What Mastercard’s BVNK deal says about stablecoins in the payments stack

Mastercard’s acquisition of BVNK, a leading stablecoin infrastructure provider, matters not just because of its size, but because of what it signals, according to Started PR, a communications and marketing agency for fintechs helping to shape tomorrow's financial world. Stablecoins, the agency noted, are beginning to look less like a parallel financial experiment and more like part of the infrastructure conversation at the heart of modern payments.

"For years, attention centered on the assets themselves or the blockchain networks behind them. Increasingly, that looks like the wrong place to focus," said Ryan Woods, head of content at the Started Advisory Board. "The more important question now is where stablecoins sit in the real payments stack, and what still needs to happen for them to become dependable in practice for businesses and institutions."

To explore that question, Started PR convened a roundtable bringing together perspectives from across the market. Participants included: Jelle Van Schaick, vice president of growth at Lorum; Serhii Zakharov, founder and CEO of PayDo; and Kevin Conabree, co-founder of Balboa. The discussion was moderated by Woods.

Ryan Woods: What does Mastercard’s BVNK acquisition say about how large incumbents now view stablecoins?

Jelle Van Schaick: “Stablecoins are being treated as financial infrastructure. The transaction volumes are there, the GENIUS Act takes effect by early 2027, and Mastercard just spent $1.8 billion acquiring a company that connects stablecoin settlement to fiat clearing. The question is no longer whether stablecoins will be part of the payments stack. It is whether the custody, compliance, and fiat connectivity behind them are built to the regulatory standard that institutional money requires.”

Serhii Zakharov: “The acquisition suggests the conversation has moved beyond whether digital assets have a role in payments at all. The more important issue now is whether they can operate inside dependable financial infrastructure. For businesses, the question is less about on-chain movement in theory and more about whether value can move into the fiat economy in a way that is stable enough for real operational use.”

Kevin Conabree: “The same shift is visible commercially as well. Stablecoins are starting to be viewed less as a standalone crypto product and more as part of a broader settlement infrastructure conversation. That matters because mainstream adoption will depend on whether they can support real economic activity, not just move value inside digital ecosystems. That is especially true when it comes to adoption in larger, slower-moving industries. Those sectors are unlikely to shift overnight, but that is exactly why the infrastructure needs to be built now.”

Ryan Woods: Does this moment suggest value in the stack is concentrating around compliance, custody, clearing and fiat connectivity?

Jelle Van Schaick: “A $1.8 billion acquisition tells you this is not experimental. Mastercard wants to own the connection point between digital assets and real-world money movement. That is the layer where regulated custody, multi-currency clearing, and compliance controls determine whether a stablecoin transaction works end to end. This acquisition validates that this middle layer, not the blockchain itself, is where the value and the complexity concentrate.”

Serhii Zakharov: “Too often, friction in crypto payments is treated as a weakness in digital assets themselves, when the deeper issue sits in the infrastructure connecting crypto to fiat. The challenge is not that blockchain cannot move funds quickly. It is that the surrounding financial architecture is still too fragmented to make those flows dependable for day-to-day business use.”

Kevin Conabree: “The real value is increasingly sitting in the infrastructure around the asset, not just in the asset itself. What matters is the ability to connect digital value to real commercial workflows in a way that is trusted, compliant and operationally dependable.”

Ryan Woods: What still needs to happen for stablecoin-enabled payments to become dependable for mainstream businesses and institutions?

Jelle Van Schaick: “The question is no longer whether stablecoins will be part of the payments stack. It is whether the custody, compliance, and fiat connectivity behind them are built to the regulatory standard that institutional money requires.”

Serhii Zakharov: “For stablecoin-enabled payments to become dependable for mainstream businesses, the surrounding infrastructure needs to become more coherent. Businesses should not have to stitch together multiple providers just to make funds move safely and predictably between crypto and fiat environments.”

Kevin Conabree: “The surrounding infrastructure has to be built for real operational environments. That means resilience, control, compliance and smooth integration with the financial systems that businesses already use.”

New center of gravity

What emerged from the discussion was not the idea that stablecoins have suddenly solved payments, or that the sector has reached some final stage of maturity. It was something more grounded, Ryan Woods concluded.

"The center of gravity has shifted," Woods said. "The harder questions now sit around custody, clearing, compliance, fiat conversion and operational dependability. In other words, around the infrastructure that determines whether digital value can function inside mainstream finance.

"That is what makes the BVNK deal interesting. It suggests that for large incumbents, stablecoins are no longer being viewed simply as an asset class or a crypto adjacency. They are increasingly being assessed as part of the infrastructure layer itself."

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