Who Needs Whom? Card Networks, Stablecoins and the Future of Payments

Here is the question nobody in polite payments circles wants to ask out loud: Do the card networks need stablecoins—or do stablecoins need the card networks?

It sounds almost impertinent. Stablecoins were supposed to be the insurgents. Peer-to-peer. Borderless. Frictionless. The whole point was to route around the Mastercards of the world. To build a payments layer that didn’t require a network with 50-plus years of infrastructure, compliance muscle and a cut of every transaction.

And yet, here we are. Mastercard isn’t fighting stablecoins. It’s embracing them. Integrating them. And that raises the sharper version of the question: If the card networks are embracing the technology that was supposed to kill it, what does that mean for the future of payments?

The Challenge From the Top

PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster put the disruption question to Mastercard Executive Vice President of Blockchain and Digital Assets Raj Dhamodharan, without a lot of diplomatic padding. Could stablecoins and crypto disintermediate Mastercard within a decade? Could the network itself become optional?

Dhamodharan didn’t flinch. And he didn’t reach for defensive talking points.

“We think of stablecoins as rails,” he said. “Each stablecoin can be thought of as a global ACH (automated clearing house), where the consumer doesn’t see the complexity.”

Read that carefully. He didn’t say stablecoins are a threat to be neutralized. He said they’re rails, infrastructure, the same category of thing Mastercard has always been in the business of running. That framing is either a masterclass in corporate aikido or a genuine insight about where the industry is headed. Probably both.

The Last Mile Was Never the Technology’s Problem

Webster introduced the concept that has quietly killed more payments revolutions than any regulator: the last-mile problem. You can move value cheaply and instantly on chain. But making that value land somewhere useful, where a merchant accepts it, a worker can spend it, a government can tax it, is a different challenge entirely.

Mastercard and the card networks spent decades building the answer to that problem. Global acceptance. Dispute resolution. Identity verification. Fraud infrastructure. Compliance frameworks that span 210 countries. None of that is glamorous. None of it makes a good whitepaper. But all of it is what makes a payment network actually work when real money is on the line.

Dhamodharan’s argument—and it’s a compelling one—is that stablecoins arrive without any of that institutional scaffolding, which means the last mile isn’t a problem for Mastercard. It’s an opening.

“The merchant may continue to want to receive value in fiat because their everyday expenses are in fiat,” he noted.

Translation: Someone still needs to do the translation between the on-chain world and the real one. And Mastercard has been in the translation business for half a century.

What’s Actually Working—and What Isn’t

Citi Global Head of Digital Assets Ryan Rugg, who has spent years in the institutional blockchain trenches, brought the kind of earned skepticism that only comes from having actually tried to build this stuff.

On the technical side, she was direct about where the bodies are buried.

“Bridges are a nightmare,” she said of the cross-chain connectors that allow assets to move between blockchains. “That’s where the majority of the hacks happen.”

For enterprises that process trillions daily, a system where settlement finality is uncertain is less of a nuisance than it is a disqualifier, she said. Financial institutions don’t do “probably settled.”

On the opportunity side, Dhamodharan pointed to disbursements, the gig economy payouts, contractor payments and cross-border transfers as the use case that’s real and moving now. Remittances are next. These aren’t glamorous consumer applications. They’re operational pain points where stablecoins can move faster and cheaper than correspondent banking, without asking anyone to change their spending behavior.

Rugg’s reminder about history was pointed.

When Citi tried to bring 65 banks onto a shared blockchain network starting back in 2017, the obstacles weren’t primarily technical.

“Technology, compliance, regulatory—incentives, incentives, incentives,” she said. The problem was getting institutions with competing interests to agree on anything at all.

The Missing Layer Has a Name

The conversation quickly converged on a concept that doesn’t get nearly enough attention in the stablecoin conversation: orchestration. The technology can move value. What it can’t do, on its own, is manage fragmentation across dozens of chains, wallet standards, regulatory jurisdictions, currency conversions and compliance requirements. All simultaneously, all reliably.

“The technology underneath this is quite powerful,” Dhamodharan said. “But that alone is not sufficient. To unlock the full value, really that orchestration needs to be provided.”

This is where the needle-threading gets interesting. If stablecoins are the rails and orchestration is the missing layer, then the entity best positioned to provide that orchestration is, almost by definition, a large, trusted, globally connected network with existing relationships across thousands of financial institutions.

So, do stablecoins need Mastercard? On current evidence, possibly more than Mastercard needs them.

Where Will Card Networks Be in 10 Years?

Webster pushed the decade question, and it produced the most revealing exchange of the conversation. Dhamodharan’s answer, in essence: the network will be bigger, more valuable and doing things that don’t look much like swiping a card.

“We are quite different from 10 years ago,” he said. “Each technology cycle innovation actually only adds to the value that we offer.”

Mastercard 10 years ago was a card company. Today it operates tokenization services, data analytics, identity verification and is now wiring stablecoin orchestration into its network. The card is increasingly just one delivery mechanism among many.

Ten years from now, the working hypothesis from this conversation is a card network that looks less like a card network and more like a trust and standards layer for global money movement, one that is as comfortable settling a stablecoin transaction in Lagos as a contactless payment in London. The brand may say Mastercard. The underlying infrastructure may be unrecognizable.

Regulatory clarity is accelerating this.

Dhamodharan pointed to the emergence of formal frameworks in Europe and the U.S. as the real unlock; not the technology, not the market enthusiasm, but the rules.

“The big pivot that I saw is when governments actually had a clear set of rules,” he said. Clear rules mean institutions can finally distinguish between digital assets they can integrate and ones they can’t touch, and build accordingly.

The Revolution That Became a Systems Upgrade

Electronic trading didn’t eliminate stock exchanges. It changed how they worked. The internet didn’t dissolve banks, it moved them online. And stablecoins, on current trajectory, will not eliminate card networks. They will become part of what card networks do.

Rugg put it plainly: “We’re here building the future of networks.” Not disrupting them. Building them.

Cards will still be tapped. Disputes will still be adjudicated. The next decade isn’t about overthrowing the financial intermediaries; it’s about rewiring what runs underneath them. The infrastructure may be unrecognizable. The experience, for most people, won’t be.

The technologies that matter most, history keeps suggesting, are the ones users never notice. That’s not a eulogy for cryptocurrency’s ambitions. It might be the highest possible compliment.

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