BVNK and Marqeta dangle a payments lure for stablecoins

• Key insight: BVNK and Marqeta are collaborating to make stablecoins easier to use for payments. 
• What's at stake: Stablecoins are rarely used at the point of sale, but payment companies and banks are betting that will change in the future. 
• Forward look: Through Mastercard's ownership of BVNK, the firm will work with Marqeta to support wider use cases for digital asset payments. 

With banks considering stablecoin strategies, a major challenge will be making the digital assets usable outside of crypto trading. That's leading to a technology race among payment firms that aren't issuing their own stablecoins but have plenty riding on the market's success. "It's the question of how consumers can actually use and spend their stablecoins," Keith Vander Leest, the U.S. general manager at BVNK, told American Banker. Marqeta, a firm that sells card-issuing technology, has partnered with BVNK, a firm that sells infrastructure that supports stablecoins. The Marqeta/BVNK deal is the first major deal BVNK has signed since Mastercard's acquisition of BVNK closed in August.

The collaboration will enable card issuers to include stablecoin capabilities in digital wallets and cards, part of a push to get consumers and merchants to use the digital asset at the point of sale. "The real opportunity for stablecoins lies in connecting them with the infrastructure people and businesses already trust and use every day. That's the gap Marqeta is built to close," Anthony Peculic, chief strategy officer at Marqeta, told American Banker. 

Paying with stablecoins

While stablecoins are not widely used directly as currency to pay merchants, there is a growing push to make it easy for consumers or businesses to use stablecoins and the underlying technology to cut time and expense from payment processing. BVNK and Marqeta are attempting to make payments that involve stablecoins look and feel "normal" while the conversions between digital and traditional currencies, and other processing steps, take place behind the scenes. 

This includes a melding of the expertise of the two companies. BVNK sells technology that connects payment networks such as Swift, Sepa, ACH and Fedwire with stablecoin rails. 

BVNK's products include an application programming interface that supports sending, receiving, storing and converting digital currencies. The company processed more than $30 billion in stablecoin transactions in 2025. Acquiring BVNK boosts Mastercard's strategy to act as an orchestration layer as stablecoins and tokenized deposits expand as an alternative to cards and ACH, according to analysts at Keefe Bruyette & Woods.

"Blockchain payments are complex and there's a lot of nuances," Vander Leest said. "Card issuing is the same. There's a lot of different messages that have to be passed back and forth. So how a company like BVNK and Marqeta go together makes sense." 

Marqeta is one of Mastercard's partners, creating synergy for future product development involving digital assets. 

"Being able to spend on the Mastercard network makes it easier. If a merchant accepts Mastercard they can accept a stablecoin. That's our mission," Vander Leest said.

For Marqeta, which underpins card programs for clients such as Block and others, the BVNK collaboration follows an earlier deal to use Zero Hash's stablecoin technology within Marqeta's card-issuing platform, making stablecoin debit cards usable across Marqeta's network. Marqeta also participates in Mastercard's crypto partner program alongside firms like Circle and Paxos.

"BVNK plays a key role in our growing ecosystem of stablecoin infrastructure partners, further connecting Marqeta with Mastercard's network and helping us enable stablecoin-backed card solutions that link directly to existing card rails," Peculic said.

Scale for stablecoins

BVNK's technology has drawn clients such as PayPal and Circle, which have used BVNK tools to create networks for stablecoins.

KBW likened BVNK's model to Bridge, a blockchain technology firm that Stripe acquired to further its stablecoin strategy. Bridge recently received a trust charter that will enable it to directly operate stablecoin products under federal oversight. Both Bridge and BVNK support scale, or the ability of stablecoins that are often issued by individual fintechs or banks to be widely used. 

"[The Mastercard deal] highlighted BVNK's embedded licensing, compliance tooling, and regulatory permissions as a key differentiator, especially for banks and fintechs that want faster time to market without building the infrastructure themselves," KBW analysts said in a research note, adding that BVNK is the "plumbing" that offers interoperability between different blockchain-based currencies such as stablecoins.   

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"This is the right strategy to future-proof for a world that could potentially see a migration of these high friction commercial flows on-chain," KBW said. The challenge of scaling stablecoins can also be seen in bank consortiums such as the Open USD consortium that is building a multi-institutional stablecoin. BVNK, Mastercard and Marqeta support Open USD, creating access to potential bank users. 

"I expect to see a lot more collaboration between banks on stablecoin. Stablecoin's value comes from network liquidity and counterparty adoption," Phil Philliou, a payments consultant, told American Banker. "I am also hopeful that regional and community banks will be able to participate in consortiums."