This week, UK bank CEOs held their first formal meeting to build a sovereign alternative to Visa and Mastercard. The initiative, codenamed “DeliveryCo” and chaired by Barclays UK CEO Vim Maru, brings together NatWest, Lloyds, Santander UK, Nationwide, and others. Target go-live: 2030.
The logic is sound. Around 95% of UK card transactions run on American-owned rails. Cash is dying. And when sanctions forced Visa and Mastercard out of Russia, ordinary people couldn’t buy groceries. The UK doesn’t want to be in that position.
I agree. But I think the conversation is missing something obvious.
The Sovereign Rail That Already Exists
Public blockchains cannot be turned off by a foreign government. They settle in seconds, run 24/7, and process trillions of dollars annually. Ethereum has not had a single second of downtime since the Merge.
In 2025, stablecoins processed roughly $46 trillion in global transaction volume. Visa does about $15 trillion a year. Mastercard about $9 trillion. Stablecoins have surpassed both. Total supply now exceeds $305 billion. Over 30 million addresses are active monthly, up 53% year-on-year. This is not a whitepaper. It is live infrastructure moving real money at a scale that rivals the networks DeliveryCo is designed to back up.
The Honest Complication
Now, the obvious pushback. The fastest-growing consumer-facing use of blockchain in payments is crypto debit cards, and almost all of them are Visa or Mastercard cards.
Alex Obchakevich of Obchakevich Research tracks this through his Dune Analytics dashboards. Visa-issued crypto card spending rose 525% in 2025. Revolut’s stablecoin payment volumes grew 156% to an estimated $10.5 billion, with the most common transaction size between $100 and $500, suggesting everyday use rather than speculation.
Impressive numbers. But Gnosis Pay is issued under licence from Visa Europe. EtherFi’s card runs on Visa rails. The MetaMask card, Bitpanda’s card, same story. If Visa were switched off, these stop working too.
So the crypto card boom, on its own, does not solve the sovereignty problem. It would be dishonest to claim otherwise.
Where Blockchain Genuinely Delivers Independence
The sovereignty case for blockchain sits at three layers that do not depend on Visa or Mastercard at all.
Settlement. The bulk of that $46 trillion in stablecoin volume is peer-to-peer, business-to-business, and protocol-level settlement that never touches a card network. Cross-border payments, treasury operations, remittances, and payroll. This layer settles in seconds, runs around the clock, and no foreign government can intercept it. This is blockchain’s strongest sovereignty argument, and it is directly relevant to what DeliveryCo is trying to achieve.
Native stablecoin commerce. A parallel merchant payment layer is emerging that bypasses card networks entirely. In mid-2025, Shopify and Coinbase launched the Commerce Payments Protocol: open-source smart contracts on Base handling authorization, escrow, and refunds onchain. Millions of merchants now accept USDC directly from wallets. No Visa, no Mastercard. Stripe’s stablecoin acceptance hit $150 billion annualised. In December, Shift4 launched stablecoin settlement for hundreds of thousands of merchants across Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, and Base. These are production systems, not pilots.
Peer-to-peer transfers. The simplest demonstration is also the most powerful. Two people, anywhere in the world, can transfer value using stablecoins on a public blockchain with no intermediary. No card network, no bank, no foreign government standing between them. Tens of millions of people do this monthly.
The UK’s GBP Stablecoin Gap
At Dune UK, we track the GBP stablecoin market through our dashboard. The picture is blunt: total GBP stablecoin supply sits under £10 million. DEX volume peaked mid-2025 and has flatlined. No GBP stablecoin has been integrated into a single lending protocol. Against USDT and USDC, GBP stablecoins are invisible onchain.
That is not a technology failure. It is a regulatory timing problem. The FCA has opened its sandbox for stablecoin issuers. HM Treasury finalised the Cryptoassets Regulations in December 2025. The full regime lands in October 2027. New entrants like tGBP and GBPA are building with compliance baked in from day one. The pipes exist. The permissions are arriving.
The Irony Is Worth Noticing
Visa and Mastercard, the companies that DeliveryCo exists to reduce dependence on, are themselves building blockchain settlement. Visa’s onchain stablecoin settlement hit a $3.5 billion annual run rate by late 2025. They launched a dedicated stablecoin advisory team in December. Mastercard joined Paxos’ Global Dollar Network.
If the UK spends four years building a new centralised rail while the incumbents migrate to decentralised settlement, what exactly will DeliveryCo be competing with by 2030?
What Should Happen
DeliveryCo should commission a formal assessment of blockchain-based settlement as a complementary layer. Not a replacement for the centralised system being designed, but a sovereign backup that already works at scale.
The FCA should accelerate the GBP stablecoin regulatory timeline. October 2027 is too slow if payment sovereignty is genuinely urgent.
UK banks in the DeliveryCo working group should look at what Shopify, Stripe, and Shift4 are doing today. Native stablecoin commerce is live and processing real money without Visa or Mastercard.
Blockchain is not a drop-in replacement for card networks. Consumer protections, dispute resolution, and merchant acceptance infrastructure still need work. But at the settlement layer, the sovereign rail the UK is looking for already exists; it already processes more volume than Visa and Mastercard combined, and it is ready now.
All the data in this piece is publicly verifiable on Dune Analytics. The dashboards are linked. The evidence is onchain.
That is rather the point.
