Acquiring banks are already trying and struggling. Shift4, one of the best-resourced payment companies in the world, took three years, three separate vendors, and custom development to ship stablecoin settlement. Nuvei, faced with the Circle Payment Network integration, found it so complex they ultimately preferred to delegate to stablecoin-native startups rather than build it themselves.
We built directly on stablecoin rails from day one. Refactoring existing infrastructure to handle B2C stablecoin flows — batching, on-chain finality, consumer card network interfacing — requires being native to this stack from the start.
The deeper issue is architectural. For stablecoin settlement to deliver real value, funds have to land in self-custody wallets. That means moving away from a sponsor-bank-dependent architecture toward something genuinely crypto-native. And it's binary: as long as 1% of the stack still relies on the sponsor bank model, the rest of the infrastructure has to bend around it.
Same logic on compliance: KYC, transaction monitoring, and regulatory reporting were designed around fiat rails. Mapping them onto on-chain settlement is a rebuild, not a config change. And retrofitting compliance on live infrastructure is where payment companies get their licenses revoked.
The clearest signal: Stripe treats us as a complementary player. Their France CEO publicly highlights us on LinkedIn and has invited us to their cross-border events for their own merchant base.
We update our underwriting rules every month. Traditional competitors run on 2-4 year update cycles. In fast-moving verticals, and especially when new verticals emerge, the creator economy is a good example, the ability to underwrite correctly from day one is a meaningful advantage. By the time an incumbent has updated their rules, we have 3 years of processing history and the advantages that come with.