Stablecoins & payment rails (new) Additive to card networks, not substitutive ▲

2026-AUG-13 — Joseph Carlson, relaying Pershing Square's Q2 letter (Ackman's new V + MA positions), endorsed: stablecoins "represent an opportunity for card networks rather than a threat… most relevant where cards are not the incumbent" — cross-border B2B, high-cost remittance corridors, dollar savings in volatile-currency countries — so adoption grows "in parallel with, not at the expense of, card volumes." Agentic commerce likewise expands the ecosystem: agents "remove friction, enable more frequent purchases" and "should adopt, not replace, consumers' existing payment preferences." 2026-AUG-15 — App Economy Insights PRO: agentic commerce shows up as a signed customer, not a forecast — OpenAI became an Adyen customer, "reinforcing Adyen's positioning around AI-native businesses and agentic commerce," alongside its first two acquisitions ever (Talon.One for loyalty, Orb for usage-based billing) toward a merchant "financial operating system"; processed volume +24% to €804B. The counterweight on the rails is pricing, not adoption: dLocal's TPV accelerated to +92% while gross profit per dollar of TPV fell to 0.72% from 1.07% as cheap local-to-local volume hit 61% of mix — "processing vastly more money but earning less on each dollar." 2026-AUG-27: Every reads the Genius Act (public input opened the day before Bessent's buyback announcement) plus the imminent Clarity Act as one design with Treasury policy: mass EM adoption forces issuers to buy T-bills — “an artificial bump for several trillion dollars' worth potentially” — with stablecoins “pushing out aggressively by 2027 at the latest.” They are “not currency… a digital IOU backed by US debt held in the US,” making them a with-us-or-against-us monetary screen. Technical punchline: paying for imports in dollar stablecoins “doesn't even operate on the current account, capital account the same way” — the T-bill stays inside the US and no dollars leave the US to pay for the goods, “a third dimension to the two-dimensional balance sheets.” Petrodollar → petro-stablecoin: lean on energy exporters to be paid in them. Expects the EU/ECB to mirror the Genius Act's foreign-stablecoin ban at the pan-European level, at the cost of decoupling. (Michael Every, Thoughtful Money 2026-AUG-27) Luke Gromen (Goldfinger Capital, 2026-AUG-14) reads stablecoins first as a Treasury funding channel, not a payments story: "you cut rates and also shift issuance forward, and I think that's part of the plan including for stablecoins. Ideally Bessent would love to issue a bunch of T-bills backed by stablecoins, or stablecoins backed by T-bills, and then cut the rates on them to basically nothing. And voila." His verdict on the mechanism: "it would mechanically work, and that is a very close relative of basically direct money financing of what is now a two-trillion-dollar and rising deficit" — inflationary at the second derivative, with the long end and the currency absorbing it. 2026-SEP-01 (Stöferle/Incrementum): the stablecoin–gold loop — Tether has become "a really significant buyer" of physical gold over the last several quarters, vaulting it outside the banking system in the Swiss mountains (the report carries an exclusive with Juan Sartori, Tether's head of special projects). The irony: the largest USDT issuer, sold to Washington as a machine that manufactures Treasury demand, is converting some of that float into bullion. On tokenization generally he is a sceptic — tokenized gold's appeal is as the anti-CBDC (neutral and censorship-resistant vs programmable and surveillable), but the whole token market cap is only $6–7bn (up ~5x in 24 months) and "it doesn't really replace gold, it repackages it — or mobilizes it." "Tokenize everything" (real estate, fine art, per Larry Fink's RWA push) is "a solution for a problem that doesn't really exist"; Tether Gold and Paxos will not be a major driver of this bull market. Pershing Square's Q2-2026 letter supplies the fullest institutional statement of the additive case. Stablecoins are "most relevant where cards are not the incumbent: cross-border business-to-business payments, high-cost remittance corridors, and dollar savings in countries with volatile currencies," where adoption "should grow in parallel with, not at the expense of, card volumes" — while in consumer payments the networks' acceptance, credit, rewards and reversibility "stablecoins, whose transactions are typically final and harder to reverse, cannot replicate." The networks are also inside the rail: both are key members of Open USD's OUSD, run hundreds of stablecoin-linked card programs, and are modernizing settlement with stablecoins. The same letter extends the argument to agentic commerce — agents "should adopt, not replace" existing payment preferences, since intent verification, delegation limits and fraud recourse "are complex problems best solved by the networks' infrastructure." Visa and Mastercard de-rated to 22× forward on these fears. (fund pitches compiled by SSR, AUG-03) E.B. Tucker (2026-SEP-11, Daniela Cambone/ITM Trading): stablecoins are the new monetary system, not a crypto sideshow - ~$400B today heading to "many, many trillions" (citing Bessent). The GENIUS Act forces issuers into 91-day-or-less T-bills, so float growth is a structural bid for bills. 140 banks are forming OpenUSD for a late-2026 launch, and banks will market coins as "safer" while money markets are made to look dangerous. Float economics: Tether ~$180B x 3.8% = ~$7B/yr "for doing nothing". Treasury wants many issuers ("hyper-liquid"). The Tucker Letter owns Circle (CRCL), buying the biggest connected operator, not pink-sheet microcaps. Luke Gromen & Darius Dale (2026-SEP-13) — both reject stablecoins as a Treasury-demand fix. Gromen: forcing eurodollars into T-bill stablecoins causes a dollar shortage in Europe/Asia, foreigners sell $22trn net of US assets ($9.4trn Treasuries, $13trn stocks), non-withheld receipts collapse (+$450–500bn deficit in 2022–23), so it 'buys you a few months at most'; China counters with a yuan exchangeable for gold. Dale: no savings pool big enough; a market rate lifts the dollar and drains liquidity, while repression speeds the exit from long Treasuries. 2026-SEP-14 — Nicolas Colin & Marieke Flament: dollar stablecoins are the new eurodollar. Like petrodollars and eurodollars after 1971, Tether and USDC are an 'outsourcing of the dollar' that extends US reach and rule-setting (freeze/seize) rather than challenging it; seen from Washington they are the 'next generation' dollar tool. They spread for the same reasons the dollar dominates: rails plus deep liquidity, which leaves any challenger with a cold-start problem. The euro's absence from the race is a sovereignty problem for Europe (bank-consortium answer: Qivalis). Colin prefers 'automating money': contracts that execute when cash arrives. Joseph Carlson (Sep-5, 2026): Mastercard closed a stablecoin-conversion acquisition (likely BVNK) and laid out agentic-commerce requirements (credentials, provable intent, spending limits, disputes) — positioning its tokenization/fraud stack as the trust layer between AI agents and money movement. Summers (2026-SEP-16): crypto was the first asset listed in Operation Economic Outcast; intelligence filings showed Russia using a Kyrgyzstan exchange financed by a Moldovan billionaire. Stablecoins are being pulled into the regulated core: Circle got bank-charter standing, and under the GENIUS Act issuers must be licensed by January 2027. 2026-SEP-18 (Eisman): senators blocked the Clarity Act (Democrats on ethics provisions, a few Republicans joining) after the industry spent "hundreds of millions" on it; its expected passage had driven the rally in crypto and in Circle - "a major blow for the crypto industry and it is unclear where the industry goes from here." 2026-SEP-18 (Carlson): agentic commerce adds demand for the card networks' trust layer: autonomous payments raise questions of authorization, spending limits, traceability, revocation and telling a real agent from fraud, which Visa's tokenization/spend controls and Mastercard's Agent Pay agent tokens answer. "More actors and more complexity creates more need for trust"; he keeps adding to a $189k MA position. Harley Bassman on MacroVoices #550, 2026-SEP-17: USD stablecoins are a 'grand idea' because they create Treasury demand while Japan sells. There is no escape route to a rival stablecoin because no other currency is liquid enough. Venmo is already a de facto dollar stablecoin: 'I'm not worried at all.'