WuBlockchain published a commentary arguing that stablecoin payment cards are unlikely to truly replace Visa. The central point is that, in domestic card spending, the biggest merchant costs do not sit with the card network, so cutting out Visa does not automatically produce meaningful savings.
The article says crypto credit card spending topped $759 million in July, with 9 million transactions, nearly 2.5 times the level seen a year earlier. More than 90% of that volume still ran on Visa.
Most merchant fees do not go to Visa
The commentary says one of the most common misconceptions in crypto payments is that Visa and similar networks take the largest share of merchant fees. It argues that this is wrong.
Using a $100 rewards credit card purchase as an example, the merchant pays roughly a 2.2% merchant discount rate, or about $2.20. That amount is split across three parties, and the split is far from even:
- About $1.75 goes to the issuing bank, the institution that extends the card to the consumer. This is interchange, and it accounts for 70% to 80% of the merchant’s total fee burden.
- The merchant-side processor or acquirer takes another $0.30 to $0.70 in service fees.
- Visa or Mastercard collects only $0.13 to $0.18 in assessment fees, or about 7% to 9% of the merchant’s total cost.
On that breakdown, removing Visa strips out only the smallest fee line in the chain.
Visa runs the information network, not the credit book
The article says Visa’s relatively small take reflects its role in the payment system. Visa does not extend credit to consumers, does not bear credit losses, and does not absorb chargeback disputes or fraud losses. It does not actually move funds either. Its job is to run the information network that activates when a card is used, pass authorization messages between the merchant terminal and the issuer, and set the rules for how the system operates.
The issuer carries the heavier load. Issuing banks provide credit to consumers, take bad-debt risk, and fund the gap between the purchase date and the repayment date. They also use interchange revenue to subsidize card rewards and keep cardholders spending.
That structure, the commentary says, is what makes Visa’s business so attractive. In 2025, Visa processed $14.2 trillion in payment volume across 257.5 billion transactions and generated $40 billion in net revenue, with a net margin close to 50%. On average, it earned only about $0.13 per transaction.
Stablecoin cards mostly operate as debit products
The article then turns to what it calls the hardest reality for stablecoin cards. Nearly all of them are debit products. Before a purchase happens, the user’s funds are already sitting in a wallet in the form of USDC or USDT. There is no credit-funding cycle and no revolving interest income.
That creates a very different economic model. The commentary points to the Durbin Amendment, enacted by the US Congress in 2010, which caps debit interchange for banks with more than $10 billion in assets at $0.21 plus 0.05% per transaction. Most stablecoin card programs, it says, work with smaller partner banks or digital banks below that $10 billion threshold, a common fintech banking model that avoids the cap.
Even so, the economics remain much tighter. The article says exempt dual-message network debit interchange currently averages about $0.62 per transaction. Compared with a rewards credit card, the revenue pool is much smaller: a $100 rewards credit card transaction can generate $2.20 in total revenue, while a stablecoin debit card transaction, even under the higher exempt rate, generates only $0.62.
From that $0.62, the program still has to cover network fees, processor fees, partner bank costs, fraud losses, and operating expenses. Only what remains can be used to offer merchants any savings.
Where stablecoins can actually change the stack
The commentary argues that stablecoins may matter less at the front end of a card payment and more in the back-end infrastructure.
It refers back to an earlier article on Stripe building its own blockchain, which broke cross-border payments into seven fee layers: acceptance, orchestration, licensing and compliance, custody, foreign exchange, issuing, and clearing and settlement. When the author maps domestic card spending onto that framework, the layer that changes in a meaningful way is clearing and settlement.
From the merchant’s point of view, acceptance does not change. The merchant still needs a terminal, the customer still taps or swipes a card, and the merchant still pays a merchant discount rate to the acquirer. The merchant may not even know whether the funding source behind the card is USDC, because the transaction looks no different from a standard Visa payment on the statement.
The same is true for orchestration and issuing. Routing still runs through Visa or Mastercard, and issuing still depends on partner banks and card-network BINs. The article says fintech firms were already using this model before stablecoins existed, so there is no fundamental break at that layer.
Faster settlement mainly helps issuers
The article says the real change appears in clearing and settlement. In the traditional model, settlement between issuers and card networks typically runs on a T+2 basis, with weekends and batch processing adding friction. To improve that, providers such as Rain support end-of-day stablecoin settlement with Visa. Mastercard has also started accepting stablecoins including USDC, PYUSD, and RLUSD for intraday settlement.
That can compress the old T+2 cycle toward near-real-time settlement and free up working capital that issuers would otherwise have to tie up.
But the commentary stresses that the benefit flows to issuers, not merchants. Merchant discount rates do not fall just because settlement gets faster, and consumers do not see a noticeable difference at checkout. In that sense, T+0 stablecoin settlement is mainly a treasury and funding optimization tool for card operators and issuing institutions.
The article adds that Visa has little reason to cut its own fees because settlement float costs were never borne by Visa in the first place. Those costs sat with the issuer. If stablecoins reduce issuer funding costs, Visa’s own cost base still does not change, so merchant pricing has no automatic reason to move lower.
Visa and Mastercard are integrating stablecoins, not resisting them
The commentary says neither Visa nor Mastercard is pushing back against stablecoin settlement. Instead, both are bringing it into their own networks. Visa has supported USDC settlement on Ethereum and Solana since 2021, and the article says its annualized settlement volume now stands at $7 billion. Mastercard, meanwhile, acquired BVNK several months ago to expand its stablecoin infrastructure.
The piece quotes the card networks as saying: "Stablecoins will not disrupt the existing payments order. They will reinforce it."
That leads to the article’s broader conclusion: the card networks are not being displaced by stablecoin cards. They are absorbing stablecoins as an upgrade to the settlement layer. Every stablecoin card that runs on Visa while claiming to challenge Visa is still adding transaction volume to the network and still paying fees into it.
Cross-border logic does not map neatly onto domestic spending
The article closes with a distinction between use cases. It says stablecoins can reduce costs in cross-border payments by removing layers of correspondent banks and easing foreign exchange friction. That logic holds. But domestic consumer card payments have a different fee structure, so the same argument cannot simply be transplanted from cross-border payments into local card spending.
Its conclusion is straightforward: stablecoins can realistically replace parts of clearing and settlement, and they can improve foreign exchange in cross-border payments. What they do not replace is the main cost center in domestic card transactions.
