The Big Whale Future of Finance - September 2026

TL;DR

• Both sides agree it's evolution, not revolution. Stablecoin settlement is being layered onto the acquiring stack, not replacing it. Worldline doesn't expect stablecoins to become the only rail "in the next 20 years", and Coinbase says merchants see them as another payment method.
• Settlement is the easy part. The real prize is merchant treasury. Coinbase's phase one is settlement plus fiat on- and off-ramps. Phase two, where merchants hold USDC and earn yield, is what Codjia called the "bread and butter" everyone wants to own.
• Consumer acceptance is still a niche; B2B is where the volume is. Payments are about 1% of stablecoin transactions, and point-of-sale and e-commerce make up only 15–20% of that. Coinbase puts 2025 B2B stablecoin payments at close to $400bn, growing about 700% year on year, against about $4bn of stablecoin-linked card spending.
• Chains are a highway business, but merchants don't care which chain they use. Coinbase pushes Base while staying chain-agnostic. Worldline won't build a chain and sees chain ownership as "almost a different business".
• Distribution vs. depth. Worldline's moat is serving both merchants and banks, plus European sovereignty. Coinbase's pitch is a one-stop, in-house on-chain stack delivered through partner PSPs. For now it is not knocking on merchants' doors, but it believes it will be better placed than acquirers to own the merchant later.

Speakers

• Océane Codjia – Coinbase, Head of EMEA Stablecoin Payments
• Thibault Pelé – Worldline, Head of Innovation
• Hugo Panczak – The Big Whale, Head of Agentic AI, Co-host
• Aleksandar Bukovski – The Big Whale, Host & moderator

Setting the Scene: Two Models, One Merchant

The session came at what Aleksandar called an inflection point for digital payments. In the previous two weeks, Circle had launched Arc and Christine Lagarde had officially unveiled Pontes. The debate set two approaches against each other. On one side was the TradFi acquirer, represented by Worldline. On the other was the digital-asset-native rail, represented by Coinbase. Both are constructive on stablecoins. They disagree on who ends up holding the merchant relationship.

What the Acquiring Stack Actually Does

Pelé broke the acquiring stack into five layers:

• Acceptance: taking any type of payment through any channel.
• Orchestration: processing the transaction.
• Onboarding: getting the merchant's contracts and preferences into the system.
• Authentication and authorisation: making sure every transaction is safe and approved. Pelé called this layer the most critical, because a wrongly declined transaction is lost revenue for the merchant.
• Clearing and settlement.

For Pelé, the value is less in any single layer than in how upgradable the stack is. It has to take new channels on the acceptance side, integrate new rails and support new merchant services.

Pelé: "The value of the acquiring is just to make sure that, as a merchant, you never think of your payments."

Stablecoin Settlement: A Feature, Not a New Model

Asked whether stablecoin settlement is a feature on top of the stack or a change to the model underneath, Pelé was clear that it does not change everything, and should not. Merchants batch their flows and are typically settled once a day, even in an instant-payments world. Where stablecoins help is speed, especially cross-border, where settlement can take up to seven days.

His bigger point was that settlement is where the stablecoin story starts, not where it ends. The value comes from what the merchant can do with the stablecoin once they hold it.

Pelé: "Settlement is only the beginning of a journey where you can create new offers and almost new products for your merchant based on the stablecoin."

Will Merchants Go Stablecoin-Only?

Codjia laid out a phased roadmap.

• Phase one, where Coinbase is focused today: get stablecoin settlement right, along with the fiat leg that converts USDC to and from local currency across multiple local rails.
• Phase two: merchants and corporates keep their stablecoins and earn yield or rewards.
• After that: fintechs and banks build products on top, and end users start paying in stablecoins through their consumer and banking apps.

Codjia: "If we don't nail this, we cannot talk about the second phase."

Pelé went further. Payments have to serve everyone, and payments are a local business. Interchange differs between the US and Europe, and even between Germany and France. People still use banknotes and cheques, and some still insert a card and type a PIN when Apple Pay exists. Stablecoins will find their place, but Pelé does not expect them to take over, "at least maybe not in the next 20 years."

Pelé: "Stablecoins could be the unique rail in the future, but they won't be the unique rail."

Codjia agreed. The merchants Coinbase speaks to see stablecoins as an alternative payment method, a way to reach stablecoin-holding customers, rather than a revolution. If one method proves better on cost and efficiency, it will win over time through competition.

Pelé: "Not revolution. For me, it's evolution."

Why Own a Chain?

Hugo asked why Coinbase (Base), Circle (Arc) and Stripe (Tempo) each want their own chain while Worldline does not. Codjia started with the structural mismatch blockchains solve: the internet, commerce and AI run 24/7, but money does not.

Codjia: "Internet is 24/7, commerce is 24/7, AI is 24/7, but money is not."

USDC carries the digital value and Base provides near-instant settlement. That lets merchants bypass correspondent banking and get faster access to working capital. Codjia named two live use cases:

• Cross-border payouts. Depending on the corridor, a payout can take five days, or up to 11 days in some regions.
• Stablecoin acceptance at online checkout. Merchants on Shopify Payments can already accept USDC on Base with no additional setup. They can either receive USDC or cash out in local currency with no FX fees on cross-border transactions.

On whether chains will compete to become the standard, and fragment the merchant experience, Codjia argued that merchants simply don't care. Coinbase supports Ethereum, Base and other L1s and L2s. It pushes Base, which she described as a major chain for stablecoin payment volume today, but it stays chain-agnostic because merchants go where their users are.

Codjia: "Merchants don't really care about the chain. They just want to move money from point A to point B."

Pelé gave the clearest explanation of why the rail owners want chains. Owning the infrastructure is like owning the highway: you set the rules, such as which currency fees are paid in. And because a blockchain is "almost a computer", the chain owner also hosts the applications built on top, such as meal-voucher or discount programmes. Worldline takes the opposite position. It stays agnostic and relies on issuers like Circle, which issues USDC across 10 to 12 chains, to solve interoperability.

Pelé: "You want to own the infrastructure just like you want to own the highway."

The Chain Is One Piece. The Stack Is the Product.

Codjia argued that the chain matters much less to merchants than the infrastructure around it. A working merchant stablecoin flow needs five pieces:

• Acceptance at checkout, the consumer-facing layer.
• A treasury management platform with on- and off-ramps.
• An orchestration API that pushes stablecoins to the merchant's wallet.
• An embedded wallet, custodial or non-custodial.
• Yield on top.

She was direct about the division of labour. Incumbents like Worldline have the distribution engine but not yet all the technology pieces. Coinbase has the pieces and partners with distributors to reach hundreds of thousands of merchants, as it already does with Checkout.com and others.

Codjia: "The chain is one topic, but the most important is the infrastructure that you need to build on top."

Competing With Stripe

Both guests were asked how they position against Stripe, which is building an end-to-end ecosystem spanning channels, processing, its own blockchain, wallets and accounts.

Pelé pointed to Worldline's dual role. Worldline provides critical infrastructure for banks as well as merchants, including authentication, issuing platforms and processing. That gives it a view of both sides of the value chain, "what's behind in the kitchen." He added sovereignty: Worldline is European infrastructure, which matters more than ever in the current geopolitical climate.

Pelé: "We have this unique role of knowing both sides of the value chain."

Codjia welcomed Stripe's entry as confirmation of the category. She positioned Coinbase's edge as depth across the on-chain stack, all in one place and mostly built in-house:

• the stablecoin
• the settlement layer (Base)
• embedded wallets
• fiat on- and off-ramps
• treasury management
• custody
• compliance
• developer infrastructure

She contrasted this with Stripe's acquisition-led strategy, which includes Bridge and Privy.

Codjia: "M&A is great, but it takes time to integrate these companies into your own stack."

Acceptance Is a Niche. B2B and Treasury Are the Loop.

An audience question asked how many European merchants will accept stablecoins in 2027 and 2028. Pelé declined to give a number and challenged the premise. Citing Artemis data, he noted that payments are roughly 1% of stablecoin transactions, and point-of-sale and e-commerce are only around 15–20% of that payment slice. Most payment volume is B2B.

That is why he sees settlement as the unlock. Suppose a merchant can hold stablecoins in treasury and use them to pay its own suppliers. Then accepting stablecoins from consumers closes a loop with no on- or off-ramp, and that is where the real efficiency lies. Without that loop, acceptance stays confined to sectors chasing tech-savvy customers, such as gambling and luxury. Broad acceptance will take more than two years. Aleksandar summed it up as a "stablecoin circular economy."

Pelé: "If it's just to accept the payment, it will remain a niche."

Codjia agreed that the sequence is B2B first, then B2C, and brought numbers:

• Cross-border fiat flows were around $45tn in 2025, of which roughly $20tn was B2B.
• Stablecoin B2B payments reached close to $400bn in 2025, growing about 700% year on year.
• Stablecoin-linked card merchant spending was only around $4bn.

On the ground, she runs about 30 customer calls a week with money movers and cross-border payment companies. Some are piloting at $5–10m a month; others already move more than $10bn of stablecoins a year.

Codjia: "It started in 2025. 2026 is when everyone is looking into their infrastructure. 2027 is when they're scaling this."

The Agent Layer: Why Cards Break and Why "Agents Are Colorblind"

Hugo turned to the consumer end of the chain. Meta's new personal agent, Muse, was downloaded almost two million times in two weeks and can make payments. Amazon has shut agents out entirely, while Shopify has partnered with Meta to integrate Muse natively.

Codjia declined to comment on other companies' strategies. Instead she set out four reasons card rails fail for agents, which is why Coinbase is investing in x402:

• Cards are tied to a human identity: a name, a billing address, a credit score.
• Cards require human approval moments such as 3DS, one-time codes and confirmation prompts, which an agent cannot complete.
• Fees of 1.5–3.5% plus fixed charges destroy the economics of a 20-cent machine-to-machine payment.
• Cards are pull-based, so there is no programmability.

Stablecoins offer programmable money, 24/7 settlement, lower cost, no identity requirement at the rail level, and native compatibility with the keys and APIs agents already use. She was careful to add that it is still early days.

Codjia: "Cards are by design pull-based. Agents need push-based, programmable money with limits, conditions and logic attached to the payment."

Pelé explained the Amazon–Shopify split through business models. Amazon is a merchant that monetises traffic to its own site. A shopping agent bypasses that site, because agents don't care about branding or UX. Shopify is infrastructure: agents that can discover its merchants' catalogues bring it more business, not less. To compete, Amazon will have to sell services rather than traffic, drawing on what it already knows: consumer payment habits, dispute management and logistics.

Pelé: "A shopping agent is colorblind. It does not care about your beautiful branding, your beautiful website."

Five Years Out: Who Owns the Merchant?

The closing audience question: if stablecoin settlement becomes a commodity, which part of the stack owns the merchant relationship? The two answers made the disagreement explicit.

Codjia said the model is win-win for now. Coinbase works at the infrastructure level with PSPs, banks, fintechs and money movers rather than approaching merchants directly. Phase two changes that. Yield and more sophisticated treasury products are where the value sits, and Coinbase may end up more advanced than acquirers there. "Not our motto right now," she said, but Coinbase could be "in a much better position to potentially own the merchant at some point." She pointed to Coinbase's hybrid B2C and B2B model, and to Amazon, whose success rests as much on AWS as on e-commerce.

Codjia: "This is bread and butter. This is what everybody wants to own in the end."

Pelé agreed that settlement will be commoditised but argued the relationship won't be. Merchants want support, co-innovation and a PSP that makes payments invisible. As payments commoditise, the PSP wins by offering an ecosystem. A PSP managing B2B flows across its merchant base can connect merchants who are each other's suppliers, creating network effects no single rail provides.

Pelé: "Settlement will be a commodity, but as a merchant, you will still want to have this unique relation with your PSP."