Headline: A 2014 prediction comes true — payment giants and crypto firms now deeply entwined
More than a decade after a prescient prediction about closer ties between Bitcoin startups and traditional payment companies, the payments landscape of 2026 looks a lot like Jason Oxman imagined in 2014. Oxman, then CEO of the Electronic Transactions Association (ETA), said in an August 2014 interview that payment-industry players would follow what consumers and merchants choose to use and that the industry’s role was “facilitating electronic transactions,” no matter the underlying technology. His comments came after BitPay became the first digital-currency company to join the ETA and amid early regulatory debates such as New York’s BitLicense proposal.
Fast-forward to today: partnerships that were once experiments are now core business lines across cards, settlement rails, stablecoins and cross-border flows. The ETA itself has evolved—leadership changed in 2019 with Jodie Kelley taking the helm, and the organization now hosts a dedicated Digital Assets committee alongside its other industry groups—underscoring how mainstream payments players have incorporated crypto into their agendas.
Card networks have been especially active. In March, Visa and Stripe-owned Bridge announced plans to roll out stablecoin-linked Visa cards in more than 100 countries by the end of 2026, enabling users to spend stablecoin balances across Visa’s merchant network. Visa has also broadened a stablecoin settlement pilot to nine blockchains and reported in April that the program has reached a $7 billion annualized settlement rate—an indicator that major card networks are moving beyond proofs of concept toward scale.
Mastercard has pursued a parallel strategy. Its Crypto Partner Program now includes more than 100 crypto companies, banks and payment providers; in May, Alchemy Pay joined the initiative to explore tighter integration between fiat payments and on‑chain commerce. These moves show card networks positioning themselves as bridges between traditional finance and blockchain-based systems rather than adversaries.
The industry’s focus has shifted from Bitcoin-only use cases toward dollar-linked stablecoins as a practical medium for commerce. Visa, Mastercard and Coinbase are among 140+ firms backing the Open Standard effort to create Open USD, a proposed open, dollar-pegged standard designed to underpin business payment infrastructure. That initiative puts major card networks in the same room with crypto-native firms building the rails for on‑chain business payments.
Meanwhile, legacy crypto payment providers continue to expand under regulation. BitPay secured MiCA authorization in the Netherlands, allowing it to offer regulated crypto and stablecoin services across eligible EU markets—an example of crypto firms adapting to new regional regulatory frameworks while broadening their service footprints.
A decade after Oxman’s warning to regulators not to reject new technologies simply because they were unfamiliar—and after his assertion that payment companies would follow market demand—the prediction looks vindicated. The partnership model has evolved from isolated pilots into integrated services spanning stablecoin-issued cards, blockchain settlement rails, cross-border corridors and regulatory-compliant product offerings. The result: a payments market in 2026 where traditional networks and crypto companies increasingly build on the same infrastructure, with stablecoins playing an outsized role in everyday commerce.
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