Card networks built a business on a 2-3% toll nobody could avoid. Walmart and Amazon just started looking for the exit, and Wall Street noticed.

Visa, Mastercard and American Express have all lost double-digit percentages of their value in 2026, with American Express down roughly 23% from its highs and Visa and Mastercard both off close to a fifth, according to Yahoo Finance and 24/7 Wall St. That's not a sector having a bad quarter. That's investors pricing in the possibility that the toll booth at the center of American retail is about to get bypassed.

Two forces are doing the damage at once, and they're hitting from opposite directions. From Washington, Bloomberg reported in January that President Trump pushed card issuers to cap interest rates at 10% and threw his support behind the Credit Card Competition Act, a bill that would force banks to let merchants route transactions through networks other than Visa and Mastercard. From the business world, Amazon and Walmart are both exploring issuing their own stablecoins, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal and PYMNTS, a move that could let them settle payments on blockchain rails instead of handing banks and card networks their usual cut.

That cut is not small. Every time a shopper swipes a card, merchants pay an interchange fee of roughly 1.5% to 3% of the transaction to the bank and network that process it, according to industry estimates cited by retail trade press. For a company the size of Walmart, that adds up fast. Analysts have estimated that shifting just one percentage point of Walmart's payment volume onto its own stablecoin could save the company around $783 million a year. Amazon, Walmart and Expedia have all been reported by the Journal to be weighing branded stablecoins for exactly this reason: sidestep the card rails, settle in near real time, keep the fee.

Card networks have faced competitive threats before. PayPal, Zelle, buy-now-pay-later apps, all nibbled at the edges without ever threatening the core toll. Stablecoins are different because they don't need Visa or Mastercard's rails at all. A February 2026 report flagged in Seeking Alpha coverage raised a sharper version of the same worry: AI shopping agents, built to minimize cost, could simply learn to route purchases through stablecoin rails that cost fractions of a penny instead of card networks that cost 2-3%. An algorithm doesn't care about rewards points.

Nineteen UK banks and payment firms, including Barclays, Lloyds, NatWest, HSBC, Citi, JPMorgan Chase, PayPal and Wise, have launched a roughly ÂŁ50 million equity raise to build the UK Payments Delivery Company, a domestic challenger to Visa and Mastercard. The report sent Mastercard down 1.7% and Visa down about 3.1%, and even Visa and Mastercard... - UK banks launching Visa Mastercard competitor payment network - British domestic payment system rival to Visa Mastercard

None of this requires Amazon or Walmart to actually launch anything yet. Neither company has confirmed a stablecoin plan, and any real rollout still depends on the regulatory framework taking shape under the GENIUS Act. But the market doesn't wait for certainty, and the stock moves say investors think the probability just moved from fringe to real.

Mastercard isn't sitting still. In March the company agreed to buy BVNK, a London-based stablecoin infrastructure firm that processes more than $30 billion a year, for up to $1.8 billion, the largest stablecoin acquisition on record, according to Cointelegraph and American Banker. The deal closed in the months since, giving Mastercard its own plumbing for stablecoin settlement rather than ceding that layer to whoever builds it next. It's a hedge dressed up as an acquisition: if merchants are going to settle in stablecoins anyway, Mastercard wants to be the rail they use, not the toll booth they route around.

Visa's answer has leaned toward the AI angle instead. The company's newly branded Visa Crypto Labs unit launched Visa CLI, a command-line tool that lets AI agents make card payments straight from a terminal without juggling API keys, according to The Block. Visa has also pushed tap-to-pay further into small-merchant territory and started extending stablecoin settlement pilots to acquirers, with plans to stretch the settlement window to seven days. The bet is that if agents are going to shop on your behalf, you want them transacting on a card rail by default, not reaching for a merchant's house currency.

Here's the asymmetry that should worry both companies more than the stock charts do. Visa and Mastercard make their money by sitting between every buyer and every seller and taking a cut no matter who wins. Stablecoins let the two biggest sellers in America, Walmart and Amazon, which together moved well over a trillion dollars in sales last year, decide they'd rather not pay that cut at all. A retailer that size doesn't need the card networks' permission to try. It just needs the regulatory green light and a reason good enough to justify the engineering lift. $783 million a year is a pretty good reason.

American Express has its own version of this problem, and a worse one, if anything. Its business model leans even harder on merchant fees and premium-card economics, and its stock has taken the steepest hit of the three networks this year. If large retailers start building stablecoin rails for their own storefronts, the networks most exposed are the ones with the least room to cut fees and still make money. For now, Visa and Mastercard are still processing the overwhelming majority of U.S. card volume, and that isn't changing by Thanksgiving. But a fifth of their market value just evaporated on the belief that it eventually will.

Also read: Figma reports earnings today as Wall Street doubts pile up • Bhutan charters a new central bank with the power to hold Bitcoin • Pinterest stock craters nearly 20 percent on weak holiday quarter guidance

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