This Week in Stablecoins: Card Payments, Crypto Policies and Bank Pushback

As the headlines this week underscore, they are already inside and trying to rearrange the furniture.

The evidence is not subtle. Payment networks are integrating stablecoins into settlement layers while regulators and industry stakeholders are debating their yield characteristics with the seriousness once reserved for money market funds. At the same time, the last mile of stablecoin payments is closing as stablecoin rails move from the edge of financial experimentation into the core of how value moves.

Over the course of the past seven days, partnerships formed, volumes climbed, acquisitions closed and lawmakers clashed. Each development reinforced a central truth about the tokenized assets, primarily that the next phase will not be decided by whether stablecoins can scale, but by who sets the rules, how trust is enforced at speed, and whether legitimacy can keep pace with usage.

Read also: The Governance Problem Stablecoins Weren’t Built to Solve

Payments Lead the Charge

Few signals carry more weight in global payments than the behavior of Visa. This week, the company added fuel to its framing of stablecoins not as a threat but as a demand driver for its settlement platform by positioning itself as the neutral backbone that can handle fiat and tokenized value with the same reliability.

According to a Wednesday (Jan. 14) report, Visa’s stablecoin settlement volumes have risen to an annualized run rate of $4.5 billion due to stablecoin-linked payment cards. While those stablecoin settlement volumes are only a fraction of the $14.2 trillion in annual payments volume that Visa processed last year, they are “growing significantly month over month,” the company said.

This is an inversion of early crypto narratives that imagined bypassing card networks entirely. Instead, stablecoins are amplifying the relevance of existing rails by introducing new transaction types that still benefit from global acceptance, compliance tooling and dispute resolution.

To accelerate the strategy, Visa, also on Wednesday, announced a partnership with stablecoin infrastructure provider BVNK, where BVNK will power Visa Direct’s stablecoin services, such as stablecoin pre-funding, allowing certain select business customers to fund Visa Direct payouts using stablecoins instead of only fiat, as well as payouts to end recipients in stablecoins.

The partnership underscores the broader pattern of large networks not trying to build crypto-native infrastructure from scratch. They are acquiring optionality by plugging into firms that already understand wallet management, liquidity routing and blockchain-native compliance.

Elsewhere in the last mile of stablecoin adoption, payments acceptance company Ingenico launched an integration Tuesday (Jan. 13) with WalletConnect Pay designed to allow merchants to accept stablecoin payments directly at checkout. Also on Tuesday, Polygon Labs announced a pair of acquisitions designed to boost its own stablecoin payments business.

See also: Tokenized Deposits Steal Stablecoin Buzz — and the Business Model

Regulation as the New Competitive Arena

Infrastructure, however, is only half the story. For stablecoins to function as everyday money, they must be regulated and compliant. That simple reality is becoming a battleground, as news this week revealed.

The fact that the U.S. crypto markets legislation, which has, or had, a lot of momentum behind it, stalled in the Senate Thursday (Jan. 15) over the draft bill’s implications for yield-bearing stablecoin instruments only underscored how far the sector has come and still has to go.

Banks have increasingly lobbied against crypto offerings that resemble deposit products, especially stablecoin rewards that, in their view, compete against regulated interest accounts. This banking pushback has seeped into the legislative text, prompting provisions aimed at limiting crypto incentives, which were a key flashpoint for developers of stablecoin-based products who ultimately derailed the legislative process.

Outside of the United States, stablecoins are moving fast. Ripple on Wednesday secured an electronic money institution license in Luxembourg, allowing it to operate across the European Union. The green light from Luxembourg’s Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF) came days after Ripple was granted permission to scale Ripple Payments in the United Kingdom, having received approvals for its Ripple’s electronic money institution license and crypto asset registration from the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority.

Read also: Legal Expert Says Bank Charters Are Crypto’s Credibility Play

Separately, findings in the January edition of the Blockchain and Digital Assets Tracker® Series, a collaboration between PYMNTS Intelligence and Citi, found that execution within viable regulatory frameworks is likely to shape the future of stablecoins and financial blockchain as firms explore not whether on-chain solutions are allowed, but how they can be governed, integrated, and made to work at scale.

There is also data that complicates every optimistic narrative. Statistics released Jan. 8 by blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis highlighted that stablecoins are now implicated in a majority of crypto-denominated fraud, with estimates putting their usage at roughly 84% of such crimes.

For policymakers, statistics like these reinforce the argument that stablecoins cannot be treated as neutral technology. They are financial instruments with real-world consequences, and their design choices influence how easily abuse can occur. The same programmability that enables compliance automation can, if poorly implemented, facilitate obfuscation at scale.

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