The stablecoin market, which has been dominated by Tether and Circle for a decade, could look very different a year from now. The main traditional names in the payments sector, Visa and Mastercard, have been hovering around this segment for some time and are reportedly working on a plan with other major players to put their own spin on stablecoins.
According to a report from CoinDesk, the credit card giants are in talks with Stripe and Coinbase to launch a stablecoin platform. The report, based on anonymous sources, provided few details about the project’s schedule or operation.
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I investigated the matter and discovered that there are indeed talks about a new consortium and that other companies may also be involved in the negotiations.
If anything does emerge from these conversations, the implications will be enormous for a stablecoin market already worth more than $300 billion.
For starters, the new partnership would accelerate the adoption of stablecoins across the retail payments system, where Visa, Mastercard and Stripe already process a huge portion of everyday transactions.
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There is also the question of what this would mean for Circle, whose flagship token, USDC, accounts for the majority of regulated stablecoin activity in North America and Europe.
Talk of the possible consortium speaks of a stablecoin “platform,” but it is quite likely that Mastercard, Visa and Coinbase will use this arrangement to encourage their millions of commercial customers to adopt some type of token of their own. This would open up new revenue opportunities from interest on reserves and other sources of earnings.
As for Coinbase, it’s harder to see what it would gain from opening a stablecoin platform with Stripe and the card giants.
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The company currently enjoys a very advantageous arrangement thanks to a contract signed in 2023 with Circle, which allows it to keep most of the interest generated by USDC reserves, while Circle assumes most of the operational and regulatory responsibilities.
This arrangement, however, is not permanent, and Circle will certainly be less generous when the time comes to renegotiate the terms. All of this suggests that Coinbase may see better opportunities by betting on a new partnership for stablecoins.
[Atualização: Após a publicação desta matéria, um porta-voz enviou o seguinte comentário da última teleconferência de resultados da empresa: “Os contratos que temos com a Circle estão estabelecidos e… são renovados automaticamente. Portanto, esperamos continuar nossa relação com a Circle sob esses mesmos termos.”]
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The biggest question, however, is whether any of this will actually happen. Based on my conversations, there is still no formal agreement and perhaps not even memorandums of understanding. For now, the “negotiations” news appears to be just that — negotiations.
And conversations like this happen all the time in the business world. While a major stablecoin deal could move forward, history shows that consortia are more difficult to achieve than they seem.
Just remember Facebook’s ambitious Libra partnership plans in 2019, or R3’s initiative to create a blockchain coalition of banks a decade ago.
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For this possible stablecoin partnership to get off the ground, companies will have to reach a level of trust that is often difficult between competitors and also find a way to work out the details amid the bureaucracies of several large corporations.
Furthermore, even in the more liberal era of Donald Trump, it seems likely that antitrust bodies will scrutinize any plan that involves the world’s largest payments companies doing business together.
For now, however, it is still very early, and it will likely be months before new information on the subject emerges — if it progresses at all.
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