Two Years Ago vs Today: Crypto Partnerships Become Infrastructure Deals

In 2024, announcements pairing banks, payment companies and established financial institutions with digital asset firms frequently centered on experimentation, access or validation. A traditional institution was testing blockchain. A payments company was adding crypto capabilities. A digital asset company was gaining the credibility or distribution that came with an incumbent partner.

Those crypto-native assumptions are starting to break down, as underscored by the announcement by Circle of its acquisition of Tazapay on Tuesday (Sept. 8), with the all-stock transaction valued at $400 million. Tazapay brings more than $25 billion in annualized payment volume, more than 60 banking and FinTech partners and local payout rails spanning more than 100 markets. Roughly 60% of its transaction volume already involves stablecoins.

As a result, the deal appears to be less about a crypto-native firm adding another crypto capability than absorbing a piece of the machinery required to make digital dollars useful in institutional payments. Tazapay had already been a design partner for Circle Payments Network. Now Circle wants to own it.

That progression from partner to infrastructure provider, to acquisition target, captures the broader change taking place across digital assets. Banks, payment networks and crypto firms are moving beyond exploratory pilots and distribution agreements toward combinations designed to solve specific problems in settlement, liquidity, interoperability, tokenization and cross-border money movement.

Read more: How 21 Banks Changed the Conversation Around Stablecoins and Tokenized Deposits 

Blockchain Moves From Proof of Concept to Control of the Finance Stack

The latest generation of partnerships appears to be focused on infrastructure, such as connecting stablecoins to bank accounts, supplying liquidity, integrating custody and compliance, linking tokenized assets with conventional markets, and making blockchain-based money work with the treasury and payments systems companies already use.

This is a shift from earlier, when the market was still answering foundational questions: Can regulated institutions hold these assets? Can blockchain connect safely with existing systems? Which ledger should be used? Where does compliance sit?

The partnership itself then typically served as a bridge across a capability gap. In 2026, the question is different: Which combination of infrastructure makes the economics work?

Circle-Tazapay offers a particularly clean illustration. USDC can already move globally on blockchain networks. That does not mean a corporate payment automatically arrives in the recipient’s preferred bank account, currency or domestic payment system. Cross-border payments still require the messy last mile of banking relationships, foreign-exchange conversion, compliance, local clearing and payout infrastructure.

The acquisition therefore points toward a maturing competitive logic for stablecoins. The token itself may become only one component of the product. The harder problem, and potentially the more defensible business, is orchestrating what happens before and after the token moves.

Still, the June installment of PYMNTS Intelligence’s Credit Union Tracker Series, “The Wallet Effect: How Credit Unions Can Close the Digital Currency Access Gap,” a collaboration with Velera, revealed that stablecoin awareness falls short for 70% of credit union members.

Rad more: Payment Networks Hold the Key to Stablecoin Scale 

Payment Networks and Banks Are Building Digital Asset Bridges, Too

Rather than treating blockchain primarily as technology supplied by external crypto firms, banks today also want to determine how tokenized money connects to their own deposits, liquidity and transaction-banking franchises. The institutional market is becoming heterogeneous: different forms of digital money may coexist, making interoperability more valuable.

Citi, for example, on Sept. 3 reported that it has successfully processed live transactions on Swift’s blockchain-based ledger. The model does not require banks to abandon existing regulated infrastructure. Instead, it creates an orchestration layer connecting new digital-money capabilities with it.

Visa, meanwhile, launched its Visa Stablecoin Platform (VSP) this summer to give financial institutions and FinTechs infrastructure for minting, moving, redeeming and managing stablecoins while connecting those activities to existing payment and treasury workflows. On Tuesday (Sept. 8), Visa pushed further into the surrounding liquidity layer, announcing an approach that combines its settlement data with on-chain lending infrastructure to help stablecoin-linked card programs obtain working capital.

In April, Visa said it added five more blockchains to its global stablecoin settlement pilot, bringing the total number of blockchains it supports to nine.

That is a sign of maturation, but also of intensifying competition. As blockchain moves deeper into regulated finance, the scarce asset is becoming less the ability to issue or transfer a token than the ability to connect that token to the enormous financial system around it. 

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