Visa’s role in stablecoins

The payments landscape is more innovative and competitive than ever before. As new technologies reshape the way value moves, stablecoins are emerging as one of the most promising tools to enable faster and more accessible digital payments. We’ve already seen how crypto, like stablecoins, and traditional payments methods are already working together, and at Visa, we see significant potential in stablecoins and the value they can provide for consumers. We believe that a clear and strong underlying regulatory framework along with government support will pave the way for stablecoins and blockchain technology to make digital payments even better and drive innovation.

Stablecoins, paired with Visa’s worldclass technology stack, offer the promise to modernize global money infrastructure, propelling us into a future where payments can be made even more seamlessly and just as securely. In the near term, we are leveraging stablecoins in the following four ways:

1. Modernizing settlement infrastructure: From our lens at Visa — we see stablecoins improving the efficiency and utility of back-end financial and money movement infrastructure. While there has been significant progress digitizing and modernizing the ‘front end’ of money movement over the past decade, the back end of the world’s settlement and money movement infrastructure needs to catch up. To this end, Visa has been working on integrating stablecoins into our existing network and treasury systems and piloting the ability for clients to fulfill their VisaNet settlement obligations using stablecoins starting with USDC. In 2023, Visa became one of the first major payments networks to settle transactions in stablecoin when we piloted enabling clients to fulfill their settlement obligations in USDC. We have settled more than $225 million to date in stablecoin volume that has been settled through Visa across participating clients. As we continue to explore potential opportunities for the use of stablecoins, we are exploring expanding our stablecoin settlement capabilities to even more partners in more markets, including enabling seven-day-a-week settlement, and adding additional stablecoins and blockchain networks to our settlement infrastructure.
2. Enhancing cross border money movement: Visa is a global leader in cross border money movement. We provide a robust interoperable service to enable commerce and move money across borders. Now we see opportunities to deploy stablecoin infrastructure to help modernize global money movement even further. Our Visa Direct technology already enables payments between friends, businesses and customers via cards, wallets and bank accounts. Integrating stablecoins into our money movement infrastructure, can speed up settlement, enhance liquidity and support the growing demand for cross-border currency holdings.
3. Enabling programmable digital money: Ultimately, we see a future where stablecoins could help deliver new utility for financial institutions and their customers through smart contracts and programmable money. Already, we are seeing stablecoins being used to power new automated financial products in lending where assets can be deposited into a smart contract as collateral that automatically triggers a stablecoin-based loan disbursement. To bring this innovation more mainstream, last year we launched our Visa Tokenized Asset Platform, which enables banks to mint, manage, burn and transact in stablecoins. Going forward, Visa can play a role in enabling infrastructure to help our bank partners build new innovative financial products that replace manual processes and antiquated core ledgers.
4. Creating on and off ramps for cards: The Visa ecosystem already supports crypto and stablecoins through stablecoin-linked cards that allow issuers to move from fiat currencies to stablecoins and vice versa. To date, we have facilitated almost $100B in purchases of cryptocurrencies and over $25 billion in cryptocurrency spending. To help bring stablecoin-linked cards to more people in more places, we’re bringing new stablecoin-linked card programs and enablers like Bridge, Baanx and Rain.

Visa is excited and uniquely positioned to be a leader in this space. Our scale — settling payments across a network of more than 150 million Visa-accepting merchant locations and more than 14,500 financial institutions — combined with our ability to orchestrate transactions in both fiat and stablecoins, enables us to remove market roadblocks and realize the potential of stablecoins and blockchain technology. We operate as a trusted bridge, helping connect both platforms and new technologies, including stablecoin-native players, with our global network to provide fair and open access to banking services.

In 2025, we believe that every institution that moves money will need a stablecoin strategy. As more players in the payments ecosystem explore this powerful new technology, Visa stands ready to help our partners navigate the transformation, bringing the scale, trust and innovation needed to help build the next generation of global payments.