The Great Rail Grab: Stablecoin Issuers Discover Their Inner Train Conductor

The race is on for the fattest slice of the stablecoin pie, and leading crypto and fintech players are no longer content to just bake it—they're building the entire kitchen, oven, and delivery truck. A fierce competition is unfolding as these companies launch their own settlement infrastructure, aiming to control more of the plumbing behind the multi-trillion-dollar flow of digital dollars. It’s the crypto equivalent of a land grab, but for virtual railroads.

According to the analysts at Delphi Digital, this isn't about building another "world computer" for cats in hats; it's a new wave of blockchain networks laser-focused on institutional payment flows. Think of it as dedicated highways for money trucks, bypassing the congested meme-coin boulevards of general-purpose layer-1s.

Exhibit A: Tether-backed Plasma, a public L1 network fine-tuned for cross-border USDT transactions, chugged onto mainnet on September 25, 2025, after a tidy $24 million fundraise in February. Not to be outdone, Circle fired up the public testnet for its own project, Arc, just a month later, billing it as an open L1 blockchain purpose-built for stablecoin finance. The message is clear: if you want to move money, you need a dedicated track.

This marks a structural shift from one-size-fits-all blockchain infrastructure to specialized, payment-obsessed networks. Companies are now battling to own the very rails underpinning stablecoin settlement, which Delphi Digital rightly notes is one of crypto's few use cases your grandma might actually understand. The fintech crowd has also elbowed its way into the scrum, hungry for a piece of the growing stablecoin payments action.

Ran Goldi, a payments exec at Fireblocks, cut to the chase for Cointelegraph: owning the payment rails is becoming "strategically important." In other words, instead of forking over fees to ecosystems like Ethereum—essentially paying tolls to use someone else's bridge—companies are now saying, "Let's just build our own bridge and keep the change."

For payment companies, Goldi added, controlling the underlying rails means they avoid being "taxed" for the mint and burn operations of a stablecoin. It's the financial version of growing your own wheat to avoid the bakery's markup.

Enter Tempo, which announced its mainnet is live, pitching itself as a merchant-focused settlement layer built for high-throughput stablecoin transactions. The project, conveniently incubated by heavyweights Paradigm and Stripe, is another engine on this newly laid track.

Stripe itself has been on a shopping spree worthy of a degen with a fresh airdrop. After acquiring stablecoin infrastructure startup Birdge for $1.1 billion in October 2024, it scooped up crypto wallet infrastructure provider Privy in June 2025 and bought billing platform Metronome this past January. Someone's assembling a monopoly board.

Delphi Digital pointed out that these deals strategically position Stripe to control more of the issuance, wallet, and billing layers around stablecoin payments, alongside the settlement infrastructure itself. They're not just building a railroad; they're buying the ticket printers, the concession stands, and the land the stations sit on.

Alvin Kan, COO of Bitget Wallet, framed stablecoin payment infrastructure as the new "revenue layer." The entities that control the end-to-end payment workflow get to skim a little cream off every single transaction—a business model as old as time, now dressed in digital threads.

He told Cointelegraph, “As settlement costs at the protocol level trend lower, value capture shifts to the orchestration layer around the rail: compliance, FX conversion, wallet infrastructure, on- and off-ramps, local payout connectivity and merchant integration.” Translation: when moving the money gets cheap, the real profit is in everything that happens before and after you move it.

Irina Chuchkina, chief growth officer of Wallet in Telegram, declared that controlling the settlement infrastructure behind stablecoins is the next great battleground. The fight for the pipes is officially more exciting than the fight for the throne.

She said, “Stablecoin payment rails could become the defining revenue driver of this cycle, for the same reason Visa and Mastercard became indispensable: not because they issued currency, but because they owned the pipes.” It's not about printing the money; it's about charging rent for the hose it flows through.

Chuchkina added that companies building settlement rails that play nice with agentic artificial intelligence stand to “capture a