Wasabi Card CEO: Stablecoins Fix Settlement, Not the Card Scheme

Quick Take:

• Wasabi Card, a two-year-old payment infrastructure company, says it has around 1,000 enterprise clients and has lost one since launch.
• It issues cards through more than 70 local BIN sponsors and pays out in stablecoins to over 200 countries, all behind one API.
• CEO Ray Yang says stablecoins replace T+1 to T+3 SWIFT settlement between card-scheme participants, not the scheme itself.
• A virtual accounts product with enterprise IBANs is due by the end of 2026; agentic payment cards with Visa and Mastercard are in discussion.

Most stablecoin pitches at TOKEN2049 Singapore were about replacing something. Ray Yang's is about fixing one step in a system he has no intention of replacing. "Stablecoins always serve the settlement layer," the Wasabi Card co-founder and CEO told Block Insider on the sidelines of the company's own side event. The merchant, the acquirer, the card scheme and the issuer all stay where they are. What changes is how, and how fast, money moves between them.

That precision comes from where the team came from. Wasabi Card started about two years ago with staff drawn from card schemes, commercial banks, crypto exchanges and Web3 projects. Two years later, Yang says the company has around 1,000 enterprise clients and has lost one.

Two Products Behind One API

Wasabi Card sells two things. The first is card issuing. "After integrating our API, they can issue cards. We can help them issue virtual cards, physical cards, corporate cards, and also consumer cards," Yang said. The second is global payouts in stablecoins. "They can use stablecoins to pay out to more than 200 countries worldwide."

The business is B2B only, and clients tend to arrive through one of three use cases.

Media buying is the first. Advertisers use the dashboard or API to "issue thousands of cards instantly, and then use the cards for advertising on TikTok, Meta, or Google Ads," Yang said.

Creator payouts are the second: platforms that have to pay large numbers of creators small amounts, often. "By using our card and global payouts, they can pay thousands of creators instantly." The third is Web3 projects and exchanges, which use Wasabi to issue white-label cards to their own users, "helping them cover global users."

Why Settlement, and Only Settlement

Yang's explanation of what stablecoins do for cards cuts against most of the conference's rhetoric, so it is worth following in full.

Card payments run on a four-party model: merchant, acquirer, scheme and issuer. "Under this four-party model, the scheme is always the center of clearance. It's the center of processing transactions. But the card scheme is not the center of settlements," he said.

Settlement between those parties has historically run on US dollars over SWIFT.

"The settlement time would be T+1, T+2, or T+3. So, it's slow, but the reason why it's slow is because it needs to avoid mistakes."

Stablecoins change the speed. "I think it can help the card scheme complete settlements in real time, 24/7. That's a big improvement on the settlement layer."

What they do not yet do is match the scale. "The SWIFT system currently processes like 5 trillion USD per day, but for USDC, they might process like 150 billion a day. So, there's still a big difference here." His worry is what happens as that gap closes. "One day, when the stablecoin volume becomes higher and higher, I think issues will come up like, 'How do you make sure that settlements have no mistakes?' We still need more infrastructure to play different roles here."

He also gave a one-line history of stablecoin use from the inside. "Before, people treated stablecoins as holding assets. Now, I think it goes more to payments, cross-border payment usage. It's more practical than before."

One Client Lost

The number Yang was keenest to share had been presented at Wasabi's event earlier that day. "From day one until now, Wasabi Card has had only one client loss." With around 1,000 enterprise clients, he said, "our client loss rate is almost zero."

His explanation is coverage. "We have over 70 card BINs worldwide. We integrated with different commercial banks and BIN sponsors locally, aggregated them, and provided a simple API to institutional clients. By using our API, they can issue cards globally in a compliant way." He calls this the localisation strategy: rather than one sponsor bank, dozens of local ones, each compliant in its own market, stitched together behind one integration.

The second reason is variety inside that coverage. "Our BIN resources are varied: we have consumer BINs, commercial BINs, support for virtual cards, and physical cards." White-labelling runs down to the card design in Apple Wallet and on plastic.

Both figures are Yang's own, from the company's event presentation, and Block Insider has not independently verified them.

The Roadmap: IBANs, Then Africa, Then Agents

Three things are on the near-term list. By the end of 2026, a virtual accounts product. "We can help our clients to issue the enterprise IBAN accounts, and we can also help our clients to issue individual bank accounts," Yang said.

Through 2027, more local BIN sponsors "in the US, in the Middle East, and even in Africa," with more commercial bank partners behind them.

And a longer-dated item that drew the most interest in the room. "Currently, we talk a lot with Visa and Mastercard. Maybe next year or in the next two years, we also will have some practical use cases with Visa and Mastercard on some special vertical scenarios, such as agentic payment cards." Cards that an AI agent can hold and spend within set limits are a live topic at both networks; Yang did not say which side approached which.

The name, for the record, came from the company's smart contract engineer, who likes Sushi and Cake. "Food names do well in crypto," Yang said.

What to Watch

Wasabi's numbers are the kind that are easy to state and hard to check from outside: client counts, churn, BIN coverage. The virtual accounts launch at year-end is the first thing a reader can verify, since an IBAN product either exists or does not. The Visa and Mastercard agentic card work is the one to watch into 2027; if either network names Wasabi publicly, the company moves from stablecoin plumbing to something the card world has to take seriously.