Mastercard’s BVNK buyout and Visa’s Bridge partnership expand stablecoin settlement for card networks
Oct. 30, 2026 • Deep Dive • Digital Assets
Mastercard and Visa are extending stablecoin technology into the systems that settle card payments between financial institutions, while leaving the consumer checkout experience largely unchanged. Mastercard completed its acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure provider BVNK in August 2026 and has expanded its network’s settlement options to include regulated stablecoins. Visa, meanwhile, is working with Stripe-owned Bridge and Lead Bank on on-chain settlement for card programs.
The shift became more concrete in September, when SoFi Bank moved its credit and debit card issuing portfolio to live settlement using its bank-issued SoFiUSD. That portfolio represents more than $25 billion in annualized card volume, a measure distinct from the value settled in stablecoins. Visa separately reported an annualized stablecoin settlement run rate exceeding $25 billion in October. The networks’ initiatives target the back-end movement and reconciliation of funds, including periods when traditional bank settlement rails are unavailable; they do not require merchants to accept cryptocurrency.
Mastercard and Visa are bringing stablecoins into the back-end systems that settle card payments, taking different approaches to an area of the network that has traditionally depended on bank operating hours. Mastercard completed its acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure provider BVNK in August 2026, while Visa is expanding a settlement partnership with Stripe-owned Bridge. In September, SoFi Bank moved its credit and debit card issuing portfolio to live on-chain settlement using its own stablecoin, SoFiUSD.
These developments concern how financial institutions move money after a card transaction, not how a customer pays at a terminal. Cardholders can still see prices in fiat currency, and merchants do not need to accept cryptocurrency. The potential change is in the settlement leg between issuers, network settlement operations and acquirers, where stablecoins can move and be reconciled outside conventional banking windows.
Mastercard builds settlement capacity through BVNK and its network
Mastercard closed its acquisition of London-based BVNK on August 3, 2026. The transaction was valued at up to $1.8 billion: $1.5 billion in upfront consideration and a further $300 million in contingent earnouts. BVNK provides infrastructure for stablecoin payments, giving Mastercard an acquired platform as it develops services connecting fiat money and digital assets.
The purchase followed Mastercard’s June expansion of its core network clearing capabilities. The company added options for intraday, weekend and holiday settlement using regulated stablecoins, extending availability to 24 hours a day, every day. Its announced blockchain coverage includes Arbitrum, Base, Canton, Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, Tempo and XRPL.
Mastercard’s work is not limited to a future network option. SoFi Bank’s entire credit and debit card issuing portfolio went live on on-chain settlement using bank-issued SoFiUSD in late September. The portfolio represents more than $25 billion in annualized card volume. That figure describes the card portfolio’s transaction volume, not a reported total of payments already settled in SoFiUSD. Mastercard and SoFi announced their partnership in March; the production migration came months later.
SoFiUSD is issued by SoFi Bank, N.A., an OCC-chartered national bank. According to the research reporting on the integration, issuing its own stablecoin allows the bank to retain associated float and reserve yield on its balance sheet rather than remit reserve earnings to an outside issuer. The arrangement illustrates why control of settlement infrastructure may matter to issuers as well as card networks.
In October, Mastercard Chief Executive Michael Miebach said the company was commercializing its BVNK-powered Global Money Platform, designed to let institutions hold, convert and settle fiat and stablecoins. The platform is a broader institutional offering; the SoFi migration is a separate example of stablecoin settlement operating across an issuing portfolio.
Visa takes a partnership route
Visa’s approach centers on network partnerships rather than a purchase of Bridge. Stripe acquired Bridge in late 2024; Visa works with Bridge and Lead Bank to settle card transactions on-chain in stablecoins. In March 2026, Visa and Bridge said they planned to expand Bridge-linked Visa card programs from 18 initial markets to more than 100 countries across Europe, Asia-Pacific, Africa and the Middle East. The wider geographic reach remains a plan, not completed coverage.
Visa Head of Crypto Cuy Sheffield said placing stablecoin infrastructure in the network’s treasury and settlement layer enables continuous money movement and on-chain reconciliation without requiring merchants to accept crypto. That distinction matters: a stablecoin-linked card program can change the movement of funds behind a transaction while retaining familiar card authorization and fiat pricing at the point of sale.
Visa Chief Executive Ryan McInerney reported in October that the company’s annualized stablecoin settlement run rate had exceeded $25 billion, ten times its level a year earlier. He also said Visa supported five stablecoins across ten blockchains and more than 225 stablecoin-linked card programs. The settlement run rate is Visa’s reported measure and should not be conflated with the annualized card volume of SoFi’s Mastercard portfolio.
Why the back-end shift matters
Traditional four-party card settlement uses central-bank wire rails and batch processing windows that stop over weekends and bank holidays. According to the supplied research, those gaps can leave institutions with 48-to-72-hour credit exposure and a need to pre-fund positions. Continuous stablecoin settlement is intended to give issuers, networks and acquirers another way to move and reconcile funds during those periods.
The two networks are pursuing that capability through different structures: Mastercard has bought an infrastructure provider and expanded its clearing options, while Visa is working with Bridge and Lead Bank. Both approaches keep the card network involved in settlement rather than handing the entire payment flow to direct public-chain transfers. For now, the clearest operational evidence is at the institutional layer: SoFi’s live migration and Visa’s reported settlement run rate. Neither means that ordinary card purchases have moved wholesale onto a blockchain or that merchants must change how they accept cards.
Mastercard and Visa are extending stablecoin technology into the systems that settle card payments between financial institutions, while leaving the consumer checkout experience largely unchanged. Mastercard completed its acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure provider BVNK in August 2026 and has expanded its network’s settlement options to include regulated stablecoins. Visa, meanwhile, is working with Stripe-owned Bridge and Lead Bank on on-chain settlement for card programs. The shift became more concrete in September, when SoFi Bank moved its credit and debit card issuing portfolio to live settlement using its bank-issued SoFiUSD. That portfolio represents more than $25 billion in annualized card volume, a measure distinct from the value settled in stablecoins. Visa separately reported an annualized stablecoin settlement run rate exceeding $25 billion in October. The networks’ initiatives target the back-end movement and reconciliation of funds, including periods when traditional bank settlement rails are unavailable; they do not require merchants to accept cryptocurrency.
The European Central Bank has launched Pontes, a bridge connecting tokenised-asset platforms to the Eurosystem’s TARGET Services for wholesale settlement in central bank money. The arrangement enables atomic delivery-versus-payment settlement, in which an asset and its payment move together. It does not yet make wholesale settlement available around the clock: Pontes depends on T2 operating hours and requires tokenised central bank money balances to be defunded at the end of the day. ECB Executive Board member Piero Cipollone says the Eurosystem plans to extend Pontes operating hours substantially by mid-2027 and reach 24/7/365 availability in 2028. Separately, the Bank for International Settlements’ Project Agorá has tested cross-border payments using a shared programmable ledger that brings tokenised commercial bank deposits and central bank reserves into a single settlement process. Both initiatives address delays and liquidity demands in wholesale payments, but neither makes continuous, cross-border settlement available today.
Project Agorá’s real-value testing settled 30 live, multi-currency transactions worth approximately CHF 800,000, with atomic settlement averaging about 80 seconds. The tests involved 28 commercial institutions and five central banks. The result shows how tokenised commercial bank deposits and central bank reserves could support faster cross-border settlement, though it does not establish that settlement latency has been eliminated. The project’s prototype found that tokenisation did not change the legal character or regulatory obligations of deposits and reserves. Its design also let participating institutions conduct compliance checks concurrently. Seven more commercial banks joined in September 2026, taking private-sector participation to nearly 50 institutions. At Sibos in October, banking executives described the testing pipeline as a step towards production trials alongside the European Central Bank’s Pontes platform. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York did not participate in the live test transactions, an important qualification for the US dollar tests.
Ripple’s final federal trust bank charter, a Moody’s investment-grade rating for RLUSD and a planned expansion of the stablecoin’s availability on Coinbase have strengthened its position as a regulated digital dollar. Coinbase said Global Exchange access, including eligibility to use RLUSD as trading collateral, will follow its initial retail and prime rollout. Moody’s assigned RLUSD an A2 long-term deposit rating and a P-1 short-term rating, the first investment-grade rating it has given a stablecoin. The distinctions behind those developments matter. Ripple National Trust Bank manages RLUSD’s reserve collateral, but the legal issuer remains Standard Custody & Trust Company, a New York-regulated Ripple subsidiary. The national trust bank is uninsured and cannot take commercial retail deposits or extend credit. Moody’s also noted that holders do not currently own the underlying reserves directly and that statutory bankruptcy protections depend on implementation of the GENIUS Act, whose rules take effect in January 2027.
Ramp partnered with Stripe and Bridge in July 2026 to deploy stablecoin rails for business bill payments and yield-bearing stablecoin accounts funded through standard fiat bank accounts. The arrangement shows how stablecoins can be incorporated into familiar payment workflows without requiring businesses to fund every transaction with digital assets. The economics depend on more than the cost of moving a token on-chain. Stripe charges merchants 1.5% for stablecoin checkout transactions, versus its standard card-processing fee of 2.9% plus $0.30; neither figure establishes the price of Ramp’s bill-payment service. Businesses receiving fiat may also face foreign-exchange and off-ramp costs, typically 0.3% to 2.0% when converting into local banking systems. Domestic clearing networks and compliance checks remain part of end-to-end delivery. Bridge’s issuance and transfer tools, alongside its conditional U.S. trust-bank approval, illustrate the infrastructure behind those payments—but not the elimination of every payment cost.
StraitsX has opened onboarding for digital payment token providers across more than 100 markets through an expanded card-issuing architecture developed with Visa. Integration documentation published on 26 October 2026 describes a multi-BIN model that combines issuing sponsorship, transaction authorization, compliance screening and fiat clearing. The approach lets participating providers build stablecoin-backed card products while merchants continue to receive conventional fiat payments through Visa’s network. StraitsX says its card gross transaction value rose 40-fold year on year from Q4 2024 to Q4 2025, while cards issued across Asia increased 83-fold. On-chain issuer telemetry recorded monthly card transaction volume of $310 million to $438 million through October 2026. The company’s stated $6 billion annualized card transaction figure is distinct from its cumulative $70 billion in processed stablecoin volume. StraitsX and Visa have also scheduled demonstrations of agentic payments for November 2026.