Visa (NYSE: NYSE:V) has announced the expansion of its stablecoin settlement capabilities to merchant acquirers, as it continues to modernize cross-border money movement. The global payment leader is now working with merchant acquirers Worldpay and Nuvei (TSX:NVEI), leveraging the high-performing Solana blockchain.
The company has already moved millions of USDC between its partners over the Solana and Ethereum blockchain networks to settle fiat-denominated payments authorized over VisaNet. This expansion comes after successful live pilots with issuers and acquirers, and is expected to speed up cross-border settlement.
In 2021, Visa began testing how USDC could be used inside its treasury operations which led to a pilot with Crypto.com. This made Visa one of the first major payments networks to test stablecoin settlement on the issuance side. Crypto.com now uses USDC to fulfill its settlement obligations on the Visa card in Australia and plans to extend this capability to other markets.
"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," said Cuy Sheffield, Head of Crypto, Visa.
Visa's treasury operation continues to test receiving funds onchain from multiple issuer partners. With these new settlement options, Visa can send funds onchain to acquirers like Worldpay and Nuvei to help speed up settlement times for their merchants. This includes a growing number of merchants interacting with the blockchain and crypto economy including on-ramp providers, games, and NFT marketplaces who may prefer to receive stablecoins over traditional fiat currencies for the card payments they accept.
As Visa looked to expand this capability to additional clients, there has been significant demand to leverage newer, high performance blockchains that can send and receive stablecoins with higher speed and lower costs. For these reasons, Visa chose to add support for Solana as a high performance blockchain that its partners can choose to send or receive USDC settlement payments.
"We are excited about the USDC use cases Visa and its partners are driving to create fundamental blockchain innovation," said Jeremy Allaire, Co-founder and CEO, Circle. "Expanding the pilot exemplifies how pairing USDC with Visa's innovation opens up the future of payments, commerce and financial applications."
"Visa's USDC settlement capability enables Worldpay to bring more of our treasury operations in-house and allows us to offer merchants more choices for receiving funds," said Jim Johnson, President of Worldpay Merchant Solutions, FIS. "Stablecoins like USDC are cutting edge payments technology that can enable online businesses around the world to accelerate their growth," added Philip Fayer, Chair and CEO, Nuvei.
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