BVNK and Marqeta Team Up to Let Companies Issue Stablecoin-Backed Cards
The partnership, announced Sept. 9, pairs BVNK’s stablecoin infrastructure with Marqeta’s card-issuing platform so businesses can let customers spend digital dollars anywhere Mastercard is accepted, without merchants changing anything on their end.
LONDON — BVNK and Marqeta announced a partnership on Sept. 9 that lets businesses issue payment cards backed by stablecoins, allowing end users to spend digital dollars at any merchant that accepts Mastercard without the merchant needing to change its own payment systems. BVNK supplies the underlying stablecoin infrastructure — converting and settling the digital-dollar balances that fund the card — while Marqeta handles the card-issuing mechanics: network relationships, card program management and merchant acceptance.
The arrangement is designed to be invisible at the point of sale. Because the card ultimately runs on Mastercard's existing rails, a merchant terminal processes the transaction the same way it would any other card payment; the stablecoin conversion happens upstream, between the cardholder's digital-dollar balance and the fiat settlement that reaches the merchant.
The tie-up comes after Mastercard's acquisition of BVNK, announced in August 2026, which folded BVNK's stablecoin settlement technology into the card network's broader push into digital-asset payment infrastructure. Pairing that technology with Marqeta, a card-issuing platform used by a range of fintechs and crypto-native companies to launch branded card products, gives both crypto-native firms and traditional businesses a route to offer stablecoin-funded cards without building settlement infrastructure themselves.
The pitch is aimed at two different customer types: crypto-native platforms that already hold customer balances in stablecoins and want to let users spend them directly, and non-crypto companies that want to offer a stablecoin-linked card as a feature without needing any digital-asset expertise in-house. In both cases, Marqeta's existing merchant-acceptance network is the mechanism that removes the need for point-of-sale changes.
As with other bank- and network-level stablecoin initiatives disclosed this year, the practical test will be adoption and reliability at scale rather than the technical architecture, which mirrors approaches other stablecoin-card efforts have already taken. Neither company disclosed volume commitments, pricing, or a specific list of launch partners at announcement, so the near-term significance of the deal is the infrastructure pairing itself rather than a disclosed customer rollout.