Visa is expanding its stablecoin settlement pilot to nine blockchains. In the last quarter, its annualized settlement run rate jumped 50% to $7 billion. The figures suggest stablecoin infrastructure is leaving the experimental phase behind and becoming a core part of how money moves at a global scale.
Five blockchains added to Visa’s stablecoin settlement network
The five newly supported blockchains are Arc, Base, Canton, Polygon, and Tempo. They join the four Visa already supports: Avalanche, Ethereum, Solana, and Stellar. The range is deliberate. Base is Coinbase’s high-performance chain for low-cost consumer settlement. Canton is designed for regulated capital markets with configurable privacy for institutional use. Arc, built by Circle, targets programmable payments and agentic commerce. Polygon focuses on fast, low-cost global transactions. Tempo specializes in real-time stablecoin liquidity flows. No single chain dominates stablecoin payments, and settlement infrastructure must keep pace with that fragmentation.
“Our partners are building in a multi-chain world, and they expect their options to reflect that reality,” said Rubail Birwadker, Visa’s global head of growth products and strategic partnerships. Partners can choose whichever network fits their needs, he said, while Visa provides a common settlement layer across all of them.
What the numbers show
A 50% quarter-on-quarter jump is not pilot noise. Financial institutions, fintechs, and payment providers are moving real money over blockchain rails, and that trend accelerated sharply over the past three months. Visa says the growth reflects stablecoin settlement maturing into a genuine complement to traditional payment systems, not a parallel experiment running in the background.
The consumer reach is already wider than most people realize. Visa supports more than 130 stablecoin-linked card programs in over 50 countries, and consumers can already spend stablecoins at ordinary merchants using a Visa card. Stablecoin settlement also runs outside standard banking hours, giving it a practical edge over legacy systems still tied to batch-processing cut-off times.
Visa as a blockchain infrastructure layer
CEO Ryan McInerney spelled out the company’s positioning on a recent earnings call. “We’ve established Visa’s role as a key interoperability layer between this powerful infrastructure and real-world solutions for users,” he said. Visa is not treating stablecoins as a feature to bolt onto its product suite; it is positioning itself as the connective tissue between blockchain networks and the broader payments world.
The company has also taken validator positions on select blockchains, meaning it is embedded in how those chains operate, not just routing transactions across them. That is a deeper level of integration than anything Visa has done with blockchain before. Traditional payment rails and blockchain infrastructure are converging, and established networks are racing to sit at the intersection of both. Whether Visa’s interoperability bet pays off will depend on how fast the rest of the card industry follows.
