Visa is taking a decidedly unglamorous piece of crypto infrastructure—working capital—and putting it closer to the center of the stablecoin boom.
The payments giant is combining its VisaNet settlement data with onchain lending infrastructure to help stablecoin-linked card programs and fintechs access financing, according to an announcement Tuesday. The idea is straightforward: give lenders a clearer picture of the money a payment program is already owed, then use that information to help finance the gap between transactions and settlement.
That gap matters more as stablecoin payments move from experiments to everyday payment products. Visa said stablecoin settlement volume has reached an annualized run rate above $20 billion, up 15 times from a year earlier.
Now, Visa wants the financial plumbing behind those transactions to keep pace.
For participating programs, VisaNet data can reveal settlement receivables—the funds a card program expects to receive after payments clear. With customer permission, lenders can combine that information with onchain transaction data to evaluate credit performance and automate parts of the financing and repayment process.
In other words, the blockchain is not replacing Visa’s existing payment rails. It is being layered onto them, potentially giving lenders a more continuous view of how money moves through a card business.
Stablecoin lending gets a Visa-sized data layer
The timing is notable. Visa’s push comes two weeks after CoinDesk reported that the company was looking for a new stablecoin settlement partner with licensing capabilities across multiple regions.
Visa is hardly alone in chasing the category. Traditional payments giants, including Mastercard and Stripe, have increasingly treated stablecoins as part of the next generation of payment infrastructure rather than a side project for crypto-native companies.
Visa said more than 160 stablecoin-linked card programs are now operating across its network, while payment volume for those programs has climbed nearly 200% year over year.
But rapid growth creates a very old-fashioned problem: how do relatively young companies finance the money they need to operate?
Traditional lenders can be reluctant to extend working capital to emerging payment companies without substantial scale, years of operating history or a lengthy manual underwriting process. That can create a mismatch between transaction growth and access to financing.
Visa’s proposal aims to narrow that gap by making the underlying receivables easier for lenders to assess.
The company has already been testing the model with Credit Coop, a decentralized lending platform that uses smart contracts for funding, collateral management and repayment. Visa said the arrangement has supported more than $2.5 billion in cumulative financed settlement volume since 2023, with no defaults across participating facilities.
More than 3,000 borrowing events and 9,000 repayment events have also been processed programmatically onchain.
That history gives Visa’s stablecoin lending push a practical angle. Rather than asking blockchain lenders to invent an entirely new credit market, the company is connecting existing payment data to infrastructure designed to move and manage financing automatically.
The bigger shift may be less about crypto credit than about visibility. Stablecoin businesses can generate transaction data around the clock, but lenders still need reliable ways to understand what those transactions mean financially.
Visa is effectively offering a bridge between those two worlds: its traditional settlement records on one side, and programmable onchain lending on the other.
As stablecoin-linked cards spread across payment apps and fintech platforms, that bridge could become increasingly important. The faster these businesses grow, the more pressure there is to turn transaction activity into usable liquidity without forcing every new company through the same slow, manual credit process.
For Visa, the bet is that stablecoin payments will not just create more transactions. They will create a new class of payment businesses that need financing too—and a market for lenders willing to underwrite them differently.