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With a stable coin, we have a cryptocurrency where (it is hoped) there are enough reserves to pay everyone back, whereas a Central Bank promises to pay the bearer for the fiat currency (and hopefully has the reserves to pay for this).

From: The Future of Payments? To CBDC or Not to CBDC. That is the question | by Prof Bill Buchanan OBE FRSE | Jun, 2025 | Medium.

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The Wall Street Journal reports that some big retailers, including Walmart and Amazon, are exploring the idea of issuing their own stablecoins in order to bypass the “traditional” payment systems and exploit their “troves of data”. This makes them a threat to banks, including regional and community lenders. Whether they succeed in stablecoins or not, the fact remains that retailers may have a much bigger role in the future of fintech.

Walmart is, of course, a focus for those of us looking at the retail/fintech possibilities and they have been looking in this direction for some time. Back in 2022, CTO Suresh Kumar said that crypto will become “an important payment tool” across the Metaverse and social media, as these will be the spaces where consumers discover new products.

(Walmart are active in mnay directions here: their Mastercard credit card is expected to launch this fall, with the experience embedded inside the OnePay app.)

The noted venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz single out Walmart in their argument for “how stablecoins will eat payments” pointing out that Walmart made $648 billion in annual revenue and  $15.5 billion in profit, but paid $10 billion in fees to the payment networks (they also point out that for another supermarket chain, Krogers, net income and payment fees are approximately equal). Thus, they say, greater stablecoin adoption would significantly improve profitability in many businesses, including small businesses like coffee shops or restaurants.

I am not commenting on their math, other than to say that payment fees cover a lot more than the cost of the payment and when considering the costs and benefits, it is also important to look at what additional services might be cross sold from payments. I might also comment that stablecoins are not the only way to drive down these costs and as Richard Crone points out that adding adding a pay-by-bank capability inside a retailer’s wallet, such as OnePay, with the attendant anti-fraud benefits such as strong user authentication, could result in significant savings. Real-time payments have been around since 2017 thanks to The Clearing House starting the RTP network that year, but only some banks have adopted the new tool, and those that have signed up have had tepid uptake in the marketplace. The launch in 2023 of the Federal Reserve’s competing instant system, FedNow, has boosted adoption by banks, but real world use remains limited: Walmart might change that.

Sarah Arnio, Walmart’s director of digital payments recently said that “We’re really bullish on instant payments and hoping to move forward with them within the next year”. Now, Walmart already gives customers the option to sign up on its website to be able to pay directly from a bank account, moving those payments via low-cost automated clearing house transfers (ACH) transfers but Arnio sees this as a “stepping stone” to faster instant payments because “We at Walmart really have a drive internally to speed up everything”..

Looking beyond the current payments landscape, Walmart are also exploring AI-driven shopping assistants as an entirely new type of customer, distinct from traditional consumers, and they will need ways to pay too, as well as exploring a future where consumers may opt for third-party shopping agents built by technology firms, ensuring its systems are adaptable to external AI-driven purchasing solutions.

(Walmart know, as I am fond on repeating, that AI agents won’t just facilitate transactions in existing processes, they will reshape the entire retail experience.)

They are also taking their first steps into the metaverse, the coming augmented and virtual reality space where customers will go to work, rest and play. They have their Walmart Realm to experiment with more “engaging” buying options. Justin Breton, Walmart’s director of brand experiences says that they are following three trends here: customers enjoy brands more when they have unique virtual experiences; customers want to be entertained while shopping; and customers are inspired by virtual games where they can purchase items they discover”.

The Bank Response

I’ve used Walmart as the example here but of course all big retailers must be looking at these new technologies with some similar ideas. Partly because of reduced costs and increased speed but also because of the potential for new business models. One advocate is Shopify, which recently announced it has already started allowing customers to pay with popular stablecoin USDC allow their small business base to tap into global markets. As they said in rheir press release, “Small businesses should be able to sell to a customer on the other side of the world as easily as their next-door neighbor”. All in all, you can see why retailers might be motivated to move now, although it is fair to observe, as Brady Dale does, it would be on them to find a way to convince customers to hold enough stablecoins to fund their purchases

So what does the mean for banks? Tom Brown’s summary seems pretty accurate to me. That so, stablecoins are having a moment [and] all of this attention has left large banks with a very bad case of FOMO. The fear may be justified. Ron Shevlin, a well-respected industry analysts, says that stablecoins could divert significant transaction volume—and core deposits—away from banks as retailers, fintechs, and Big Techs issue branded stablecoins that lead consumers to move cash into stablecoins for convenience, rewards, or programmability. It is hard to disagree with him when he says that for some people stablecoins become functional equivalents of bank deposits—but without the FDIC insurance, relationship ties, or regulatory protections banks provide. As Ron points out, this  risk isn’t theoretical: Deposit displacement has been happening for years. A new study from Cornerstone Advisors found that $2.15 trillion has already left banks for fintech investment accounts—two-third of it from Gen Xers and Baby Boomers. This is on top of the estimated $10 billion that Americans have sitting in merchant mobile apps like Starbucks’ in any given week.

So how can banks, who enjoy a great income stream from interchange right now,  position themselves for a world of stablecoins and instant payments. The networks have already been active—they are not sitting back and waiting—but on the general assumption that payments margins are on the way down, the banks’ strategic response should be to add value around the transactions, not to try and survive off of shrinking interchange in the face of competition from non-card alternatives such as Walmart Pay-By-Bank or an Amazon coin. Those services might, for example, include safety and security, data and decisioning, not only the payments themselves.

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I’m not the only person who was wondering about this. The noted venture capitalist Marc Andreessen knows more about the web than I ever will, and back in 2012 he told a Wired magazine conference in New York that “we should have built payments in the browser”.

(They got half way, because buried in your browser, in addition to the familiar error 404 for page-not-found, there is also error 402 for page-requires-payment. But no payment mechanism was provided.)

I note that the Collisons (the genius brothers behind Stripe) were also quoted arguing that the lack of effective payments mechanism is the reason that the web went from being an open environment and opportunity for all to an “oligopoly controlled by five companies now worth more than $3 trillion”.

From: Micropayments Are A Macro Opportunity.

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The Saxons then scattered all the beehives there were in the town on top of the besiegers, which prevented them from moving their feet and hands because of the number of bees stinging them. After that they gave up the city, and left it.

From: An Anglo-Saxon Anecdote: How beer and bees beat the Viking siege of Chester in c. 907 – Thijs Porck.

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Plus, the symbiosis has potential. Bridge makes it relatively easy for clients to issue and send stablecoins. Privy’s wallets make it easier to handle them. Put differently, Bridge is the stablecoin engine and the pipes. Privy’s wallets are the destination as well as the use case front-end.

Even more than that, they are customizable enough to disappear into the background. The infrastructure allows any user to spin up wallets for their clients, abstracting away the hassle of custody, key management, onchain fees and transaction signing. Stablecoin users need not even know they’re using a wallet – with Privy and Bridge integrations, transactions would become as easy as “click here to pay”, and balances could show up in simple and familiar web accounts.

From: Stripe’s stablecoin strides – by Noelle Acheson.

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cale AI’s shock $15 billion deal to sell a 49% stake to Meta, with its CEO Alexandr Wang leaving the startup he founded to lead a new AI lab at the tech giant, has raised the specter that the startup’s $14 billion-valued data labeling business could implode.

At play is the concern that Scale, which has been the dominant player in labeling data to help major tech companies and AI startups train their models, could share details about the types of data that leading AI players have used to build their most cutting edge tech with Meta.

From: Scale AI’s Business Could ‘Collapse’ If Meta Buys A Stake And Hires Its CEO.

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This is the ingenious moment pinned Ukrainian troops threw beehives at Russian soldiers after running out of grenades on the frontlines.

Drone footage taken in the midst of Russia’s invasion shows the savvy troops picking up the beehives and carrying them over to a cellar occupied by Russian troops in what appears to be a farm in the countryside in the town of Pokrivsk, in the east of the country.

From: Buzz off Russians! Moment Ukrainian troops hurl BEEHIVES at Putin’s troops after running out of grenades on frontline | Daily Mail Online.

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The Saxons then scattered all the beehives there were in the town on top of the besiegers, which prevented them from moving their feet and hands because of the number of bees stinging them. After that they gave up the city, and left it.

From: An Anglo-Saxon Anecdote: How beer and bees beat the Viking siege of Chester in c. 907 – Thijs Porck.

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Research conducted by FreedomPay, Dynatrace and Retail Economics in the UK found that retail and hospitality businesses are losing a whopping £1.6billion a year to payment system outages. These disruptions, which can last an average of 84 minutes, far exceed what most consumers are willing to tolerate, putting businesses at risk of lost revenue and reputational harm. What’s more, they are not one-off events but recurring challenges, with British businesses experiencing an average of more than five major outages each year (two-thirds of which ouccr during peak trading periods, naturally amplifying their impact). The study also found that one in five retail and hospitality businesses do not have a backup payment system in place, so with fewer than one third of consumer regualrly carrying—and the average amount of cash carried (£35) below the typical in-store spend of £47—businesses without digital backups are particularly exposed.

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The credit card programme is expected to launch this fall, with the experience embedded inside the OnePay app and powered by Mastercard’s global payments network. The card, issued by Synchrony, will be made available to millions of Walmart customers and to consumers across the US.

From: Walmart’s OnePay adds credit cards to financial services portfolio.

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Yet potential property claims of prior owners could hinder the use of stablecoins as digital money.

From: Stablecoins should be treated as currency.

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