Two American banks have started paying the card network in stablecoins

At the end of November 2025 the network’s stablecoin settlement program was worth $3.5 billion on an annual basis. On December 17 Bitcoin closed at $86,243, −1.8% against the previous day.

What changes behind the counter

For you, the person paying, nothing changes, and that’s the beauty of it. What changes is the dead time in between. Settlement happens every day instead of only on business days, the money moves in a few minutes, and nothing stops between Friday and Monday anymore. At the end of November the program was worth $3.5 billion a year.

The rules explain it better than the enthusiasm does. In the United States the federal stablecoin law was signed in July, and with it went the uncertainty that had kept the banks on the sidelines. The stablecoin market has passed $300 billion, and at that point a bank stops asking whether it’s allowed and starts asking whether it pays.

Why that chain, and not another

In the same weeks a big investment bank tokenized debt on the same chain, and an American asset manager launched a liquidity fund on it. When three different institutions pick the same infrastructure for three different uses, that infrastructure has stopped being a technology bet.

The network also announced that it will be among the first validators of the chain the stablecoin issuer is building for itself. To me that’s the most interesting step: the company that processes the payments starts running a piece of the infrastructure as well as using it.

And meanwhile the rest of the world gets ready

The project is part of a program run by the Japanese regulator, which has already approved a joint trial by the country’s three largest banks. The chairman of the group leading the initiative called the shift to a token economy “an irreversible social trend”, which is the kind of line you use once the decision has already been made.

In Hong Kong, meanwhile, the territory’s largest licensed exchange listed on the stock market, raising $206 million, with the retail tranche subscribed 393 times over. On its first day of trading it opened higher, reached five percent up and closed two and a half percent down. Enthusiasm at the raise, coolness on the secondary market, all on the same day.

What the price was doing in the meantime

On the macro side, the American employment figures had come out, with unemployment at 4.6 percent and expectations of a rate cut shifting accordingly. That’s what moves the price in the short term. The infrastructure news moves something else, on timescales the daily chart doesn’t pick up.

On days like this the useful thing is to keep the two apart. The price responds to rates, leverage and mood; the infrastructure responds to rules and costs. Mix them up and you end up explaining a two percent move with a banking partnership that had nothing to do with it.

Put bluntly: on the day the American banks started settling in stablecoins, bitcoin’s price did minus two, because they’re two different clocks and only one of them makes news every day.