Stablecoin card spending passed $1 billion a month in July, and BKN301’s CTO says banks need to rebuild the layer behind the card

Stablecoin card spending crossed $1 billion a month in July and is forecast to reach $50 billion a year by 2028, according to research reported by Reuters in August. Mahesh Paolini-Subramanya, CTO at BKN301, says the real question is not whether people will spend stablecoins, but what banks and issuers have to rebuild so those balances can sit behind an ordinary card.

1. Paolini-Subramanya argues that the familiar payment card, not a new wallet interface, is the most likely path for stablecoins into everyday spending. He said the pattern matters more than the absolute number: three years ago stablecoin card spending was “a fraction” of today’s level, and now it has passed $1 billion in a single month.
2. He says the use case is strongest where a US dollar-pegged balance solves a real problem that local banking does not. That includes workers and small businesses across Africa and the Middle East dealing with currency instability, costly remittance corridors, and thin banking infrastructure. In his view, the fastest-growing markets are not necessarily the most crypto-native ones; they are the places where payments pain is sharpest and where banks have enough regulatory clarity to plug in lawfully.
3. For issuers, his main point is that cards already solved two of payments’ hardest problems: merchant acceptance and consumer trust. Tens of millions of merchants already accept cards, and consumers already understand disputes, liability, and loss protection. That means the complexity should not land at checkout or with the customer; it should sit behind the scenes in a governed orchestration layer that chooses the funding source and settles the transaction within the fast authorisation times card users expect.
4. Visa’s published rules, he notes, require issuers in Europe to respond to point-of-sale authorisation requests within five seconds. That is the operational bar a stablecoin-backed card stack still has to clear, even if the underlying balance lives somewhere very different from a traditional deposit account.
5. Paolini-Subramanya says a bank or issuer that wants fiat and stablecoin balances behind the same card needs three things. The first is a single, governed view of balance and identity, whether the asset is a deposit, e-money, or a tokenised dollar. Today, he said, these balances usually sit in separate systems with separate ledgers and different rules for how the data is managed. The rest of the stack, by implication, has to make that fragmentation disappear before the card ever hits a terminal.