Bitcoin at the Table: Rewriting the Payments Conversation
Alphabit Investing
For decades, Visa and Mastercard have been the uncontested infrastructure of global commerce. Their rails underpin trillions of dollars in annual spending, touch nearly every economy on earth, and represent some of the most durable competitive moats in all of financial services. So when a decentralized network invented in 2009 begins settling volume at a genuinely comparable scale, we believe investors should pay closer attention.
The 2025 Headline
In its Q4 2025 one digital assets research report delivered an impressive data point: Bitcoin settled $6.9 trillion worth of payments over the prior 90 days, a figure on par with or above Visa and Mastercard. For comparison, over that same 90-day period, Visa and Mastercard processed a combined $6.88 trillion in payments.1
This means that a decentralized protocol, with no headquarters, branch locations, and customer service lines, is now processing settlement volume that rivals the combined throughput of the two largest card networks in history.
An important caveat: further analysis of this 90-day data indicates that once internal transfers between addresses controlled by the same entity are stripped out, Bitcoin's "economic" settlement is closer to $870 billion per quarter, or roughly $7.8 billion per day, well below Visa and Mastercard's gross figure on a daily basis. With activity migrating off-chain and some flows moving to brokers and other investment products like ETFs, on-chain transactions appear to be largely used by institutions, for trading flows, and for value storage purposes. We contend that this fact continues to be a positive indicator for the future potential for digital asset payment infrastructure: only approximately 21,000 merchants worldwide accept Bitcoin compared to the hundreds of millions of vendors that accept Visa and Mastercard for everyday purchases.2
Further proving our optimism about the disruption of the global commerce infrastructure, the broader digital ecosystem appears to be keeping pace with Bitcoin with regards to transaction volume increases. Back to the first quarter of 2025, stablecoin transaction volume rose over 30% from the end of 2024, surpassing Visa's payment volume3, further proof that the whole digital asset payment infrastructure is growing.
Why This Matters
The story here isn't that Bitcoin has fully replaced Visa, or that it's even ready to be widely adopted by the general public for so-called normal transactions. Frankly, the consumer payments use case remains nascent. We see the story as being a structural migration of institutional capital onto digital rails, and the velocity at which it's happening. Bitcoin entered 2025 with strong institutional momentum, backed by over $38 billion in ETF inflows, and remains a dominant global settlement layer rivaling traditional networks in transactional throughput.4
The companies that mine Bitcoin, manage it, lend against it, and build the infrastructure around it are not speculative bets on a fringe technology. They are the backbone of a settlement layer that quickly developed to functionally operate at institutional scale.
For investors seeking exposure to this structural shift, we believe the conversation should be about how to access digital assets intelligently, not about whether or not they matter or their long-term usefulness.
Sources:
1. https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-stablecoin-settlement-visa-mastercard-consumers
3. https://www.mitrade.com/insights/news/live-news/article-3-794912-20250501
4. https://insights.glassnode.com/cme-glassnode-bitcoin-insight-and-market-trends-h1-2025/
