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 17 December Bitcoin closed at $86,243, −1.8% against the previous day.

What changes behind the till

For the person paying, nothing changes — and that is the point. What changes is the dead time in between: settlement windows open every day instead of on business days, funds moving in minutes, and no break between Friday and Monday. At the end of November the program was worth $3.5 billion a year.

The regulatory context explains it better than the enthusiasm does: in the United States the federal stablecoin act was signed in July, and from there the uncertainty that had kept the banks still fell away. The stablecoin market has passed $300 billion, and at that point the question for a bank is no longer whether it is lawful, it is whether it pays.

Why that chain, and not another

In the same weeks a large investment bank tokenized debt on the same chain and an American asset manager announced 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.

And the network announced it will also be among the first validators of the chain the stablecoin issuer is building for itself. That is the most interesting step: whoever processes the payments isn’t just using the infrastructure any more, they are starting to run a piece of it.

And meanwhile the rest of the world gets ready

The project sits inside a program run by the Japanese regulator that 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 when 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. The first day of trading opened up, touched five percent and closed down two and a half: the enthusiasm of the raise and the coldness of the secondary market, 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 is what moves the price in the short term, while the infrastructure news moves something else — and on timescales the daily chart doesn’t record.

Separating the two is the useful part of days like this. The price responds to rates, to leverage and to mood; the infrastructure responds to rules and to costs. When the two levels get confused you end up explaining a two percent move with a banking partnership — and it has 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 are two different clocks and only one of them makes news every day.