Stablecoin payments firm BVNK has added the Stellar network to its platform as a settlement route.

Blockchain outlet The Defiant reported on Sept. 22 that the integration will allow BVNK customers to use Stellar-based settlement routes in more than 130 markets.

The move comes seven weeks after Mastercard completed its acquisition of BVNK on Aug. 3. Mastercard previously agreed in March to buy BVNK for $1.8 billion. Of that, $300 million is contingent. Which blockchain network BVNK adopts for its settlement network is effectively linked to Mastercard’s strategy to expand its payments infrastructure.

BVNK said Stellar processed $55.6 billion in payments across 3.6 billion transactions in 2025. It said uptime was 99.99 percent, average settlement time was 5 seconds and transaction fees were far below 1 cent. BVNK said it plans to add support for other Stellar-based native assets. It also set out cross-border payments, remittances and treasury spending as future tasks.

Kimberly Meskell Julien (킴벌리 메스컬 줄리앙), head of partnerships at BVNK, said the future of global payments is a multi-chain, multi-asset structure, but companies do not need to shoulder the technical burden of connecting to dozens of blockchains themselves. BVNK is highlighting that corporate clients can expand settlement networks without managing individual chain connections.

Stellar also stressed institutional demand. Denelle Dixon (디넬 딕슨), chief executive of the Stellar Development Foundation, said financial institutions rely on the network for cross-border transfers and payments and stablecoin settlement. Stellar has a larger stablecoin circulation than its decentralised finance (DeFi) total value locked, but the size of its dollar-pegged stablecoin remains small compared with Ethereum, Tron and Solana.

Data from DeFiLlama shows about $894 million of dollar-pegged stablecoins are in circulation on Stellar and total value locked is $260 million. By the same measure, Ethereum holds $146 billion, Tron $94 billion and Solana $15.8 billion in dollar stablecoins.

BVNK’s currency reference document as of Sept. 17 listed eight networks — Ark, Arbitrum, Base, BNB Chain, Ethereum, Polygon, Solana and Tron — along with Bitcoin, Litecoin and XRP, but Stellar was not included at the time. BVNK said the integration is nevertheless already live for customers across all supported countries.

BVNK was founded in 2021 and counts Worldpay, Deel and Flywire among its clients. In February it secured a Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) licence in the European Union, and in January it supplied stablecoin infrastructure for a Visa Direct pilot. On Sept. 9 it also partnered with card issuing and processing company Marqeta.

The integration shows stablecoin payments infrastructure is expanding into a multi-chain structure rather than remaining on a single chain. It also showed that BVNK’s choice of networks after the Mastercard acquisition is connected to a strategy to expand global payments networks.