Key Takeaways
A quiet substitution is underway in the Americas, where stablecoin balances are absorbing cross-border payment functions that once belonged to commercial banks alone.
Federally chartered crypto bank Anchorage Digital has partnered with Mexican conglomerate Grupo Salinas, integrating its USD-pegged stablecoin rails to accelerate cross-border payments for the more than $155 billion Latin American remittance market.
"Stablecoins are evolving from a trading instrument into core financial infrastructure," Anchorage CEO Nathan McCauley said, adding the partnership gives institutions "a secure and federally regulated way to move dollars globally using blockchain rails."
The deal links Anchorage’s regulated payment infrastructure with Grupo Salinas’s financial arm, Coinpro, and its large retail banking network through Banco Azteca. The integration targets the US-Mexico corridor, one of the world's largest, where remittance flows to Latin America exceeded $155 billion in 2024, according to the World Bank.
The partnership represents a broader shift of stablecoins from crypto-native trading to real-world payment applications, a trend accelerated by the 2025 US Genius Act. With total stablecoin market value now over $320 billion, the move puts Anchorage in direct competition with payment giants like Visa and Mastercard, who are also building their own stablecoin settlement networks.
Anchorage's partnership with one of Mexico's largest business groups is the latest move in a broader race to build the rails for a new generation of payments. Major card networks are making significant investments to avoid being bypassed. In March 2026, Mastercard acquired UK-based stablecoin infrastructure firm BVNK, signaling a clear intent to integrate blockchain-based deposit rails.
Visa has been pursuing a parallel strategy, expanding its stablecoin settlement program across nine different blockchains. The company has also partnered with infrastructure firms like Bridge and WeFi to enable stablecoin balances to be spent directly via Visa cards, effectively treating on-chain funds as a primary funding source rather than something to be converted.
"Our Visa partnership means stablecoins stop being something people hold and become something people use," WeFi’s group CEO Maksym Sakharov said.
These moves by the payment incumbents show that stablecoins are increasingly seen not as a niche crypto product, but as a fundamental component of future financial plumbing. The competition is no longer about whether blockchain rails will be used for payments, but who will control them.
The strategic push from firms like Anchorage and Visa is a direct response to a fundamental shift in user behavior, particularly in emerging markets. For years, the primary use case for stablecoins was trading on centralized crypto exchanges. Now, according to a 2024 report from Chainalysis, the dominant use case in Latin America is everyday transactions.
The region received roughly $415 billion in cryptocurrency between July 2023 and June 2024, with a significant portion being retail-sized stablecoin payments. The driver is simple economics. The World Bank notes that traditional remittances can cost as much as 6% of the transaction value. In contrast, a stablecoin transfer between two self-custody wallets can settle in minutes for a fraction of one percent.
This is not happening in a regulatory vacuum. The US Genius Act, passed in July 2025, established a federal framework for stablecoin issuers, defining them as payment instruments rather than securities. This clarity has allowed regulated entities like Anchorage, a federally chartered crypto bank, to build products for mainstream financial institutions. The partnership with Grupo Salinas, which is controlled by noted bitcoin advocate Ricardo Salinas Pliego, bridges this new regulated crypto infrastructure with an established, high-volume banking operation, positioning both firms at the center of a structural shift in global payments.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
