Georgia handles the money almost no one thinks about. Roughly 70% of all U.S. card payments flow through companies with operations in the state, a concentration that earned metro Atlanta the nickname Transaction Alley. Now stablecoins are arriving at those rails, and Georgia’s incumbents are moving first. In June 2025, Fiserv launched its own dollar-pegged stablecoin, FIUSD.
The scale here is easy to underestimate. Georgia fintech companies process more than 118 billion transactions worth over $2 trillion a year, by a February 2026 Forbes analysis. Global Payments, headquartered in Atlanta, agreed in April 2025 to acquire Worldpay for $24.25 billion, consolidating the rails further. And Fiserv did not stop at a stablecoin. In April 2025 it became the first company in the country to process card payments under Georgia’s merchant-acquirer bank charter, a state-specific license that gives processors direct access to the card networks. Transaction Alley is not waiting to be disrupted. It is trying to own the disruption.
The reason any of this matters sits on every merchant’s monthly statement. U.S. businesses paid a record $198 billion in card-processing fees in 2025, by Nilson Report data, with Visa and Mastercard interchange averaging 2.36%. Swipe fees are most retailers’ largest cost after labor, and they add an estimated $1,200 a year to the average family’s bills through higher prices. Stablecoins promise to route around that. Since the GENIUS Act gave them a federal framework in July 2025, processors have bolted stablecoin settlement onto ordinary merchant tools, letting a store accept a dollar-pegged token, settle to cash automatically, and pay a fraction of the card fee.
Merchants have fought that toll for two decades with little to show for it. A long-running antitrust settlement with Visa and Mastercard was rejected by a judge in 2024 as too soft on the networks, a revised version won only preliminary approval in 2026, and the Credit Card Competition Act, which would force cards onto competing networks, remains stuck in Congress. That stalemate is exactly why a technology that sidesteps the networks entirely lands differently now than it would have five years ago.
The Tollbooth or the Bypass
Here is the tension Georgia embodies. Stablecoins could hand merchants and consumers the biggest payments savings in a generation. They could also become the same tollbooth rebuilt on a new road. Global stablecoin supply passed $323 billion by May 2026, and some datasets put annual stablecoin transfer volume above $27 trillion, higher than Visa’s. That figure flatters the truth, though: much of it is trading and automated movement, not a shopper buying groceries. Real checkout adoption is still small.
The savings only appear if the rails change hands. If Fiserv issues the stablecoin, runs the settlement, and holds the merchant charter, a payment can move on-chain and still pass through the same Georgia toll. The card networks also do real work a raw transfer does not: fraud protection, instant authorization, chargebacks, the rewards consumers expect. Stripping the fee strips some of that too, and someone has to rebuild it. The threat to Transaction Alley was never stablecoins. It is stablecoins that Transaction Alley does not control.
Georgia spent forty years making itself indispensable to how America pays, and it collects a sliver of nearly every swipe for the service. Stablecoins are the first serious challenge to that arrangement, and Atlanta’s answer has been to build the new rails before anyone else can. Whether that ends in lower costs for a corner store in Macon or just a new banner over the same tollgate turns on a question Georgia has not answered: when the toll moves on-chain, does the price come down, or only the address change?
Disclosure: The author holds no position in the assets or companies named and has no relationship with them. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.
