Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, and Coinbase (?) are reportedly teaming up to issue a stablecoin.
If you saw the news yesterday and thought "okay, another crypto thing", I get it. But this one is actually worth paying attention to, even if stablecoins aren't usually on your radar
First, a quick explainer on stablecoins
A stablecoin is kinda like a digital dollar. It's a token that lives on a blockchain and is always worth $1. You can send it anywhere in the world in seconds, without going through a bank, without waiting for settlement, without paying the fees that traditional wire transfers carry. For global commerce, that's genuinely useful.
Right now, two companies dominate this space: Tether (which issues USDT) and Circle (which issues USDC). Together they control about 80% of a market that's worth $325 billion. They've basically been printing digital dollars and collecting the interest on the reserves backing those dollars. It's been a very good business.
So what just happened?
According to reporting from The Information and CoinDesk, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, and Coinbase are planning to form a consortium and issue their own stablecoin to compete directly with Tether and Circle. No official announcement yet. No token name, no launch date. But multiple sources say Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard are close, with Coinbase still deciding whether to join.
[Disclaimer: I work at Stripe and have no internal knowledge of this- this is all gathered from public sources and news outlets. These views represent my views alone, and do not represent comments or information from the company “Stripe” or any of it’s affiliates.]
Why these four companies specifically?
Stripe bought a stablecoin infrastructure company called Bridge in 2024.
Mastercard bought a stablecoin firm called BVNK earlier this year.
Visa has been running stablecoin settlement pilots across nine different blockchains.
Coinbase launched its own white label stablecoin product late last year.
These four companies have been reading the tea leaves and they were all stacking pieces. This consortium is just the moment those pieces come together publicly.
Here's the part that actually matters
Tether and Circle are good at issuing stablecoins, but in my opinion, they have a distribution problem. You’ve probably never even heard of Tether or Circle, and getting merchants, banks, and everyday people to actually use your stablecoin requires relationships; which is exactly what Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe have spent decades building.
Visa and Mastercard are connected to virtually every bank and merchant on the planet. Stripe powers a huge chunk of global internet commerce. A stablecoin backed by those networks doesn't have to convince anyone to trust it: trust is already built in.
That's what makes this different from past "big company does crypto" announcements. This isn't about access to crypto markets. It's about who gets to issue the digital dollar that eventually powers everyday commerce.
The Coinbase Piece
Interestingly, Coinbase is currently one of Circle's biggest distribution partners. They hold about 25% of all USDC in circulation and have a revenue-sharing deal with Circle that's up for renewal in August — which, by the way, is in about two months.
If Coinbase joins this consortium and starts pushing a competing stablecoin, that's a gut punch to Circle. Your biggest partner becomes your biggest competitor. Circle has to be thinking hard about this right now.
The bigger picture
This is ultimately a fight over something pretty mundane sounding but enormously valuable: the right to issue digital dollars and collect the interest on the reserves behind them. Right now crypto native companies own that. The payment networks want in before it's too late to matter.
The GENIUS Act, passed last year, gave stablecoins a real regulatory framework in the U.S. for the first time. That opened the door for companies like Visa and Mastercard to move without regulatory ambiguity hanging over them.
They're moving.