The operational pitch is 24/7 settlement on blockchain infrastructure, independent of banking hours. If that holds in practice, the immediate beneficiaries are issuers and payment processors managing liquidity and cross-border timing, not consumers looking for a new way to pay.

SoFi Bank, Galileo, and MTN: Who Can Use the Rail and How It Scales

The scaling vector is not just SoFi Bank. Galileo Financial Technologies, SoFi’s payments infrastructure platform, is positioned to let other banks and fintech issuers on its network opt into stablecoin settlement through Mastercard’s system.

That matters because distribution is the hard part in payments. If Galileo turns this into an opt-in feature for multiple issuers, the pilot can expand faster than a single-bank proof of concept, assuming counterparties decide the compliance, integration, and liquidity trade-offs are worth it.

Underneath it sits Mastercard’s Multi-Token Network (MTN), which is positioned to support multiple forms of tokenized money, including stablecoins, tokenized bank deposits, and digital representations of fiat currencies. That framing suggests Mastercard is building a settlement layer that can route across instruments, not making a one-way bet on any single stablecoin model.

Adoption Signals: Stablecoin Market Scale and Visa’s Parallel Settlement Tests

Stablecoin adoption data is now large enough that payment networks can justify infrastructure work. The stablecoin market’s total valuation was approximately $314 billion as of March 2026, according to DefiLlama data. Stablecoin transaction volumes hit a record $969.9 billion in a single month in 2025, and projections cited in the packet suggest monthly volumes could surpass $1 trillion by the end of 2026, though the forecasters are not named.

Mastercard is not alone. Visa is described as expanding stablecoin usage for settlement, including testing cross-border settlement using USDC and exploring business payouts to stablecoin wallets.

For traders, the convergence is the signal. The narrative is shifting from “stablecoins for exchanges” to “stablecoins as payments plumbing,” but the market still lacks the details that would separate a contained pilot from a production-grade rail.

Marcus Hale’s Take: The Bull Case Is 24/7 Regulated Settlement—The Bear Case Is Missing Pilot Details

The bull case here is straightforward. Mastercard is treating stablecoins as an internal settlement upgrade, not a consumer behavior change, and it is doing it with a bank-issued token that is described as dollar-backed and reported to be 1:1 cash reserved. If stablecoin settlement can run continuously, the payoff is tighter liquidity management and fewer timing frictions in cross-border flows, which is where the real cost sits in payments.

The bear case is that the packet is light on the only details that matter for market structure. The threshold that matters is whether Mastercard discloses a real rollout path, including pilot size, transaction counts, and go-live milestones, plus technical specifics like which network is used, the permissioning model, and what “finality” looks like in the settlement flow. If additional Galileo-connected issuers publicly opt in and Visa expands corridors or payout support, the setup starts to look structural rather than narrative-driven, and that is what would make stablecoin settlement matter in practical terms.

Sources

• Cointelegraph