Interoperability is what the financial space has touted as a prerequisite for stablecoins to reach commercial scale. But, at the same time, the banks, card networks, stablecoin issuers, blockchain operators and infrastructure providers all building that interoperability are each simultaneously competing to control the layer through which digital money is routed, converted, settled and governed.

The headlines this week offered a clear indication that while the first battle was over whether stablecoins would become legitimate financial infrastructure, the next may be over who controls the infrastructure that makes different forms of digital money interchangeable.

Thirty-nine U.S. state banking associations are backing the BankChain Alliance, a bank-owned network intended to support tokenized deposits, stablecoins and programmable payments. Large, systemically important banks like J.P. Morgan that once treated stablecoins largely as a non-issue are reportedly reconsidering whether they need stablecoins of their own. And the British government wants to give the Bank of England an explicit secondary mandate to encourage innovation in payments and digital money, including stablecoins.

This is familiar territory for payments. The most durable businesses in the industry have rarely succeeded simply because they invented another way to represent money. They succeeded because they sat between institutions and made fragmented systems behave like networks.

Read more: This Week in Stablecoins: Crypto That Never Touches the Customer 

The stablecoin debate’s battle lines have traditionally appeared straightforward. Cryptocurrency companies issued stablecoins. Banks defended deposits and experimented with tokenized versions of them. Those lines are blurring as banks move beyond the question of whether stablecoins or tokenized deposits win and prepare for the possibility that both do.

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