💳 Inside Visa's Multi-Billion Dollar Stablecoin Strategy

🏦 The Payments Giant's On-Chain Pivot

Visa is no longer watching the stablecoin revolution from the sidelines. The company has quietly built a multi-billion dollar annualized run rate business around stablecoin settlement — and it's only getting started.

Joshua Moss, who leads Visa's stablecoin product strategy and go-to-market for commercial and money movement solutions, recently outlined the company's comprehensive approach to integrating digital dollars into the world's largest payment network. The strategy spans everything from stablecoin-linked cards to on-chain settlement to cross-border B2B payments — and it reflects a fundamental shift in how traditional finance views blockchain-based money.

"We view stablecoins as both a currency and a rail. At Visa, we've actually been in the space for quite a long time."

📊 The Scale of Opportunity

The numbers paint a compelling picture. Visa Direct, the company's money movement platform, now supports over 12 billion endpoints across cards, accounts, and wallets in 195 countries and territories. Yet stablecoins currently represent just 1% of on-chain transaction volume for payments-related use cases — with the remaining 99% focused on trading.

That gap represents enormous potential, particularly in B2B payments. The global B2B market generates approximately $145 trillion in payment volume. Of that, roughly 20% consists of cross-border transactions, and another 20% involves high-friction corridors with volatile currencies and expensive correspondent banking. That leaves approximately $6 trillion in addressable opportunity — just in B2B alone.

"Those high friction B2B cross-border corridors are really what we're focused on."

💰 Five Core Product Lines

Visa's stablecoin strategy isn't a single product — it's a comprehensive ecosystem designed to bridge traditional finance and DeFi across multiple use cases:

Account Funding Transactions (AFTs) and Original Credit Transactions (OCTs): The original on-ramp and off-ramp infrastructure that allows users to move between traditional bank accounts and crypto exchanges
Stablecoin-Linked Cards: Cards attached to stablecoin wallets that enable spending at nearly 200 million merchants globally without requiring merchants to add new payment methods
Stablecoin Settlement: Already running at an annualized rate in the billions of dollars, this allows issuers to settle obligations with Visa directly in stablecoins rather than converting to fiat
Prefunding and Payouts: A pilot program launching soon that allows Visa Direct clients to prefund in stablecoins for cross-border payments or receive payouts directly to stablecoin wallets
Consulting Services: Strategic guidance helping both traditional issuers and DeFi-native clients develop their stablecoin strategies

🔄 The Stablecoin Settlement Breakthrough

Stablecoin settlement has emerged as one of Visa's fastest-growing blockchain product lines. The service addresses three critical pain points:

First, DeFi-native issuers like Rain and others operating stablecoin-linked card programs were incurring substantial costs converting stablecoins to fiat just to settle with Visa. By accepting stablecoins directly for settlement, Visa eliminates mint/burn fees and off-ramping costs while enabling 24/7/365 settlement.

Second, issuers in emerging markets often find it easier and cheaper to acquire USDC than actual US dollars due to correspondent banking frictions. Direct stablecoin settlement removes that friction entirely.

Third, issuers required to hold collateral with Visa can now settle on-chain around the clock, significantly reducing their collateral requirements.

"We're charging a small fee, but the benefits significantly outweigh the costs for issuers who would otherwise have to incur conversion costs."

💳 Making Stablecoins Spendable

One of the most practical applications of Visa's blockchain strategy is the proliferation of stablecoin-linked cards. These cards solve a fundamental problem: it remains extremely difficult to spend stablecoins in the real world.

The use case is particularly relevant in countries with volatile local currencies. Users receive paychecks, immediately convert to USDC on an exchange, and then need a way to pay for groceries, advertising, or other everyday expenses. Stablecoin-linked cards — from issuers like Rain, Ether.fi, and even Pudgy Penguins — enable spending at traditional merchants without requiring any changes to merchant infrastructure.

From the consumer perspective, the experience is seamless. From the merchant perspective, it's a standard transaction — no new wallets, no additional checkout buttons, just business as usual.

"The consumer experience does not change at all. From a merchant's perspective, it's a BAU [business as usual] transaction."

🌍 Cross-Border Payments & The Visa Direct Expansion

The upcoming Visa Direct pilot for stablecoin prefunding and payouts represents another significant expansion. The service enables two critical flows:

Inbound prefunding: Clients operating their treasury in stablecoins can prefund Visa directly in digital dollars rather than converting to fiat. Visa handles the conversion and moves funds through its global banking infrastructure to complete payouts.

Outbound payouts: Clients can prefund in fiat and Visa will convert to stablecoins for delivery to stablecoin wallets — treating digital wallets as a new endpoint alongside traditional accounts and digital wallets.

The system is designed to support B2B, B2C, and P2P use cases, with particular focus on:

Creators: Immediate payouts to stablecoin wallets for creators in countries without robust banking infrastructure
Gig workers: Instant payouts to ride-share drivers and similar workers operating globally
Remittances: Faster, cheaper cross-border transfers with direct delivery to stablecoin wallets

🤖 Preparing for Agentic Payments

The rise of AI agents presents both opportunities and challenges for traditional payment networks. Agents will likely operate primarily using stablecoins for on-chain transactions, but they'll still need access to traditional merchant infrastructure to be truly useful.

Visa's approach centers on tokenization technology and intelligent commerce controls. Rather than giving an agent direct access to card numbers, businesses can leverage Visa's tokenization to create secure, controlled payment methods for autonomous agents.

"Agents will definitely operate using stablecoins, but in order for them to really be useful in the traditional merchant landscape, that's where they need a card."

The framework allows agents to spin up stablecoin-linked cards as needed while maintaining the fraud protections and risk controls that come with the Visa network.

🔗 Multi-Chain, Multi-Coin Infrastructure

Perhaps most importantly, Visa has committed to a chain-agnostic and coin-agnostic strategy. The company is not picking winners among blockchains or stablecoin issuers.

Visa currently supports multiple chains including Ethereum and Solana, and works with various stablecoin issuers including USDC. New currencies and chains go through a rigorous onboarding process focused on compliance and technical integration, but the goal is maximum interoperability.

"There are a lot of coins, a lot of chains, and we are not in the business of picking winners."

This approach positions Visa as the interoperability layer between disparate blockchain ecosystems — solving the fragmentation problem that could otherwise limit blockchain adoption in traditional finance. Rather than JP Morgan using Citi's blockchain or vice versa, Visa provides the bridge between different institutional chains, currencies, and networks.

🎯 The Three Strategic Priorities

Looking ahead, Visa's stablecoin strategy focuses on three core objectives:

1. Bringing clients on-chain — Whether traditional finance or DeFi-native, helping all clients access the benefits of blockchain technology

2. Universal stablecoin spending — Attaching a stablecoin-linked card to every wallet to make digital dollars spendable everywhere Visa is accepted

3. Dominating B2B payments — Capturing share of the $6 trillion opportunity in high-friction cross-border B2B corridors

💭 The Bigger Picture

Visa's comprehensive stablecoin strategy represents something more fundamental than product launches or revenue streams. It's a recognition that money itself is being reinvented — and that the world's largest payment networks must evolve or risk obsolescence.

The company isn't fighting the shift to on-chain payments. Instead, it's positioning itself as the essential infrastructure that makes blockchain-based money work in the real world. By providing the bridge between traditional finance and DeFi, between fiat and stablecoins, between legacy merchants and crypto-native users, Visa is building the connective tissue for the next generation of money movement.

With stablecoin market capitalization projected to reach the trillions by 2028 and year-over-year growth rates of 40-50% even during crypto bear markets, the secular trend is undeniable. Visa's multi-billion dollar bet on stablecoin infrastructure suggests the payments giant sees exactly where the future is headed — and it's determined to build the rails that get us there.