Somewhere inside Walmart and Amazon, treasury teams have spent the past year studying whether the world’s two largest retailers should issue their own dollar-backed digital tokens. Neither has committed to it publicly. But that both are seriously exploring it, according to reporting from Axios and the Wall Street Journal, tells you something the commentary around stablecoins keeps missing: the companies moving fastest are not banks defending deposits. They are merchants trying to escape a fee they have paid, with little choice, for fifty years.
That fee is interchange, the 1.5 to 3 percent that flows to card networks and issuing banks every time a customer taps a card. For a retailer running on low single-digit margins, it is one of the largest line items on the income statement that the retailer itself has almost no power to negotiate down. Stablecoins, reserve-backed digital tokens that settle instantly on a blockchain rather than through the four-party card system, offer a way to route around that toll entirely. That is the real story taking shape in 2026, and it is a different story from the one most boardrooms think they are watching.
The bank-run narrative that regulators already closed off
For most of 2024 and 2025, the dominant fear about stablecoins was that they would pull deposits out of the banking system: why leave money earning nothing in a checking account when a stablecoin could, in theory, pass through the yield earned on its Treasury bill reserves? Congress addressed that fear directly. The GENIUS Act, signed into law in July 2025 and now moving through implementation at the OCC and Treasury, requires payment stablecoin issuers to back their tokens one-to-one with cash, Federal Reserve balances, or short-dated Treasury instruments, subject to monthly attestation. Crucially, it also prohibits issuers from paying interest or yield to holders in connection with holding the token. Congress, in other words, pre-empted the deposit-flight scenario by law before it could fully materialise.
That single provision has quietly reframed the entire debate. If stablecoins cannot legally compete with banks on yield, the disruption has to show up somewhere else. It is showing up in payments infrastructure, where the incumbents under pressure are not retail banks but the card networks and the merchant-acquiring ecosystem built around them.
Visa, Mastercard and Stripe’s Bridge unit have responded exactly as you would expect an incumbent to respond to a threat it cannot ignore: by trying to own it. All three are backing a new multi-chain stablecoin settlement platform aimed at giving banks and payment processors more settlement options, with Mastercard framing the effort around “real-world utility, especially in settlement, where timing and liquidity matter most.” Read that carefully. It is not a company saying stablecoins are irrelevant to its business. It is a company that processes roughly a fifth of the world’s card transactions moving to make sure that whatever settlement layer wins, it collects a toll on it too.
Why the fight matters more to CEOs than to crypto traders
This is the part that should concern any executive whose company processes high transaction volumes on thin margins: retail, travel, subscription commerce, logistics, and business-to-business trade finance. The interchange model has been stable for decades because no credible alternative existed at scale. That is no longer true. A retailer settling directly in stablecoins with a supplier, or eventually with a consumer through a wallet rather than a card, is not a hypothetical; it is the specific commercial logic Walmart and Amazon are reportedly evaluating. Whether or not either company actually issues a token, the fact that they are willing to spend legal and technical resources studying it should tell every large buyer of card-processing services that their supplier, the card network, now has a credible reason to renegotiate rather than simply collect.
There is a structural wrinkle worth understanding, because it explains why this will not happen the way most executives assume. The GENIUS Act restricts stablecoin issuance to insured depository institution subsidiaries, OCC-approved federal issuers, and state-qualified issuers. A public company that is not predominantly in the financial business cannot simply launch its own coin; it needs unanimous approval from a review committee made up of the Treasury Secretary, the Federal Reserve chair and the FDIC chair, or it needs to issue through a chartered banking partner. Expect the practical outcome to be a wave of retailer-bank partnerships and bank-as-a-service arrangements rather than a flood of retailer-branded coins. The disruption is real, but it will arrive wearing a bank’s regulatory clothing.
Banks are not fighting this the way the 2021-era crypto-versus-finance narrative predicted. JPMorgan has been publicly skeptical that stablecoins will reach a trillion-dollar market by 2028, even as it builds its own deposit-token infrastructure in parallel. A Federal Reserve research note published this year makes the pattern explicit: banks have historically met disruptive payment innovations, from money market funds to debit networks, not by resisting them but by absorbing their functionality into bank-issued instruments. Tokenized deposits, which the GENIUS Act explicitly permits banks to issue, are the industry’s answer: the settlement speed of a stablecoin, inside the regulated, interest-bearing, deposit-insured perimeter. It is co-option, not capitulation.
A second-order effect nobody priced into the innovation story
The part of this story with the least obvious connection to corporate strategy is happening inside the US Treasury market, and it deserves more attention than it has received. Standard Chartered now estimates the stablecoin market, roughly $300 to $320 billion today, could reach $2 trillion by 2028. Because issuers must hold Treasury bills as reserves, that growth implies roughly $1 trillion in new bill demand over the same period, on top of Federal Reserve purchases, against a projected net new bill supply of around $1.3 trillion under the current debt-issuance mix. StanChart’s analysts suggest the Treasury may need to shift its issuance further toward bills, potentially crowding out long-dated auctions, to meet that demand without disrupting yields.
A retail payments product built to help merchants avoid card fees is now large enough to influence how a sovereign government finances itself. That is the kind of consequence a purely technological reading of stablecoins misses entirely, and it also suggests why Washington’s regulatory posture has been more accommodating than many predicted: a captive, growing buyer of short-term government debt is not a constituency any Treasury Secretary dismisses lightly.
India’s different bet, and why it matters beyond India
The Reserve Bank of India has taken the opposite position from Washington, and for reasons worth understanding on their own terms rather than as reflexive caution. The RBI’s position, laid out in its financial stability commentary this year, is that stablecoins fail money’s basic test of singleness, elasticity and integrity: a token whose reserve assets can lose value in a bond market shock cannot reliably hold its peg, and a private, dollar-denominated settlement instrument sits awkwardly against a central bank’s responsibility for monetary sovereignty. The RBI’s preferred alternative is its own central bank digital currency, the digital rupee, alongside continued expansion of UPI.
And UPI’s expansion is the more interesting half of India’s answer to the same toll-booth problem that is driving Walmart and Amazon. UPI already settles transactions without the interchange economics of card networks; India is now exporting that model rather than importing a private one. Cross-border UPI transactions grew roughly twentyfold in a single year, from around 37,000 in FY24 to more than 755,000 in FY25, with the system now live in seven countries, including the UAE, Singapore, France and Sri Lanka, and accepted by more than 1.5 million international merchants. Where American retailers are trying to build a private escape route around card interchange, India has been building a public one for years and is now selling access to it bilaterally, corridor by corridor.
For Indian exporters, GCCs and IT services firms billing overseas clients in dollars, this creates a genuine strategic choice rather than a settled answer. Dollar stablecoins may offer faster, cheaper settlement on outbound corridors where UPI has no reach, but they sit outside a regulatory framework the RBI actively discourages domestically. UPI-linked corridors carry sovereign backing and are expanding, but remain limited to specific partner geographies. Treasury teams at Indian companies with meaningful cross-border receivables should be modelling both rails now, rather than waiting for one to become the obvious default.
What this actually asks of a CEO
The mistake would be treating any of this as a decision about whether to “adopt crypto.” It is a decision about where the toll booths on your company’s payment flows currently sit, who owns them, and whether that ownership is about to be renegotiated. For a subscription business, a retailer, a logistics company or an exporter, the relevant question for the next board cycle is not philosophical. It is which of your largest, highest-volume payment corridors are exposed to a settlement layer that competitors, card networks, banks or sovereign payment systems are all simultaneously trying to reinvent, and what your treasury function is doing to make sure you are not the last one still paying full price for plumbing everyone else has started to renegotiate.
