Visa Rolls Out a One-Stop Stablecoin Shop, Because Banks Hate Homework Too 🏦

Visa on Thursday unveiled the Visa Stablecoin Platform, or VSP, an enterprise system that lets banks, fintechs and payment providers mint, hold, transfer and redeem stablecoins through the company's payments network. The platform combines stablecoin issuance, wallet infrastructure and treasury management into a single product, integrating stablecoin operations into existing payment and settlement workflows rather than requiring institutions to build their own blockchain infrastructure. "Stablecoins are opening up a new layer of programmable money, but for most institutions the hard part isn't the concept, it's the operational reality," Visa Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jack Forestell said in a statement. "With the Visa Stablecoin Platform, we're giving our clients a single place to mint, move, and manage stablecoin operations with the controls, security, and network reach they already expect from Visa."

At launch, VSP supports Open USD (OUSD), a stablecoin introduced by the Open Standard consortium in June, alongside Visa's existing support for Circle's USDC and Paxos' USDG, according to Fortune. The platform, initially available to select beta users, includes wallet management, fund transfers, integration with existing treasury and settlement systems, transaction approval controls and audit logs. Stablecoins, which are designed to maintain a fixed value, most commonly by being pegged to the U.S. dollar, collectively make up a roughly $304 billion market, according to CoinGecko.

The announcement follows a series of stablecoin-related moves by Visa. In October, the payments giant published research arguing that stablecoins could bring portions of the $40 trillion global credit market onto blockchain rails, citing more than $670 billion in stablecoin lending over the previous five years. In March, Visa became the first major payments company to join the Canton Network as a Super Validator, a role intended to help banks use stablecoins for payments, settlement and treasury operations on a privacy-focused blockchain network. In April, Visa expanded its stablecoin settlement program by adding Base, Polygon, Canton, Arc and Tempo, bringing the total number of supported blockchain networks to nine. At the time, the company said its annualized stablecoin settlement volume had reached $7 billion and that it supported more than 130 stablecoin-linked card programs across 50-plus countries.

Separately, Jesse Pollak said on Wednesday that he is stepping back from leading the Base App, handing responsibility for the product back to Coinbase while shifting his full attention to growing Base as a blockchain for global finance. In a post on X, Pollak reflected on Base's performance over the past six months and acknowledged that the network's strategy around on-chain social and creator coins did not meet expectations.