This is a featured post from Stablecoin Insider contributor – Ariel Eiberman
TLDR
Mastercard isn’t trying to revolutionize payments – they’re treating stablecoins as just another currency on their existing rails. Diego Szteinhendler, their SVP for LAC crypto strategy, explains why merchants aren’t actually asking for stablecoins, how governance trumps speed, and why programmability might matter more than cost savings. The conversation reveals a pragmatic approach focused on real adoption rather than technological idealism.
I’m sitting across from Diego Szteinhendler, Mastercard’s SVP of Fintechs, Enablers & Crypto for the LAC Region, and he’s telling me about his grandmother. It’s not what you’d expect to hear in a conversation about stablecoins and digital payments infrastructure, but Diego has a way of cutting through the noise.
“El día que mi abuela pueda usar la funcionalidad, ahí ganamos. A ella le importa que yo le mande dinero a Diego y que le llegue la forma más barata y más rápida.”
(Translated from Spanish): “The day my grandmother can use the functionality, that’s when we win. She cares that I send money to Diego and that it arrives in the cheapest and fastest way.”
It’s this kind of practical thinking that makes Diego’s perspective on the stablecoin space so refreshing. While conferences buzz with technical jargon and blockchain evangelism, he’s focused on real adoption by real people. And that starts with understanding what we’re actually building toward.
What’s Next for Money
Before we dive into Mastercard’s strategy, Diego frames something that’s been nagging at me for months. We’re not just talking about improving existing payment rails – we’re potentially witnessing something more fundamental.
(Translated from Spanish): “I think the next leap will be as disruptive as the leap from barter to currency.”
But here’s the thing that most people miss: it’s not necessarily about the technology itself. It might be about improving what money can do, but we’re still figuring that out.
Key Takes:
The potential disruption isn’t guaranteed – it’s conditional on real utility beyond current systemsTechnology alone won’t drive adoption; practical benefits for end users willWe might be witnessing a fundamental shift, but it could also just be incremental improvement
This isn’t just faster payments or lower costs – those are table stakes. We’re talking about programmable money, assets that can carry instructions, value that can be conditional. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me tell you how Mastercard is actually approaching this transformation.
Mastercard’s Stablecoin Philosophy: “Just Another Currency”
(Translated from Spanish) “We at Mastercard today see stablecoins as just another tender, another currency we’re going to incorporate into the network.”
This might sound mundane, but it’s actually a significant positioning. While everyone else is trying to reinvent payments from scratch, Mastercard is saying, “We already have the infrastructure. We already have the trust. We already have millions of merchants in 210 countries. Let’s just add stablecoins to what already works.”
The interesting part is what comes with that infrastructure. Diego gets animated when he talks about governance – something that rarely gets mentioned in stablecoin discussions but might be critical for real-world adoption.
(Translated from Spanish) “Not all payment rails are equal. That’s not the same in a wallet, not the same in real-time payments, not the same in a bitcoin transaction from wallet to wallet, where you got the wrong wallet and good luck.”
When you use a stablecoin through a Mastercard network, you get chargebacks. You get purchase protection. You get fraud monitoring. You get dispute resolution. Try getting that from a peer-to-peer crypto transaction.
Key Takes:
Mastercard isn’t reinventing the wheel – they’re adding stablecoins to existing infrastructureGovernance and consumer protection might be more valuable than technological innovationThe “boring” approach of using established rails could win over greenfield solutions
This is where Mastercard’s decades of building trust infrastructure become potentially valuable. They’re not just processing payments; they’re providing confidence in an inherently uncertain digital asset space.
Reality Check: What Merchants Actually Want
Here’s where our conversation took a turn I wasn’t expecting. I asked Diego about merchant adoption, specifically whether businesses are actively requesting stablecoin payment options. “Not yet”. Mastercard doesn’t deal directly with most merchants anyway – they work through issuing banks, acquiring banks, and increasingly, PSPs and PayFacs. But more importantly, Diego painted a picture that anyone who’s spent time with actual small business owners will recognize.
I mentioned hearing from small merchants in Buenos Aires who are open to accepting USDT, but don’t know how to actually implement it. Diego’s response was brutally practical:
(Translated from Spanish): “Let’s say a merchant in Argentina gets 4 USDT transactions out of 100, and for that needs another terminal, the payments aren’t reconciled, they saved 4 pesos, and at the end of the day – was it worth it or not?”
This is the math that crypto evangelists don’t want to talk about. A merchant who processes 100 transactions might see 4 in stablecoins. For those 4 transactions, they need a separate terminal, separate reconciliation processes, separate training for staff. They save a few pesos in fees, but spend hours in operational complexity. Diego thinks the future might lie with aggregators – PSPs and PayFacs who can abstract away this complexity.
(Translated from Spanish) “Maybe you pay a little more, but you have other advantages in terms of payment reconciliation, maybe FX overall, maybe a backend system that helps you with accounting.”
Key Takes:
Merchants aren’t demanding stablecoins – they want simpler operations and lower costsThe operational complexity of handling multiple payment types often outweighs fee savingsAggregators and PayFacs will likely drive adoption by abstracting complexity away from merchants
The message is clear: merchants want to sell more stuff and reduce costs. They don’t care about the underlying technology. The companies that win will be those that make stablecoin payments invisible to merchants while providing clear benefits.
Beyond USDT: Mastercard’s Technical Strategy
Diego outlined four key pillars of Mastercard’s stablecoin strategy, and they’re more comprehensive than I expected.
First, the infrastructure play I mentioned – allowing stablecoins to run on existing Mastercard rails. They’re already doing this with companies like Dollar App (which issues in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia), Gemini’s program in the US, and even MetaMask cards for self-custodial wallets.
Second, settlement in stablecoins. This goes beyond just allowing stablecoin-funded cards – they’re enabling entire transactions to be settled in digital assets across their network. This is live now, Diego tells me.
Third, they’ve been selective about which stablecoins they’ll support.
(Translated from Spanish): “We’re talking about USDC, we’re talking about entering Paxos’s network, we’re talking about using PayPal’s currency, PYUSD, and Paxos’s currency, FIUSD.”
Fourth, they’re integrating stablecoins into their cross-border payment system (MOV) for remittances and B2B payments – use cases that don’t require cards at all.
But Diego also mentioned two projects that caught my attention. Crypto Credentials creates vanity names for wallet addresses (think sending to “Diego.Steinhendler” instead of a 42-character hex string), potentially solving one of crypto’s persistent UX problems. And Multi-Token Network is their platform for tokenizing various assets beyond just stablecoins.
Key Takes:
Mastercard is building multiple touchpoints for stablecoins, not just card paymentsThey’re being selective about which assets to support, likely due to regulatory considerationsInfrastructure projects like vanity wallet names suggest they’re thinking beyond basic payments
The regulatory compliance piece is crucial here. As a US-regulated public company, Mastercard has to be careful about which assets it supports. Diego expects upcoming legislation to provide more clarity, but they’re already being selective.
The Real Disruption: Programmability
When I asked Diego about his 3-5 year vision for stablecoin payments, speed and cost reduction are already happening. What’s not happening yet, and what could be more significant, is programmability.
(Translated from Spanish): “If you think about some existing payment technologies, they could match some of these things – faster, cheaper, etc. They’re not that hard to emulate.”
But programmable money? That’s potentially new. Money that can carry instructions, value that can be conditional, payments that can execute automatically based on predetermined conditions – these capabilities don’t exist in traditional payment systems.
Diego thinks we might start seeing creative applications of programmability in the next 2-3 years, and that’s where things could get interesting. But he also raised a concern that’s been nagging at me: regulatory reality in Latin America.
(Translated from Spanish): “I still wonder what will happen with local regulations in Latin American countries. Because obviously, a country’s monetary policy can’t disappear.”
Key Takes:
Programmability might be more disruptive than speed or cost improvementsRegulatory responses in LATAM could significantly impact stablecoin adoptionCreative applications are still emerging – we don’t know what programmable money will enable
If stablecoins become massively adopted, effectively dollarizing economies through the back door, governments will respond. How they respond will determine how much of this potential we actually see realized.
Living Through the Transition
As our conversation wound down, I reflected on something Diego said earlier about the current market chaos. We’re in a period where multiple solutions are competing simultaneously – traditional payment rails, various stablecoin implementations, different wallet experiences, competing standards.
(Translated from Spanish): “Two years where everything will coexist and it will be confusing.”
We’re living through that confusion now. But confusion often precedes consolidation. The companies that survive this period will likely be those that provide clear value to end users – Diego’s grandmother – rather than those with the most sophisticated technology.
Key Takes:
We’re in a confusing transition period with multiple competing solutionsConsolidation will likely favor practical utility over technological sophisticationEnd-user value will determine winners, not technical capabilities
Mastercard bets that its existing infrastructure, combined with the governance and trust it’s built over decades, will be the bridge that brings stablecoins to mainstream adoption. They’re not trying to revolutionize everything at once. They’re trying to make stablecoins work within systems people already understand and trust.
Whether that approach wins or gets disrupted by something entirely new remains to be seen. But sitting in that room, listening to Diego talk about his grandmother and reconciliation headaches and the mathematics of merchant adoption, I was reminded that the most important innovations often happen not in conference halls or white papers, but in the mundane realities of how real people actually live and work and spend money.
The shift, if it comes, will be measured not in transactions per second or basis points of fees, but in whether Diego’s grandmother can easily send money to her grandson. Everything else is just infrastructure.