on the design and direction of future products and services. The focus is practical execution: translating technical innovation into scalable, compliant use cases that can operate across markets and integrate seamlessly into everyday commerce.
A name conspicuously absent from the list is Tether, issuer of the market-leading USDT stablecoin. Wells Fargo, PayPal, and other mainstream financial giants are making their forays into the stablecoin sphere, including Wells Fargo (NASDAQ: WFC), which earlier this month filed a trademark application for “WFUSD.” PayPal chose St. Patrick’s Day to announce expanding access to its PYUSD stablecoin via PayPal accounts to 70 markets worldwide.
Customers in these markets can now buy, hold, send, and receive PYUSD directly from their PayPal accounts, a perk previously available only to customers in the U.S. and U.K. PayPal’s GM of crypto, May Zabaneh, said: “Consumers and businesses around the world are looking for faster, more seamless ways to transact globally, and the current system still charges too much, takes too long, and settles on timelines that were designed for a different era.” PayPal launched PYUSD in August 2023 via a partnership with Paxos, but it took two years for the token’s market cap to surpass $1 billion. However, the cap took off like a rocket last September and currently sits at $4.1 billion, seventh-highest among U.S. dollar stablecoins.
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