The news: Traditional payment providers are deepening their involvement in the cryptocurrency sector.

• Mastercard will buy stablecoin startup BVNK for $1.8 billion, per a press release. The network tried to buy BVNK in October for about $2 billion, but the deal fell through. (Mastercard then tried to buy Zerohash, conveniently also for $2 billion, but that deal also fell through.)
• Wells Fargo applied to trademark “WFUSD,” per filing records found by Decrypt. It’s unclear whether WFUSD would function as a stablecoin or as a tokenized deposit like JPMorgan’s JPMD. Wells Fargo did not respond to a request for comment.
• PYUSD went live in 70 more countries, including Colombia, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic. (PayPal did not offer a comprehensive list and instead instructed users to “check your PayPal app to see if PYUSD is available in your country.”

Why this is happening: Everyone along the payments value chain has different motives for engaging with stablecoins, but they all boil down to one thing—avoiding disintermediation.

• Mastercard will facilitate more than $3 trillion worth of card transaction value in the US alone this year, per our forecasts. That volume is the bedrock of the network’s value-added services, which are card networks’ key growth engine. Networks can’t risk losing transaction volume to rails that dangle the promise of cheaper transaction costs.
• Banks don’t want to lose out on interchange revenues if alternative rails eat into credit and debit card share, but even more existentially, they don’t want to lose deposits to fintechs that have found loopholes in regulations that let them offer competitive APYs on stablecoin deposits.
• And fintechs are betting that stablecoins can help turn their mobile wallets into stickier super apps that offer more bank-like services without needing to partner (and share revenues) with banks.

Implications for payment providers: The financial system is staring down a stablecoin glut.

The GENIUS Act effectively gave traditional finance the federal government’s blessing to dip its toes in the world of blockchain (especially as crypto companies press deeper into banks’ territory).

But few consumers want to navigate a world where they need bespoke denominations of US dollars for every financial or retail entity they interact with, one where mobile wallets become an alphabet soup of currencies that are ostensibly fungible but functionally uninteroperable.

Wells Fargo is part of the consortium that owns Zelle, which recently announced that it was going to explore using stablecoins to power remittance payments. Zelle is wildly popular, and banks (even those that don’t own Early Warning Services) risk making a severe misallocation of resources if they think they’ll have better luck going it alone versus working together.

Go deeper: Check out our Stablecoin Explainer 2026 for insights on the competitive landscape and key use cases.