[scarlac]

It will probably happen, but will take a while. My bet is that this is what Apple is working on. They will launch a version of Apple Card that is free of MasterCard.

So far it's been a really long-haul play where Apple has spent a lot of time establishing deals with banks manually, in order to get a tiny fee, which they can due to the increased security of their system. This hard work is necessary in order to create a payment network that can work for everyone.

Eventually, Apple will be in a position to launch their own network, while increasing fees for themselves and lowering fees for merchants.

As someone who's been a merchant I'm very happy to see this happening, although it's like watching a tree grow (paint drying would be exciting in comparison). It's likely Google will follow suit, and depending on Apple's choice of implementation, we could hope that it will be backed by a stable cryptocurrency - but that's just a shot in the dark.