Three payment giants, one direction

Mastercard launched its Global Money Platform, combining traditional currencies and stablecoins through BVNK, the infrastructure business it acquired in August. The platform helps businesses manage cross-border payments while reducing the need for separate pools of prefunded cash.

Visa moved USDC funding for cross-border payouts into commercial use through Inyo Global. Stripe announced a collaboration with Plasma, a new layer 1 blockchain focused on stablecoins, to develop cards supporting multiple currencies and reduce unnecessary conversions.

At Legends4Legends two weeks ago, Haseeb Qureshi illustrated these economics through Rain, a fast-growing company in Dragonfly’s portfolio that provides infrastructure for stablecoin-powered cards and payments. Card programmes traditionally keep cash buffers to cover nights, weekends and bank holidays. Settling in stablecoins allows money to move outside banking hours, reducing idle capital and improving margins.

Businesses such as BVNK, Rain and Plasma are helping turn that economic advantage into products. The established payment networks are bringing the reach to make them widely available.

Also this week

• Visa Direct moves stablecoin payments into commercial deployment
• Mastercard launches “Global Money Platform” to merge fiat and stablecoins
• Plasma and Stripe partner to develop multi-currency stablecoin-backed cards
• BNY and Citadel Securities complete Treasury repo in first use of tokenized assets on major triparty platform
• Federated Hermes joins Wall Street's tokenization push with plans for first onchain fund shares
• Morgan Stanley expects to support tokenized equities in Q1 2027

Relevant financial updates

• DATA Network*, an AI training-data provenance and licensing protocol, has received a $30mln strategic investment from Sui Foundation
• Fission*, a tokenized asset liquidity platform, has raised $10mln in a Series A round led by Pantera Capital with investments from Circle Ventures, Borderless Capital, and Ari Rubenstein
• Multiliquid*, an institutional liquidity protocol for atomic swaps between tokenized assets and stablecoins, has raised $8mln in a Seed round led by Polychain with investments from Wellington, VanEck, Strobe Ventures, and 4 others
• Zaria, a real-time loan servicing and collateral management platform for digital-asset-backed lending, has raised $5.2mln in a Seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners
• Kraken owner Payward has acquired Lithuania's Saldo Bank for an undisclosed amount

*Underlying TBV portfolio position | Prices as per 16/10

Interesting things to read

• The IMF examines what tokenization needs to scale, from legal certainty to interoperability
• Stanford’s Dan Boneh joins the a16z crypto podcast to discuss whether AI could break cryptography and how it could strengthen security