Quick take:
- Visa is expanding its stablecoin settlement capabilities to merchant acquirers.
- The payments services giant has teamed up with Worldplay and Nuvei to roll out a pilot on Solana.
- The company has already moved millions of USDC between its partners on Solana and Ethereum blockchains.
Visa is expanding its stablecoin settlement capabilities to the Solana blockchain. The company announced Tuesday that it is collaborating with merchant acquirers Worldplay and Nuvei for a live pilot on Solana.
According to the announcement, Visa has already moved millions of USDC between its partners on Solana and Ethereum networks to settle fiat-denominated payments authorized over VisaNet.
Commenting on the announcement, Cuy Sheffield, Head of Crypto at Visa said this partnership helps to improve the way people move money as it fulfils Visa’s commitment to being at the forefront of digital currency and blockchain innovation.
“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 Sheffield.
This partnership is building on the 2021 Crypto.com pilot which Visa used to test stablecoin settlement on the issuance side. According to Visa, the pilot was successful in leveraging USDC and the Ethereum blockchain to receive payments from Crypto.com.
Crypto.com has successfully been using USDC to settle cross-border payments with its Visa card in Australia. Before the pilot, the crypto exchange company took days to complete currency conversions and international wire transfers.
Jeremy Allaire, Co-founder and CEO of Circle, the company behind the USDC stablecoin commented: “Circle built USDC to provide a functional digital dollar that could move at the speed of the internet to facilitate secure, reliable payments. Expanding the pilot exemplifies how pairing USDC with Visa’s innovation opens up the future of payments, commerce and financial applications.”
Visa’s expansion of on-chain settlements to include acquirers even speeds up the settlement times for their merchants. It also taps into an expanding network of merchants that interact with blockchain technology including on-ramp providers, games, and NFT marketplaces, who prefer to receive stablecoins over fiat currencies, the company said in a press release.
Jim Johnson, President of Worldpay Merchant Solutions, FIS commented: “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.”
Philip Fayer, Chair and CEO of Nuvei added: “Optimizing cross-border transactions is only one use case where stablecoins can benefit businesses. As a leading global payments company, we are constantly focused on innovation, and we’re excited to work with Visa to bring these capabilities to our partners.”
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