Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and Coinbase are reportedly planning a joint stablecoin consortium, according to anonymous sources. It would be one of the largest coordinated pushes by the traditional payments industry into the 320 billion USD stablecoin market to date.
Such a consortium operates a shared payment token that is backed by stable reserves and owned by several companies at once. As a result, it differs from USDC or USDT, which a single issuer controls in each case. For now, however, the parties remain in an exploratory phase: there is no formal deal and possibly not even letters of intent. CoinDesk first reported on the talks in early June 2026, citing three anonymous sources, and Fortune independently confirmed them a few days later. The stablecoin market recently reached a new all-time high of 320 to 325 billion USD. Tether holds roughly 58 percent of that, while Circles USDC accounts for around 76 to 78 billion USD.
The stablecoin consortium would directly target USDC
Today, a large share of the revenue from the USDC system flows to Coinbase. This revenue stems from the reserves that back every USDC in circulation: Circle holds the deposited capital primarily in short-dated US Treasuries and earns interest on it. Under the 2023 agreement with Circle, however, the exchange receives roughly 50 percent of this reserve interest on the outstanding USDC balance. Circle carries most of the operational and regulatory burden, whereas Coinbase takes on barely comparable obligations. Therefore, this revenue logic is precisely what a dedicated consortium token would ultimately replace.
How closely the two companies are intertwined also shows beyond the interest split. In addition, Coinbase took an equity stake in Circle in 2023 and held around 20 percent of all circulating USDC on its own platform in 2024, compared with just 5 percent in 2022. Consequently, a shared stablecoin would internalize the reserve interest revenue among the participants instead of channeling it to an external issuer. There is also the leverage of the existing networks: Visa, Mastercard and Stripe already process a large share of global retail payments and could therefore redirect merchants to a token of their own. Moreover, Circle dominates the regulated stablecoin space in North America and Europe, which is why a consortium token would amount to a direct attack on that position.
Coinbase, however, plays down the situation itself. Following the CoinDesk report, a spokesperson stated that the contract with Circle renews automatically and that the relationship continues on the same terms. This points either to an early phase of the talks or to the exchange hedging both paths at once.
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Billion-dollar investments show how serious the parties are
Mastercard provides the clearest evidence first. In March 2026, the group announced the acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure provider BVNK for up to 1.8 billion USD, of which 300 million USD is structured as performance-based payments. The pace of the revaluation is notable: BVNK was still valued at around 750 million USD in December 2024, meaning Mastercard is putting up more than double that within little over a year. The provider was originally founded in London in 2021, processes roughly 30 billion USD annually and operates in more than 130 countries, with clients such as Worldpay, Deel and Rapyd. As a result, the transaction ranks as the industry's largest stablecoin acquisition and also exceeds Stripe's 1.1 billion USD deal for Bridge.
Stripe and Visa follow the same pattern. Payment processor Stripe acquired its own stablecoin infrastructure with Bridge for 1.1 billion USD, while Visa recently expanded its stablecoin activities to nine blockchains. All three groups have thus built up their capacities in parallel and independently of one another, before any joint consortium was even discussed. Therefore, the venture is not a leap into the unknown but rather a pooling of positions that already exist.
The Coinbase episode around BVNK at the same time illustrates the competition within the possible consortium. The exchange had also examined BVNK as an acquisition target and was close to a deal worth around 2 billion USD in November 2025, before the talks collapsed. Mastercard later secured the same platform. Consequently, the fact that Coinbase is now exploring a consortium can also be read as an alternative route to an infrastructure of its own that the exchange had previously missed out on.
Libra failed, Diem dissolved, this time positioned differently
The comparison with Facebook's Libra is obvious. In 2019, the social network announced a consortium that was to include Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and PayPal, among others. As early as October 2019, however, all the major payment companies left the project under regulatory pressure. The successor organization Diem ultimately dissolved in January 2022.
Structurally, the situation in 2026 is nevertheless different. Visa, Mastercard and Stripe now have their own stablecoin infrastructure and no longer depend on a shared ecosystem as an entry ticket the way they did back then. Moreover, the regulatory environment has shifted: from 1 July 2026, the EU applies the full authorization requirement for stablecoin issuers under MiCA. For regulated payment groups, this hurdle is more of an advantage than a burden. In the United States as well, the GENIUS Act created the necessary legal certainty.
The R3 consortium, however, offers a cautionary counterexample. Their coalition founded in 2015 was meant to create a shared blockchain infrastructure for major banks, yet it lost considerable significance after institutions such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley exited early. The added value of a decentralized architecture failed to convince the participating banks. Consortia therefore often fail not because of regulation but because of governance, once direct competitors have to coordinate on a lasting basis.
Antitrust law and missing details remain the biggest hurdles for the stablecoin consortium
For now, the project's maturity remains low. There is neither a formal deal nor necessarily any letters of intent. The platform name and technical details are still unknown, and the venture is considered "stealth". This covert character likewise signals an early development phase, possibly involving further companies.
Antitrust law furthermore represents a structural risk. Visa and Mastercard jointly control a large share of global card payments and are already in the regulators' focus because of this market power. A shared stablecoin network of the world's largest payment groups would likely sharpen this constellation, because it ties two dominant competitors together in an additional new market segment. Therefore, even under the more regulation-friendly Trump administration, antitrust authorities would probably scrutinize such cooperation closely.
There is also the governance risk between competitors that already troubled Libra and R3. For now, the central building blocks for a reliable assessment of feasibility are missing, because neither a governance structure nor an issuer nor an underlying blockchain has been named. As long as these remain open, the consortium stays an ambitious intention rather than a concrete product.
