SoFi Starts Settling Its Entire Card Program on a Stablecoin, Via Mastercard

SAN FRANCISCO — SoFi Bank has begun settling its entire debit and credit card program over Mastercard’s network using SoFiUSD, a stablecoin the OCC-chartered bank issues itself, with the migration going live Sept. 22 and the company projecting more than $25 billion in annualized settlement volume once it is complete.

For a cardholder swiping at a coffee shop, nothing about the transaction looks different. The change is in what happens after the swipe: instead of settlement flowing through the card networks’ traditional bank-to-bank rails, SoFi is routing the backend leg over a blockchain-based stablecoin it controls, then converting back to dollars on its own books. SoFi has said merchants do not need to hold the stablecoin, integrate anything new, or change how they accept payment — settlement funds land in their SoFi Bank accounts as dollars, same as before.

The pitch for doing this is largely about speed and cost on the back end: stablecoin rails can settle around the clock rather than waiting on traditional interbank settlement windows, and a bank that controls its own issuance avoids paying intermediaries for that leg of the transaction. SoFi has not published a breakdown of the specific cost savings it expects, so the $25 billion volume figure is a projection of scale, not of cost reduction.

The move puts SoFi in a small but growing group of federally chartered banks willing to move card settlement — as opposed to just offering crypto trading or custody — onto stablecoin rails, following a wave of similar announcements this year as the regulatory environment under the GENIUS Act has firmed up around bank-issued dollar stablecoins. Whether $25 billion in annualized volume actually materializes, and whether other card issuers follow with their own bank-issued stablecoins rather than relying on third-party ones, remains to be seen over the next several quarters.