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More Than a Hundred Thousand Merchants Have Been Paid in Stablecoins. Almost None of Them Know It.

The most successful stablecoin product of the last two years is one the merchant never sees.



A cardholder taps five dollars at a coffee shop. The balance behind the card sits in USDC. In the roughly four hundred milliseconds before the terminal confirms the payment, an issuer processor has to answer one question, whether the account has the funds, and then the transaction settles exactly the way every card transaction settles. The coffee shop receives local currency, a few days later, through the same card network it has always used. Nothing on its statement says the word stablecoin.

That is the paradox at the centre of a piece the venture investor F-Prime published at the end of August. It maps a market that is working by any reasonable measure, and it says plainly that the merchant is the one party for whom almost nothing has changed.



 The demand side is no longer in question.

F-Prime calls stablecoin-linked debit cards one of the clearest examples of product-market fit in crypto, and the numbers it cites support the claim.

Visa estimates that stablecoin-linked card volume grew 319 percent to 5.2 billion dollars in 2025, across more than 130 card programs in over 50 countries, as cited by F-Prime. Paymentscan puts cumulative spending on stablecoin-powered cards above 10.9 billion dollars, and RedotPay forecasts that annual spending could reach 50 billion dollars by 2028, both as cited by F-Prime. The two largest full-stack providers together process close to nine billion dollars of annualized card volume, according to F-Prime's own estimate.



The reason is simple enough to fit in one sentence. For somebody holding digital dollars, a card is the shortest path from a balance to groceries, fuel and everyday commerce.



What changed from the first generation of crypto cards is the asset behind them. Coinbase and others let users spend bitcoin at merchants as early as 2015, but the customer was liquidating a volatile asset at the point of sale and paying for the privilege. F-Prime notes that Coinbase has charged 2.49 percent on purchases funded with non-stablecoin crypto assets. A dollar-denominated stablecoin behind the balance removes the liquidation and most of the conversion friction. The holder spends a dollar and the card network sees a dollar.



The sentence that should worry everyone who sells to merchants.

Then F-Prime reports the line that reframes the whole category. Rain's chief executive, as cited in the piece, said that stablecoin-funded payments have reached more than one hundred thousand merchants without them knowing it, because the transactions still settle through traditional payment networks on a T plus three basis.

Read that slowly. A hundred thousand businesses have already accepted stablecoin-funded payments. Not one of them chose to. Not one of them received the settlement speed, the programmability or the transparency that the payer's money carried right up to the moment it touched the card rail.

The value of the on-chain balance stops at the authorization. Everything downstream of it is the same settlement chain merchants have lived with for decades: acquirer, network, batch, reconciliation, a deposit that arrives days later in local currency, and a fee taken somewhere in between.

None of that is a criticism of the card model. It is the reason the model scaled. Card acceptance already exists nearly everywhere a business takes payment, and a product that rides it inherits that reach on day one. Asking every merchant to install something new would have killed the category before it started.

But it means the industry has built a remarkable consumer product on top of a merchant experience that has not moved. F-Prime says it directly: the next step is moving stablecoins deeper into merchant settlement.



Why the merchant side is the harder half 👀

There is a structural reason the consumer side moved first. A consumer product needs one decision, the holder's. A merchant settlement product needs the merchant's finance team, its accounting system, its treasury policy and often its bank to agree that a different form of money is acceptable on the receiving side.

That is a much heavier lift than a card program, and F-Prime's own map shows where the stack is still thin. It lists settlement platforms that provide round-the-clock fiat and stablecoin conversion, crypto-native regulated banks that combine a charter with control of the stablecoin leg, and what it calls stablecoin-native issuer processors, which it says no provider has yet established at scale. The common thread is that the infrastructure for moving value on-chain exists and the infrastructure for receiving it inside a regulated business is still being assembled.

The concentration of the current model adds a second reason to build the merchant side carefully. F-Prime points out that most issuance runs through a small number of full-stack providers, and that the abrupt shutdown of one card infrastructure provider, Kulipa, in July 2026 stranded card programs across twenty clients. When a single layer carries most of the volume, a merchant who depends on it inherits that dependency without having chosen it.



 The settlement side is starting to arrive where merchants already work.

The useful signal this month is not another card launch. It is where stablecoin settlement is beginning to appear.

On 7 October, Circle and Tereina, a financial services company backed by SAP, announced an integration to bring USDC and EURC into enterprise payment workflows, beginning with SAP Pay, with Arc as the preferred blockchain. According to the announcement, eligible businesses will be able to send and receive stablecoin payments without leaving the business applications they already use. The announcement describes the SAP ecosystem as generating 84 percent of global commerce, a figure attributed to SAP rather than measured independently here. USDC is positioned as the preferred stablecoin for USD-denominated workflows and EURC as the option for euro-denominated activity.

That design choice is the important part. It does not ask a finance team to adopt a new system. It puts the settlement option inside the system the finance team already runs. The companies say they plan proof-of-value programs with customers over the coming months, which is the honest way to describe where this stands: announced and being piloted, not yet a default.

Put that next to the F-Prime picture and the shape of the next two years becomes visible. The consumer side reached merchants by hiding inside the card rail. The settlement side will reach merchants by showing up inside the enterprise software that already holds their invoices, payables and receivables. Neither approach asks the merchant to change its habits. Only the second one actually delivers the money to the merchant in the form the payer sent it.



 What changes for a merchant when settlement is native.



It is worth being concrete about what the merchant is currently not receiving.



Timing. A payment that settles in under a second is working capital the same day rather than a receivable that clears later in the week. For a small business, that gap is the difference between paying a supplier from revenue and drawing on a credit line.

Information. A card settlement arrives as a batch total that has to be matched back to orders. An on-chain settlement is a single record with the amount, the time and the reference attached, readable by the payer and the payee from the same source.

Currency choice. 

A merchant selling across borders can hold dollars in USDC or euros in EURC rather than accepting whatever conversion happens somewhere in the chain.



And a smaller point that matters more over time. When settlement is native, the merchant's balance can sit in an instrument that does something while it waits, instead of passing through a series of intermediaries before it becomes usable at all.

None of this requires the merchant to care about blockchains, any more than a coffee shop cares how card authorization works. It requires the settlement to land in a form the merchant's existing tools understand.



 Where the rest of the stack fits 👀

Meridian Finance is one connected system on Arc, Circle's Layer 1, rather than a set of products sharing a logo, and acceptance is where it starts.

Meridian Pay accepts USDC and EURC at checkout, gasless for the payer, settling in under a second, so the merchant receives the same money the customer sent. YieldVault wraps Circle USYC so a merchant balance waiting between sales and payables earns Treasury yield rather than sitting idle, withdrawable at any time, with yield coming from the underlying Treasuries and no fixed or guaranteed rate offered or implied. PaymentStream pays by the second for work delivered continuously, which turns payables like contractor time into a stream rather than a monthly batch. A balance can sit in USDC, EURC, USYC or cirBTC and move between them without leaving the chain. Firmata Protocol carries identity, reputation and conditional settlement, so a payment to an unfamiliar counterparty can release when the condition is met rather than on trust.

On Arc, gas is paid in USDC and finality lands in under a second, so the settlement asset and the transaction currency are the same thing. That is the property the card model cannot give a merchant, because the card model was built to move a promise of money first and the money itself later.



 The honest part 🔍

All of it runs on Arc testnet, more than 20 contracts, each verified on Arcscan from the second of deploy, roughly one hundred thousand transactions and four thousand on-chain holders. Not mainnet.

Arc's public mainnet went live on 16 September with eleven founding validators. An independent security audit covering the contracts and the front end gates our migration, and it has not happened yet. We could have pushed the same bytecode the week Arc launched. We did not.

For a piece about merchant settlement that matters more than usual. A merchant who accepts a new form of money is trusting the rail with revenue, not with a test balance. The standard for asking for that trust is an independent audit, not a louder pitch.





Whether anybody publishes a merchant-side figure to sit next to the consumer-side ones. Card volume, program counts and cumulative spend are all reported. The number of merchants that chose to receive stablecoin settlement directly is not, and it is the number that matters.

Whether settlement inside enterprise software moves from proof of value to default. The Circle and Tereina announcement describes pilots over the coming months. The test is whether stablecoin settlement becomes an option a finance team selects in the tool it already uses, without a separate project.

And whether concentration falls. A market where a few providers carry most of the volume is efficient until one of them stops. A merchant settlement layer that is open and interoperable is the structural answer to that, and it is worth watching whether the next wave is built that way.



If stablecoin cards already reach merchants, why does merchant settlement matter 

❓

Because the card reaches the merchant only as a card payment. The merchant receives local currency days later through the existing network and never sees the stablecoin, its speed or its record. Native settlement means the merchant receives the money in the form the payer sent it, in under a second, with a readable record.



Does a merchant have to change its systems to accept stablecoin settlement 

❓

Not necessarily, and that is the point of the integrations now being announced. The Circle and Tereina announcement describes stablecoin payments available inside existing business applications, starting with SAP Pay. The less a finance team has to change, the more likely adoption becomes.



Is the F-Prime analysis independent research 

❓

It is an investor's analysis, and F-Prime says so, including a disclaimer that the views are its own and may change. Several figures in it, from Visa, Paymentscan and RedotPay, are cited rather than produced by F-Prime. It is a useful map of the market and should be read as one.



Does Meridian perform anti-money-laundering or know-your-customer checks 

❓

No. Where a merchant, institution or broker is the counterparty, it keeps its own customer due diligence and regulatory obligations exactly as it does today. The stack provides settlement, conditional release and proofs.


❓

No. The stack runs on Arc testnet, with every contract verified on Arcscan. Migration is gated by an independent security audit covering the contracts and the front end. Testnet live, audit before mainnet.



The Infrastructure Race for the Next $100 Billion

, Jingwei Li, F-Prime, 27 August 2026, including figures it cites from Visa, Paymentscan and RedotPay.


 Circle Bring USDC and EURC into Enterprise Workflows

, Starting with the SAP Ecosystem Behind 84% of Global Commerce, Circle press release, 7 October 2026.

Built on Arc, Powered by Circle.



Not investment advice. Nothing here endorses any provider or forecasts the decisions of any regulator.

💳 More Than a Hundred Thousand Merchants Have Been Paid in Stablecoins. Almost None of Them Know It.

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