More than a decade after one payments industry insider warned it was coming, the convergence between Bitcoin-era startups and legacy card networks has become mainstream — and it’s now centered on stablecoins, settlement rails and regulated services.
Back in August 2014, then-ETA (Electronic Transactions Association) CEO Jason Oxman told CoinDesk that payments firms would follow how consumers and merchants chose to transact, and that the trade group would remain open to new payment technologies without formally endorsing any single system. His remarks followed BitPay’s move to join the ETA as the first digital-currency company in the trade association, and arrived amid early commercial Bitcoin adoption and regulatory debates such as New York’s BitLicense proposal. Oxman also urged regulators not to apply rules simply because a technology was new, while acknowledging the need for consumer protection.
Fast-forward to 2026 and that prediction looks prescient. The ETA’s leadership has changed — Jodie Kelley became CEO in 2019 — and the organization now runs a dedicated Digital Assets committee alongside its other payments-industry groups. Meanwhile, partnerships between traditional payment networks and crypto firms have evolved from isolated pilots into production products and infrastructure.
Notable recent developments:
- Visa and Bridge (the Stripe-owned company) announced in March plans to roll out stablecoin-linked Visa cards to more than 100 countries by the end of 2026. These cards let users spend stablecoin balances across Visa’s merchant network.
- Visa expanded its stablecoin settlement pilot to nine blockchains and said in April the program had reached a $7 billion annualized settlement rate — a move intended to give payment partners more choice when selecting blockchain networks.
- Mastercard’s Crypto Partner Program now includes more than 100 crypto firms, banks and payment providers. In May, Alchemy Pay joined the initiative to explore tighter links between fiat payments and on-chain commerce.
- The industry’s attention has shifted from Bitcoin-only use cases to dollar-pegged digital currencies. Visa, Mastercard and Coinbase are among more than 140 companies backing Open Standard, the group building Open USD — a proposed open-standard, dollar-linked stablecoin and associated payment infrastructure for businesses.
- BitPay, one of the early entrants into payments-crypto integration, has continued to expand its regulated footprint: it secured MiCA authorization in the Netherlands, clearing the way to offer regulated crypto and stablecoin services across eligible EU markets.
What this adds up to is a payments landscape where legacy and crypto-native players collaborate across cards, settlement layers, stablecoins and cross-border flows. A prediction from 2014 that payments companies would follow consumer and merchant preferences toward new rails has, in many respects, come true — only now the frontier is centered on regulated stablecoins and blockchain-based settlement rather than Bitcoin alone.
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