STABLECOINS · PAYMENTS · SETTLEMENT
Visa | Empowering the future of payments with stablecoins
Full research note • Main page texts + Onchain Analytics + Visa’s role • Styled for CryptoWisely
Visa
Stablecoins
Settlement
Cross-border
Onchain Analytics
VTAP
Visa’s main page information (core texts)
| Hero message |
Empowering the future of payments with stablecoins. Stablecoins combine the stability of fiat currencies with the speed of crypto — enabling digital payments that are fast, borderless and accessible. |
|---|---|
| Visa’s positioning | Visa presents itself as a leader integrating stablecoins into the next generation of payments, with solutions designed for banks, fintechs and crypto wallets. |
| Operational lens |
Streamline your business operations with stablecoins. Stablecoins are positioned as a strategic opportunity for banks and fintechs: a fiat-denominated store of value and more efficient cross-border money movement into and out of emerging markets. |
Key metrics (as presented)
| Supply | $217B supply • 46% YoY growth in circulating stablecoin supply |
|---|---|
| Volume | $6.4T volume • 63% YoY growth in adjusted transaction volume |
Create your stablecoin strategy with Visa (four building blocks)
| Consulting and analytics | Expert practitioners help create a stablecoin strategy for each client. |
|---|---|
| Stablecoin-linked cards | Enable consumers to spend their stablecoin balance at Visa-accepting merchant locations. |
| Cross-border money movement | Help make payments faster and more cost effective into and out of emerging markets. |
| Infrastructure (VTAP) | With the Visa Tokenized Asset Platform (VTAP), Visa clients can mint, burn and transact in stablecoins. |
Mainstream integration thesis
| Claim | Stablecoins are becoming increasingly integrated into mainstream payments — not just for crypto companies, but for banks, corporates and financial institutions globally. |
|---|---|
| Implication | As adoption widens, Visa’s positioning is that every financial institution should have a stablecoin strategy — and Visa can help. |
Stablecoin-linked cards (merchant reach)
| Core message | Enable spending at 150+ million Visa-accepting merchants with stablecoin-linked Visa cards. |
|---|---|
| How it works | Wallet developers can work with a Visa partner so customers can pay using a stablecoin wallet balance linked to a Visa credential. |
| Reference | Visa suggests learning more about stablecoin-linked card partnerships via the Visa newsroom. (If you want, we can add a live link here.) |
Visa integrates stablecoins with its global network
| Stablecoin-linked cards | Your customers can spend against their stablecoin balance for everyday purchases when they pay with a stablecoin-linked Visa card. |
|---|---|
| Seamless on and off ramps | Your customers can purchase and spend stablecoins using their Visa credentials. |
| Stablecoin settlement | Select Visa-member clients can participate in a stablecoin settlement pilot program to fulfill settlement obligations with Visa using program-supported stablecoins. |
Making sense of stablecoins
Onchain analytics can help financial institutions cut through complexity
| Why this exists | Stablecoins are becoming a meaningful part of digital commerce, but not all stablecoin volume is created equal. Visa’s Onchain Analytics Dashboard is positioned to distinguish where real economic activity is happening onchain and where gaps still exist. |
|---|---|
| The “noise” problem | Stablecoins are issued and transferred on public blockchains; data is public in real time. But accessing and organizing it requires blockchain expertise, and stablecoins operate across many chains with different nuances. On top of that, transactions can be manual (end users) or programmatic (bots), producing “noise” in interpretation. |
| DeFi bots (important nuance) | Automated bots can perform stablecoin arbitrage, liquidity provision and market making. These activities help sustain DeFi, but the resulting transactions don’t resemble settlement in the traditional sense. That makes it difficult to compare bot activity with organic payments activity initiated by a consumer or business. |
Why the Visa Onchain Analytics Dashboard?
| Launch + partner | Launched in 2024. Built in partnership with the blockchain data provider Allium Labs. |
|---|---|
| Design goal | An easily digestible, freely available window into aggregated, publicly available blockchain data, beginning with stablecoins. |
| What it shows | Active users, volumes by coin and blockchain, transaction sizes, and a continuously evolving set of stablecoin metrics—designed so anyone can follow stablecoin activity more clearly. |
Four notable trends (as stated)
| 1) Supply approaching all-time highs | Demand picked back up in 2025; circulating supply approaching $250B, up nearly $100B from 2024. |
|---|---|
| 2) Growth of monthly active users | 47M monthly active stablecoin users across all chains. |
| 3) Total vs bot-adjusted volume | Applying a simple heuristic that removes inorganic data adjusts last-30-day volume from $3.9T to $817.5B. |
| 4) Retail is still small | Retail-sized transactions represent < 1% of adjusted stablecoin volume in the past 12 months (through March 2025). Most volume still comes from high-value transfers. |
Retail-sized transactions (interpretation)
| What the data implies | It may still be early days for retail use onchain, but Visa argues other use cases remain meaningful. Visa highlights partnerships with leading wallets and fintechs to issue stablecoin-linked cards, enabling everyday purchases at Visa-accepting merchants (from coffee to travel). |
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| Visa’s focus | Becoming a network that enables consumers to use stablecoins as part of everyday purchasing, and understanding deeply how new technologies facilitate money movement as they emerge. |
| Open invitation | Visa signals ongoing iteration of the tool and welcomes discussion: methodologies for adjusted volume, which metrics matter by segment, and what could be clearer or more focused. |
Visa’s role in stablecoins
The potential in stablecoins and the value they can provide for payments
| Macro context | Visa frames the payments landscape as more innovative and competitive than ever. Stablecoins are positioned as a tool for faster and more accessible digital payments, with an emphasis on regulatory clarity and government support as enabling conditions. |
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| Infrastructure thesis | Stablecoins paired with Visa’s technology stack are framed as a way to modernize global money infrastructure, pushing toward a future where payments are seamless and secure. |
Four ways Visa says it is leveraging stablecoins
| 1) Modernizing settlement infrastructure | Visa describes stablecoins improving back-end settlement and money movement infrastructure. It references integrating stablecoins into network and treasury systems and piloting VisaNet settlement obligations using stablecoins (starting with USDC). Visa notes it settled more than $225M to date via participating clients and signals expansion: more partners/markets, seven-day-a-week settlement, additional stablecoins and more networks. |
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| 2) Enhancing cross-border money movement | Visa Direct already supports payments across cards, wallets and bank accounts. Visa positions stablecoin integration as a way to speed settlement, enhance liquidity and support demand for cross-border currency holdings. |
| 3) Enabling programmable digital money | Visa describes a future where stablecoins enable smart contracts and programmable money for new utility. It references use in automated lending flows (collateral in smart contracts triggering stablecoin loan disbursement). Visa highlights VTAP as an enabler for banks to mint, manage, burn and transact in stablecoins and modernize manual processes and legacy ledgers. |
| 4) Creating on/off ramps for cards | Visa references stablecoin-linked cards to move from fiat to stablecoins and vice versa. It cites almost $100B in crypto purchases and $25B+ in crypto spending, and references enablers such as Bridge, Baanx and Rain. |
Why Visa claims it is uniquely positioned
| Scale | Visa references scale across a network of 150M+ Visa-accepting merchant locations and 14,500+ financial institutions, alongside the ability to orchestrate transactions in both fiat and stablecoins. |
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| Bridge role | Visa positions itself as a trusted bridge between stablecoin-native players and global banking rails, with the goal of removing roadblocks and enabling fair/open access to services. |
| Forward-looking claim | Visa states that every institution that moves money will need a stablecoin strategy, and positions itself as a partner bringing scale, trust and innovation into the next generation of payments. |
CryptoWisely.io Comment
Visa’s narrative is not primarily about retail hype. It’s about operational embedding:
settlement pilots, treasury integration, programmable issuance (VTAP) and analytics that help institutions interpret onchain data.
CryptoWisely Insight: if you’re building or launching a stablecoin product, treat compliance + operational standards + integration design as the core deliverable—not a later phase. The winners will look less like “token launch teams” and more like “regulated infrastructure operators.”
CryptoWisely Insight: if you’re building or launching a stablecoin product, treat compliance + operational standards + integration design as the core deliverable—not a later phase. The winners will look less like “token launch teams” and more like “regulated infrastructure operators.”
Disclaimer: This note is for planning purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or investment advice. Always validate current program details and applicable regulatory requirements before execution.