Visa Broadens Stablecoin Settlement Reach with Circle’s USDC by Tapping Solana

Global payments processing giant Visa has announced expanding its stablecoin settlement capabilities to the Solana blockchain.

Visa has successfully conducted real-world pilot tests with both issuers and acquirers, facilitating the seamless transfer of millions of USDC stablecoins tokens across the Solana and Ethereum blockchain networks. These transfers were executed to settle fiat currency-based payments that had been authorized through VisaNet.

Visa Expands Stablecoin Settlement

In the latest announcement, Visa also revealed working with merchant acquirers Worldpay and Nuvei. The company first began exploring USDC’s role inside its treasury operations back in 2021, which led to a pilot with Crypto.com, making it one of the major payment networks to experiment with stablecoin settlements from the issuer’s perspective.

This work subsequently led to a successful pilot leveraging USDC and the Ethereum blockchain to receive payments from Crypto.com specifically for cross-border transactions within their active card program in Australia.

The pilot essentially eliminated the cumbersome process involving conversions and costly international wire transfers for cross-border purchases on Crypto.com Visa cards. As a result, Crypto.com has transitioned to USDC to fulfill its settlement obligations for its Visa cards in Australia.

Commenting on the development, Cuy Sheffield, Visa’s Head of Crypto said,

“By leveraging stablecoins like USDC and global blockchain networks like Solana and Ethereum, we’re helping to improve the speed of cross-border settlement and providing a modern option for our clients to easily send or receive funds from Visa’s treasury. Visa is committed to being on the forefront of digital currency and blockchain innovation and leveraging these new technologies to help improve the way we move money.”

Tapping into Solana

Visa highlighted the growing demand to leverage newer, high-performance blockchains that can send and receive stablecoins with higher speed and lower costs as its rationale behind tapping into Solana. With this move, Visa has become one of the first major payment companies at scale to directly utilize the layer 1 blockchain for live settlement payments between its clients.

Meanwhile, the Solana network has witnessed steady improvements in performance and reliability as it maintained uninterrupted service for more than six months and has been 100% uptime since February.