Invest1 publisher3 min readPublished
Marqeta adds Mastercard-owned BVNK to a card stack that already had Zero Hash
BVNK processed more than $30 billion of stablecoin transactions last year and now plugs into Marqeta's issuing platform, where the card rails stay as they are and the currency conversion happens out of the cardholder's sight.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- BVNK and Marqeta are collaborating so card issuers can put stablecoin capability into digital wallets and cards, with the conversion between digital and traditional currency handled behind the scenes.
- Mastercard owns BVNK, an acquisition KBW analysts read as support for the network's plan to act as an orchestration layer as stablecoins and tokenized deposits grow alongside cards and ACH.
- Marqeta had already embedded Zero Hash's stablecoin technology in its card-issuing platform, so BVNK becomes a second supplier of broadly the same function.
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Why it matters
- capability Any merchant already taking Mastercard can be paid out of a stablecoin balance without touching its terminal or its acceptance contract, because the conversion sits upstream of the authorisation.
- constraint Merchant acceptance is only half of it: consumers and businesses still rarely pay merchants in stablecoins, and nothing in this collaboration gives them a reason to hold spending balances that way.
- decision Issuers building inside Marqeta now choose between two stablecoin suppliers, one of them owned by the network their transactions route over, and KBW frames the choice as a matter of licensing and compliance permissions.
- precedent Buying the plumbing and then steering an issuing partner onto it sets a template Mastercard can repeat with the other firms in its crypto partner program.
The card rail is untouched. A cardholder funded from a stablecoin balance presents a Mastercard, the merchant is paid in the currency it already takes, and the conversion between digital and traditional money happens behind the scenes along with the other processing steps [1]. So the revenue question is the conversion spread and whatever an issuer pays for the capability. American Banker did not report terms.
BVNK processed more than $30 billion in stablecoin transactions in 2025 [2], which averages roughly $2.5 billion a month [3]. That figure covers everything the company processed; card-linked spend is not broken out. What BVNK sells is an application programming interface for sending, receiving, storing and converting digital currencies, wired to payment networks including Swift, Sepa, ACH and Fedwire [4]. PayPal and Circle are among the clients that have used its tools to build stablecoin networks [5].
Marqeta already had this function. An earlier deal put Zero Hash's stablecoin technology inside Marqeta's card-issuing platform, making stablecoin debit cards usable across its network [6]. On what the second supplier adds, analysts at Keefe Bruyette & Woods wrote that the Mastercard deal "highlighted BVNK's embedded licensing, compliance tooling, and regulatory permissions as a key differentiator, especially for banks and fintechs that want faster time to market without building the infrastructure themselves" [7], and called BVNK the "plumbing" between different blockchain-based currencies [8]. Marqeta is also one of Mastercard's partners [9].
"Being able to spend on the Mastercard network makes it easier. If a merchant accepts Mastercard they can accept a stablecoin. That's our mission," Vander Leest said [10]. Peculic, speaking for Marqeta, said BVNK "plays a key role in our growing ecosystem of stablecoin infrastructure partners, further connecting Marqeta with Mastercard's network and helping us enable stablecoin-backed card solutions that link directly to existing card rails" [11].
Once the token sits behind a network card, acceptance takes care of itself, and stablecoins are still rarely used directly to pay merchants [12]. The open variable is whether anyone holds spending balances in stablecoins in the first place. The flow KBW points at is not shopper checkout: the firm wrote that "this is the right strategy to future-proof for a world that could potentially see a migration of these high friction commercial flows on-chain" [13]. Phil Philliou, a payments consultant, told American Banker that "stablecoin's value comes from network liquidity and counterparty adoption" and that he expects more collaboration between banks [14].
Mastercard did not build BVNK, it bought it, and KBW likened BVNK's model to Bridge [15]; Marqeta sits in Mastercard's crypto partner program alongside Circle and Paxos [16]. The parts were built outside the networks and are being bolted in by ownership and partnership. I think the test is narrow and checkable: whether an issuer inside Marqeta picks the network-owned supplier over the independent one, and whether card-linked stablecoin spend ever gets reported as a number.
What to watch
- The first named issuer to launch a BVNK-backed stablecoin card program on Marqeta, and the date it goes live.
- Any disclosure that separates card-linked spend from the rest of BVNK's stablecoin processing volume.
- Whether Zero Hash keeps the Marqeta programs it already supplies now that a Mastercard-owned rival sits in the same platform.