Capital is betting on card issuance, compliance, clearing and settlement, and enterprise APIs. The dividend from stablecoin payments is shifting from “cards” to the “underlying infrastructure.”
Li Lin has bet again. On June 3, 2026, WasabiCard, a global stablecoin payment infrastructure platform, completed its Pre-A round of financing. Including previous early-stage rounds, its cumulative financing has approached $10 million. Investors include Vernal Capital, Avenir Group, Vision Plus Capital, and 01VC—Avenir Group being Li Lin’s family office. Interestingly, almost simultaneously, another piece of news swept through the community: Fiat24 suspended new account applications in mainland China. Meanwhile, several crypto payment card services familiar to Chinese users, such as SafePal and Bitget Wallet, have cooperation relationships with Fiat24’s card issuance capabilities.
On one hand, capital is increasing its investment in an “invisible” payment infrastructure company. On the other hand, underlying service providers are directly affecting some front-end card products due to policy adjustments. Viewing these events at the same time provides an opportunity to re-examine the stablecoin payment track. Behind this opportunity lies a rapidly expanding real demand.
I. The Retreat of “U Cards”: Not the Demand, But the Model
According to the Fireblocks “State of Stablecoins 2025” report, 49% of surveyed institutions are already using stablecoins in payment scenarios, and another 41% are in the testing or planning phase. This means nearly 90% of institutions have already engaged with stablecoin payments in some way. Demand is rising, but the way this demand is met is changing.
As is well known, for the past few years, the most discussed form of stablecoin payment in the Chinese market has been “U cards”: users transfer stablecoins like USDT and USDC into card products, which are then used for online subscriptions, consumption, or offline payments. This is also the easiest for everyone to understand and accept. However, U cards are just the front-end that users see. Behind a card lies the truly complex aspects: card issuance qualifications, card network cooperation, KYC/AML, risk control systems, stablecoin-to-fiat exchange, clearing and settlement networks, merchant channels, and cross-border payment capabilities. Users often only remember front-end brands like RedotPay, KAST, and Crypto.com, while institutions like WasabiCard remain largely unknown.
In fact, it is precisely thanks to infrastructure companies like WasabiCard that “issuing a card” alone is no longer difficult today. Project teams can completely outsource stablecoin acceptance, credit limit allocation, card issuance, and payment channels to third-party service providers, only needing to apply their brand and launch the front-end. In a sense, this is also a major reason for the rapid proliferation of U card products in recent years.
Therefore, Fiat24 tightening its account opening is just a trigger. The real issue is that the C-end U cards that have rapidly proliferated in recent years are essentially a model of “light front-end, heavy external dependency.” They outsource the most difficult parts, leaving mainly branding, customer acquisition, and the user interface. While this solves the problem of “spending U,” it doesn’t solve the problem of “how to conduct this business long-term, stably, and compliantly.” The contraction or even exit of multiple front-end card products over the past year has repeatedly shown that relying solely on the front-end experience cannot sustain a payment business that can weather cycles.
This point is crucial. U card products can be replicated, subsidies can be matched, and users will quickly migrate based on fees, risk control, and usability. What is truly difficult to replicate is the back-end capability: the ability to maintain stable card issuance and acquiring partnerships in multiple markets; the ability to handle identity verification and anti-money laundering requirements in different jurisdictions; the ability to maintain consistency in fund flows and information flows between stablecoin top-ups, fiat exchanges, card spending, and merchant settlements; the ability to form a sufficiently mature risk control system for abnormal transactions, high-risk addresses, chargebacks, refunds, freezes, and compliance reviews. This is also the logical starting point for institutions like Avenir Group betting on WasabiCard—what investors are looking for is perhaps not another crypto card product, but a stablecoin payment business that is moving from “cards” to the “underlying infrastructure.”
II. Why Avenir Group Bet on WasabiCard
In recent years, the crypto market has not lacked grand narratives. From DeFi, NFTs, and GameFi to public chains, L2s, Restaking, and AI + Crypto, industry cycles are often driven by asset prices, token expectations, and liquidity expansion. However, payments have always been a different kind of business. It’s not as glamorous and it’s difficult to generate extreme valuation imagination in a short period, but it is closer to real-world transaction needs. Because as long as transactions occur, there are opportunities to generate revenue in every specific link: payments, foreign exchange, card issuance, settlement, acquiring, and cross-border transfers.
And the scale of this business is already significant. According to Artemis data, the total volume of stablecoin on-chain transfers globally reached $33 trillion in 2025, a year-on-year increase of 72%, exceeding the sum of Visa and Mastercard. Even excluding non-payment uses such as internal exchange transfers and arbitrage, its real economic volume is approaching the scale of traditional card networks. Regardless of whether these fund flows ultimately correspond to transactions, transfers, or settlements, stablecoins have become an important underlying network for global capital flows. However, precisely because of this, a single on-chain USDT/USDC transfer needs a complete set of off-chain financial infrastructure to truly become usable payment for businesses, salaries for employees, settlements for merchants, and card balances for consumers. This is precisely where companies like WasabiCard have an opportunity.
They handle the more “dirty and tedious” aspects, such as connecting with card networks and issuing banks, building enterprise APIs, processing fund settlements, managing risk control and compliance, and supporting enterprise clients in embedding stablecoin payment capabilities into their business processes. These tasks do not attract market attention as quickly as issuing a token, but once the capability is validated, it can form stronger reusability. Because from a business model perspective, B2B infrastructure and C-end card products are naturally two different businesses. C-end card products require continuous customer acquisition, continuous subsidies, continuous user education, and also face users’ repeated comparisons of fees, usability, and brand trust. In contrast, once B2B payment infrastructure is integrated by exchanges/wallets, payment companies, or outbound enterprises, it has the opportunity to benefit continuously from the growth of its clients’ transaction volumes. The former is trapped in a cycle of customer acquisition, while the latter is more likely to form compound interest.
More importantly, once a project team integrates a set of payment APIs into its business, the migration cost becomes higher, and the partnership is more likely to deepen around transaction volume, settlement volume, and business scale. This is the beauty of underlying infrastructure: it doesn’t need to outperform everyone; as long as any of its clients achieve success or scale, it can share in the growth dividend.
Breaking these down explains why capital is more willing to focus on the underlying infrastructure: payments are one of the scenarios where stablecoins can most easily generate real cash flow. Compared to Web3 narratives that still rely on token cycles and liquidity expectations, it is closer to real transaction needs and is a business model driven more by transaction volume and network scale, rather than entirely by market sentiment. WasabiCard and other service providers already have business and compliance foundations, accumulating reusable capabilities in B-end customer relationships and highly compliant systems. For investors, “already integrated” is worth more than “planned to be integrated.” Capital is buying not a single-point product, but a scalable infrastructure whose growth can be “built upon” the growth of its clients, rather than having to acquire customers for every single transaction. For investment institutions, the ceiling of a single U card product depends on how many C-end users it can acquire and their active consumption frequency. The imagination of a stablecoin payment infrastructure, however, depends on how many enterprise clients it can serve, how many payment scenarios it can support, and whether it can become a universal capability layer behind more front-end products. From this perspective, Avenir Group’s investment in WasabiCard is less an “authoritative endorsement” and more like a shrewd, long-time crypto player making a directional bet on stablecoin payment infrastructure. Where it points may be more important than the financing itself.
III. Not Competing on Scale, But on Position: Where are the Barriers in the B-end?
Of course, this does not mean that the infrastructure model is inherently easier to succeed. In stablecoin payments, C-end cards and B-end infrastructure are two separate tracks; comparing absolute scale is meaningless. The key is to look at their position.
Let’s first look at the benchmark in the C-end track, RedotPay. It currently has over 6 million users, covers more than 100 countries, has an annualized transaction volume of about $10 billion, and annual revenue exceeding $150 million. In 2025, it raised a cumulative $194 million, with a valuation exceeding $1 billion. This is almost the ceiling for U cards. However, it is noteworthy that even this champion relied on licensed entities like Reap for its card BINs, Fireblocks and Sumsub for compliance, and Circle’s network for cross-border payouts. In other words, the card at the forefront also stands on a layer of underlying infrastructure.
Now let’s look at BVNK, a “graduate” of the B-end track. It processes over $30 billion in payment volume annually, covers more than 130 countries, holds licenses in multiple regions including MiCA, and was eventually acquired by Mastercard for up to $1.8 billion, becoming the largest stablecoin infrastructure acquisition to date. It represents another endgame for this track: not competing for C-end users, but developing underlying capabilities to a sufficient depth, continuously refining compliance, and ultimately being integrated into the global network by giants.
WasabiCard is also on this track. As of this round of financing, it has officially disclosed serving over 500 enterprise clients globally, issuing over 500,000 cards, processing over $1 billion in transaction volume, and has integrated with multiple chains such as Avalanche, Arbitrum, and BNB Chain. It recently joined Circle’s partner program. It aggregates card issuance, API, settlement, and payment capabilities into a single interface, focusing on a localized strategy of cooperating with major global banking institutions. It positions itself as an infrastructure company capable of exporting global white-label card issuance, API, clearing and settlement, and payment capabilities “at the touch of a button.” The localized strategy allows WasabiCard to issue cards to local users compliantly by leveraging local banking capabilities in regions worldwide. Simultaneously, its enterprise clients only need to integrate the API once to achieve global card issuance with a single click.
More importantly, based on public information, WasabiCard’s focus is not solely on issuing cards to consumers, but on continuously expanding global card issuance resources, enterprise payment APIs, global fund distribution (payouts), multi-chain asset access, and compliance system construction. This means it provides not a single payment product, but a set of underlying payment capabilities that can be called by different platforms and business scenarios. So, where is the moat for this layer of capability? The Fireblocks report provides corroboration: when banks and payment institutions select stablecoin infrastructure suppliers, 41% prioritize “fast and reliable fund distribution (payout),” and 34% prioritize compliance. In short, payout and compliance are the two most valued aspects by enterprises during selection, which is precisely what issuing a card cannot replace. For representative B-end players like WasabiCard, this also means proving not just that they can issue cards, but that they can become the stablecoin payment operating system behind various enterprise clients, serving broader internet companies and cross-border business scenarios.
IV. PayFi, A Time to Re-see the “Underlying Infrastructure”?
If the most exciting part of stablecoin payments in the past few years was U cards, then the next phase worth paying more attention to may be PayFi infrastructure. For a long time, PayFi was easily simplified to “card issuance” or “cashback rewards,” making it seem more like a user product track than a financial infrastructure track. However, this situation has been changing significantly in the past two years.
Financial infrastructure related to stablecoin issuance, payment, and clearing and settlement has become one of the few assets in the crypto industry that can stably generate cash flow. The PayFi track, which is tied to this, has attracted almost all types of players, from crypto-native projects, traditional payment giants, stablecoin issuers, and exchanges, to specialized stablecoin public chains, all positioning themselves in their own ways.
The most telling evidence is the series of actions by traditional payment giants: in October 2024, Stripe acquired stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge for approximately $1.1 billion, which was considered one of the largest acquisitions in the crypto space at the time. A year and a half later, in March 2026, Mastercard announced its intention to acquire stablecoin infrastructure provider BVNK for up to $1.8 billion, paying about $700 million more than Stripe did that year, setting a new record. Around the same time, Visa expanded its cooperation with Bridge, which had been acquired by Stripe, planning to expand stablecoin-linked cards from 18 countries at the time to over 100 countries. And earlier, PayPal had already launched its own stablecoin, PYUSD. Placing these actions from payment giants, card networks, and large fintech companies on the same map, it is no longer an isolated bet on crypto payments by a single company, but a preemptive positioning by the entire payment industry around the stablecoin gateway.
Because stablecoins do not just impact payment experience, but also the deeper profit and power structures of the traditional financial system. It directly relates to who will control accounts, cross-border channels, and even clearing and settlement in the new era. From this perspective, the giants actively connecting on-chain accounts, stablecoin assets, and merchant payment terminals is less about embracing innovation and more about not wanting to be bypassed and left behind in the next round of payment and settlement restructuring.
However, as giants begin to enter the underlying infrastructure race themselves, the window for independent infrastructure players becomes particularly clear: either become an indispensable part of the giant’s network, or grow into that network yourself. After all, regulation and licensing, KYC/AML, card network cooperation, and localized compliance are precisely the aspects that C-end U card products, which relied on traffic and subsidies in the past, find most difficult to sustain long-term. This explains why companies like WasabiCard are primarily investing in global compliance system construction, multi-banking network integration, and core clearing and settlement system upgrades in this round of funding. These directions are not glamorous, but they are precisely the underlying capabilities that stablecoin payments must build to transition from user products to financial infrastructure.
Looking further ahead, the imagination of PayFi may extend to AI Agent payments. If AI Agents truly begin to conduct automated transactions on behalf of users in the future, then payment infrastructure cannot be designed solely around “humans.” Machines also need callable accounts, verifiable authorization, controllable limits, auditable transaction records, and the ability for small-value, high-frequency payments that can be executed automatically within compliance boundaries. This will make the endgame of stablecoin payment infrastructure more complex. Of course, this is still a more distant prospect. But it at least illustrates that the value boundary of stablecoin payments is far greater than that of a U card.
Written at the End
Crypto payment cards are certainly a good business. They connect stablecoins with real-world consumption, allowing users to intuitively feel for the first time that “U can be spent.” This is why U cards quickly broke through in the Chinese market and became the most easily understood entry point for PayFi. But the biggest dividends may not be in the cards themselves. In the past, the market was more likely to remember a card, an app, a cashback promotion, or a low-fee entry point. However, as stablecoins enter larger-scale real-world business scenarios, what will truly determine the long-term landscape of the industry may be more fundamental capabilities.
Behind-the-scenes players like WasabiCard may not have been the most familiar names in the Chinese-speaking market in the past, but stablecoin payments themselves are a slow and heavy business. If they can continuously achieve scale in areas such as compliance, card issuance, settlement, acquiring, cross-border payments, and enterprise APIs, they have the opportunity to become a sample of a key type of company in the PayFi era. Returning to the two recent news items at the beginning, they actually point to the same thing: the competition in stablecoin payments is shifting from the “card face” that users can see to the “underlying infrastructure” that users cannot see. For this reason, as more capital begins to re-examine stablecoin payment infrastructure, this industry may be entering a new phase.
[Farmer Frank]
The Infrastructure Shift: Why WasabiCard’s Funding Signals the End of the U-Card Era
The recent $10 million funding round for WasabiCard, backed by Avenir Group and other prominent investors, coupled with Fiat24’s withdrawal from mainland China, marks a pivotal moment in the stablecoin payment landscape. This dual news event signals a decisive shift from consumer-facing “U cards” to underlying infrastructure as the primary value driver in the stablecoin payment space. For experienced investors, this represents not just a change in market dynamics, but a fundamental realignment of where the durable value and competitive moats will be established in the PayFi ecosystem.
The Infrastructure Bet: Beyond the Surface of U-Cards
The most significant implication of WasabiCard’s funding is the explicit market validation of the B2B infrastructure model over consumer-facing card products. U-cards, while effective in introducing stablecoins to retail users, have proven to be a low-barrier-to-entry business with limited defensibility. As the article notes, these products are essentially “light front-end, heavy external dependency” models that outsource the most critical components of payment processing.
What investors like Avenir Group are recognizing is that the true value in stablecoin payments lies not in the card interface that users see, but in the complex infrastructure supporting it: multi-jurisdictional compliance frameworks, banking partnerships, card networks, KYC/AML systems, and settlement mechanisms. These components form a formidable moat that cannot be easily replicated or disrupted by new entrants offering slightly better fees or cashback programs.
The exit of several U-card providers over the past year underscores this reality. While consumer-facing products can scale quickly through marketing and subsidies, they lack the institutional-grade infrastructure necessary for sustainable operations across different regulatory environments. WasabiCard’s focus on building this foundational layer positions it to capture value not just from card issuance, but from the entire payment value chain.
Regulatory Realities and the Compliance Premium
Fiat24’s suspension of mainland China operations serves as a stark reminder that regulatory compliance is not a checkbox to be ticked, but an ongoing, resource-intensive capability. For infrastructure providers like WasabiCard, this represents both a challenge and an opportunity.
The compliance moat is particularly valuable in the current regulatory environment, where payment institutions must navigate increasingly complex requirements across multiple jurisdictions. What WasabiCard and similar companies are building is essentially a regulatory arbitrage engine – the ability to facilitate stablecoin payments in regions where direct access is restricted, through compliant frameworks and partnerships.
This creates a significant competitive advantage over consumer-facing products that lack these capabilities. As traditional payment giants like Mastercard and Stripe enter the space through acquisitions (BVNK and Bridge, respectively), they are effectively paying a premium for existing compliance frameworks rather than building them from scratch. For investors, this suggests that compliance-focused infrastructure companies may be positioned for attractive exits or continued growth as traditional players seek to on-ramp to the crypto economy.
The B2B Advantage: From Customer Acquisition to Compound Growth
The structural difference between B2B infrastructure and B2C card products cannot be overstated. While consumer card products are trapped in a perpetual cycle of customer acquisition, marketing spend, and fee competition, B2B infrastructure benefits from a compounding growth model.
Once an enterprise client integrates WasabiCard’s API into their platform, the provider benefits from that client’s growth rather than needing to continuously acquire new customers. This creates a more predictable revenue stream and higher customer lifetime value. Moreover, integration costs create switching friction, making enterprise relationships stickier than consumer relationships.
The economics are particularly compelling when considering the scale potential. While the article cites RedotPay as having reached approximately $150 million in annual revenue with 6 million users, BVNK processed $30 billion in annual volume before being acquired by Mastercard. This demonstrates that while consumer-facing products have a practical ceiling, infrastructure providers can achieve significantly larger scale by serving enterprise clients.
The Traditional Payment Giant Factor
The acquisitions of Bridge by Stripe and BVNK by Mastercard represent a critical inflection point. Traditional payment networks are no longer observers of the stablecoin ecosystem; they are active participants positioning themselves for the future of payments.
This creates a bifurcation in the infrastructure landscape: either become an indispensable component of the traditional giants’ networks, or build a standalone network that eventually becomes too significant to be ignored. For investors, this suggests that infrastructure providers with proven compliance frameworks and established banking relationships may be particularly attractive acquisition targets.
The strategic implications are profound. As Mastercard and Visa expand their stablecoin-linked services from 18 to over 100 countries, they are effectively building bridges between traditional payment infrastructure and the crypto economy. Infrastructure providers like WasabiCard that can plug into these networks gain immediate access to global merchant acceptance and card distribution channels.
The AI Agent Payment Frontier
Looking beyond the current landscape, the article touches on an even more compelling long-term opportunity: AI agent payments. As autonomous agents begin conducting transactions on behalf of users, payment infrastructure will need to evolve beyond human-centric design to support machine-to-machine transactions.
This requires fundamentally different capabilities: programable payment authorization, auditable transaction records, micro-payment frameworks, and compliance boundaries that can be executed automatically. Infrastructure providers that begin building these capabilities today may position themselves to capture an entirely new market segment that doesn’t yet exist.
For investors, this represents a potential paradigm shift in payment infrastructure valuation. While current valuation may be based on transaction volume and user base, future valuation could incorporate network effects between human users and AI agents, creating exponential growth potential.
Investment Implications
For experienced crypto investors, the shift to infrastructure represents both a risk and an opportunity. On one hand, consumer-facing payment tokens may face diminished growth prospects as the market matures. On the other hand, infrastructure providers offer more defensible business models with clearer paths to sustainable profitability.
The key considerations for investors should include:
- Competition Positioning: How does the provider compare to traditional payment giants entering the space?
- Regulatory Footprint: Does the company have established compliance frameworks in key jurisdictions?
- Enterprise Traction: What is the quality and scale of enterprise clients?
- API Integration Depth: How deeply embedded is the provider in client business processes?
- Cross-Chain Capability: Can the provider support multiple blockchain ecosystems?
WasabiCard’s funding round, particularly Avenir Group’s participation, suggests that these considerations are increasingly factoring into investment decisions. As the market shifts from novelty to utility, the infrastructure layer that enables stablecoin payments at scale will likely deliver the most durable returns.
Conclusion
The era of U-cards as the primary interface for stablecoin payments is fading, not because demand is diminishing, but because the market is maturing beyond consumer-facing products to the underlying infrastructure that enables compliant, scalable stablecoin payments. WasabiCard’s funding and Fiat24’s withdrawal are two sides of the same coin: the industry is recognizing that the true value in PayFi lies not in the card interface, but in the complex web of compliance, settlement, and banking relationships that make stablecoin payments possible at scale.
For investors, this represents an opportunity to reallocate capital from consumer-facing products with limited defensibility to infrastructure providers building the foundational layers of the future payment system. In a market increasingly driven by real-world utility rather than speculative hype, the infrastructure bet may prove to be the most prudent long-term strategy in the PayFi ecosystem.