Thanks for tuning into our Stablescape series, where we share insights and deep dives into stablecoin infrastructure. Just this week we published our thoughts on Decrypt on how the stablecoin founder map doesn’t match the volume map - and the stablecoin investment thesis most funds are missing.

Now for the next part of our series:

Merchant and payment processing has more builders than any other category, and the incumbents are already shopping for a winner.

More than 575 startups are fighting to process stablecoin payments for merchants, and Stripe is quietly buying the category out from under them.

It is the biggest slice of the Stablescape map, and its leaders are still undecided. Just two of those companies have ever been acquired.

That combination, the largest category and the least settled, is the whole story.

At more than 575 companies, merchant and payment processing edges out agentic payments, which sits at about 545, as the largest slice of the stablecoin universe.

The field splits six ways. 251 are payment gateways, 169 are stablecoin payment rails, 82 handle merchant acceptance and commerce, 43 run crypto card programs, and the rest are processors. DePay sits in that gateway layer, letting merchants accept stablecoins at checkout without an intermediary in the middle.

That split matters, because the layers are worth different amounts. A payment gateway is close to a commodity, which is part of why 251 of them exist. Merchant acceptance and commerce is stickier, since it owns the relationship with the merchant, and far fewer companies have cracked it.

Formation is still climbing. 227 of these companies were founded in 2026 alone, up from 104 in 2025 and 40 in 2024, so the category is adding entrants faster than almost anything except agentic payments. The difference is that merchant processing has been building steadily since 2018, while the money and attention only arrived recently.

For all those companies, few have graduated. 83% sit at pre-seed or seed, and the whole category shows only two confirmed exits, Baanx and Loop Crypto.

Compare that with stablecoin issuance, where Circle went public and now defines the category, or cross-border payments, where Stripe bought Bridge for $1.1B. Merchant processing still lacks that kind of anchor.

Issuance consolidates because a dollar token grows more useful as more people hold it, so liquidity pools around one or two names. Merchant acceptance works the other way. A gateway in Brazil gains little from a gateway in Nigeria, so scale in one market does little for the next.

The pattern is a crowded field waiting for a front-runner.

Part of the reason is geography. Merchant and payment processing is amongst the most evenly spread category on the map, with 232 companies in the US, 108 in Europe, 53 each in LatAm and APAC, and 45 in Africa.

That spread is unusual. Agentic payments, by comparison, is almost entirely a US story, with more than 360 companies there against a handful everywhere else. Merchant processing shows up wherever people actually buy things.

Payment acceptance is a local business. Every market has its own rails, its own merchants, and its own regulators, so the category fragments along borders in a way that issuance and settlement infrastructure rarely do.

In LatAm it is already the second fastest-growing category, up 250% over two years and led by merchant acceptance and commerce.

Beyond each other, these startups face the incumbents moving in.

Stripe alone accounts for three of the stablecoin sector's confirmed exits, Bridge, Privy, and Valora, and it now offers stablecoin accounts across 101 countries. PayPal and the card networks are building toward the same merchant layer.

That changes the math for a young gateway. The prize is a market that Stripe, PayPal, and the card networks all want, and much of the winning may come through acquisition rather than an independent breakout.

A payment gateway is a well-understood pattern, so the barrier to entry is low and the entrants are many.

Winning is the hard part. It means owning merchant distribution in a specific corridor, wiring up local rails, and clearing compliance market by market, which is slow, unglamorous work that resists a single global champion.

That is how the category can be both the largest and the least consolidated at once. Scale of formation and scale of a business are different things.

Consolidation tends to arrive when one player locks up enough merchants in a market that rivals find it cheaper to buy in than to compete. That moment has yet to land here.

If this category rewards distribution over technology, the businesses to watch are the ones already moving real merchant volume, corridor by corridor. For an investor, the signal that matters is merchant volume and take rate in a defined market, rather than raw company count.

The winners will look less like a global stablecoin Stripe and more like operators who own a market, a merchant base, and the local rails underneath. Some will stay independent. Others will become the acquisition that finally gives an incumbent its merchant layer.

It is the biggest category on the map, and its leaders are still to be decided. At the same time, once a company embeds itself, it’s nearly impossible to displace. Check out our very own Alex Witt on Stabledash talking about this:

These insights come from our interactive dashboard, Stablescape, our effort to map the global stablecoin infrastructure ecosystem.

Today, the platform tracks ~3,500 companies across 137 countries, helping us identify where the next generation of financial infrastructure is being built. Explore the dataset:

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Disclosure: Verda Ventures may hold positions in companies named here. For information only, not investment advice.