Mastercard’s BVNK Deal Highlights the 4 Barriers to Stablecoin Adoption

Crypto’s goal of replacing fiat has never been able to overcome certain roadblocks.

Many of them are operational, not ideological. Stablecoin adoption, for example, has been limited as a standalone system because while the digital assets are able to solve the movement of value problem, they do so in a relative vacuum, and don’t yet solve the coordination problems that impact users, institutions and jurisdictions in the real world.

Even across blockchain, it turns out, adoption requires setting up a successful network. Or, as this week’s developments show, it could be as simple as joining one.

From Mastercard’s $1.8 billion acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure platform BVNK, announced on Tuesday (March 17), to PayPal’s expansion that same day of cross-border stablecoin-enabled payments across 70 countries, the future of digital money is looking increasingly like it might be an integration story.

It could be that stablecoin back ends for settlement—paired with the familiar front ends of incumbent FinTech, banking and payment networks—represent the best approach for the industry. If you can’t beat them, join them, the stablecoin marketplace may as well be saying.

Mastercard reportedly noted in an conference call after the deal was announced that building similar financial blockchain capabilities internally would take “quite a bit of time.”

In that sense, the payments landscape seems to be converging on world that is not “fiat-versus-crypto,” but “fiat-and-crypto.” That’s the type of world that could potentially kick off a land grab for control over the transaction flows supported by next-generation payment rails.

It may all boil down to first overcoming the four category horsemen of stablecoins: their economic incentives, governance, consumer adoption and cross-domain trust gaps.

Read more: Digital Dollars Keep Getting Stuck Outside the Real Economy

Making Blockchain Talk the Company Talk

Stablecoins may represent the next evolution in payments technology. But as Mastercard’s BVNK deal suggests, technology alone isn’t enough. Without incentives, governance and trust, even the most efficient systems struggle to scale.

And the barriers to stablecoin adoption aren’t technical. They’re economic, institutional and behavioral. The BVNK deal, however, underscores how incumbents like Mastercard are attempting to address those gaps by integrating stablecoins into the existing systems where they can best provide value while ensuring their own centrality to future transaction flows, regardless of the underlying rails.

“The biggest problem in crypto is not adoption; it’s the user experience,” Mesh CEO and Co-founder Bam Azizi told PYMNTS in an interview posted in May. “You need to make payments so simple that even a grandmother will use it one day, maybe without even knowing that the mechanism behind the scenes is a stablecoin … to do that, you need to do a lot of heavy lifting.”

Behind Mastercard’s BVNK acquisition is a way to wrap stablecoins in the governance, trust and incentive systems that already exist in global payments.

Findings in “Waiting for Certainty: Why Most CFOs Are Holding Back on Crypto and Stablecoins,” a PYMNTS Intelligence study, revealed that these missing governance layers are the among the top reasons corporate executives have yet to experiment with, much less seriously integrate, blockchain solutions themselves.

Across payments, predictability matters as much as efficiency, and institutions need to know how disputes are resolved and who is ultimately responsible.

Still, among the middle-market firms surveyed that were using stablecoins and cryptocurrencies, bank-integrated solutions were the most popular, per the report. Of the CFOs using stablecoins, 8% did so through a payments or treasury FinTech, and 5% did so via self-custody wallets.

See also: Behind the Stablecoin Buzz, Old-School Infrastructure Still Runs the Show

Filling the Gaps in a Fragmented Landscape

End users rarely choose payment infrastructure. They choose products, such as credit cards, mobile wallets or banking apps. The underlying rails are largely invisible, at least when everything is operating correctly.

Against this backdrop, Mastercard’s acquisition of BVNK can be seen as an effort to supply what stablecoins lack. BVNK provides infrastructure that connects traditional financial systems with blockchain-based networks, including tools for converting between fiat currency and stablecoins and enabling cross-border transactions. Mastercard brings something different: a global network of banks and merchants, established governance frameworks and regulatory relationships built over decades.

Even regulators are signaling openness to this model, provided that it maintains financial stability and consumer protections. The focus is shifting from whether stablecoins should exist to how they can be integrated responsibly.

Taken together, it shows that stablecoins are not failing to become standalone currencies; they are succeeding as infrastructure. By operating in the background, they can scale more effectively, align with existing incentives, and navigate the complexities of governance and trust.