defi.com

We think crypto competes with banks. In reality, @base is going after Visa, Mastercard, @stripe, and PayPal. And the numbers are starting to prove them right. Base isn't positioning itself as "just another Layer 2" anymore. Their bet: become the payment infrastructure that directly competes with the biggest web2 payment rails. The numbers speak for themselves. Stablecoins on Base hit ~$5.2B, with USDC at ~90.9%. 12.89M daily transactions at $0.02 median fee. Card networks would charge billions for the same volume at 2.5% interchange. The honest caveat: that gap holds at settlement. Card rails are priced on wrapped credit, fraud exposure, and reversibility. Strip those out and the question shifts from "cheaper rails" to who carries the risk when things go wrong. The Coinbase moat With 110M+ verified users and $250M+ in onchain payments processed in three months, the playbook is clear: → Start with institutional B2B payments → Onboard merchants (Shopify already accepts USDC via Base) → Build a credible alternative to legacy rails @brian_armstrong puts it bluntly: old way = 3-5 days, 3%+ fees, closed weekends. New way = $33T settled in stablecoins last year, sub-cent fees, 24/7/365. One nuance: sub-cent fees are network fees, not all-in. Move USD to EUR and you still pay on-ramp, off-ramp, and FX. The targets are explicit: - Visa & Mastercard: Visa reported $4.6B annualized stablecoin settlement on its network in Q1 2026. - Stripe: Coinbase + Nium for USDC payments settled in local fiat across 190+ countries. - SWIFT & ACH: stablecoin transfer volume eclipsed the ACH network by early 2026. The real battlefield: agentic commerce McKinsey & Company projects agent-driven transactions could hit $3-5T by 2030. Visa launched Trusted Agent Protocol. Mastercard has Agent Pay. But those frameworks still sit on rails designed for humans. An AI agent running 1,000 micro-transactions per hour can't operate there. Base took a step ahead with x402, co-developed with Cloudflare and Anthropic. Settlement in ~200ms, fraction of a cent per transaction. AWS just integrated x402 natively into Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Payments. Frenemies: competing and partnering at once Coinbase uses Visa for cards, Stripe for on-ramps, and competes head-on with both on rails. Base is simultaneously a competitor and a partner of the networks it wants to disrupt. What it means: Web2 rails still own consumer credit, fraud guarantees, and reversibility. But their monopoly on institutional flows, cross-border B2B, and soon agentic commerce is being directly challenged. Base is betting the next decade of payments won't belong to cards. It will belong to stablecoins on programmable rails, with risk repriced and unbundled rather than wrapped in interchange. APMs were the first wave. Stablecoin rails might be the second. PS: I post weekly about payments, stablecoins, and the reality of building a payment startup with @subyhq. Follow for more!