Visa Unveils Stablecoin Platform for Banks and Fintech Companies

Visa has introduced a new platform that allows banks, fintechs and payment providers to issue, hold and transfer stable coins through its payment network.

In one blog post On Thursday, Visa said Visa Stablecoin Platform, or VSP for short, combines stablecoin mining, redemption, wallet infrastructure and treasury management into a single business system. Instead of requiring financial institutions to build their own institutions blockchain infrastructure, the platform integrates stablecoin operations into existing payment and settlement workflows.

“Stablecoins open a new layer of programmable money, but for most institutions the hardest part is not the concept, but the operational reality,” Visa Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jack Forestell said in a statement. “With the Visa Stablecoin Platform, we are giving our customers one place to mine, move and manage stablecoin operations with the controls, security and network reach they already expect from Visa.”

As their name implies, stablecoins are cryptocurrencies designed to maintain a fixed value, usually by being pegged to the US dollar. Together they have grown into a roughly $304 billion market Coin gecko.

At launch, the Visa Stablecoin Platform will support Open USD (OUSD), a stablecoin introduced by the Open Standard consortium in June, in addition to Visa’s existing support for Circle’s USDC and Paxos’ USDG, according to Fortune. The platform, which is initially available to select beta users, also allows institutions to manage wallets, transfer funds and integrate these wallets with existing treasury and settlement systems, and includes transaction approval controls and audit logs.

The news follows several moves by Visa in the stablecoin market.

In October, the payments giant published a study arguing that stablecoins could put parts of the $40 trillion global credit market on blockchain rails, citing more than $670 billion in stablecoin lending in the past 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 in more than 50 countries.