Leading digital payments firm Visa (NASDAQ: V) unveiled its stablecoin platform on July 16 to help financial institutions, fintechs, and digital asset firms access stablecoin capabilities through a single Visa-managed environment.
The ‘Visa Stablecoin Platform (VSP)‘ provides direct access to a range of stablecoin capabilities and flows alongside Visa’s network, risk, and fraud capabilities, “so institutions can move from exploration to implementation with greater confidence,” said Visa.
The payment giant aims to provide a range of market players with a new way to access, store, and redeem stablecoins, including on-chain wallet infrastructure via a newly introduced ‘Wallet-as-a-Service’ offering, as well as connectivity for minting.
“Stablecoins are opening up a new layer of programmable money, but for most institutions the hard part isn’t the concept, it’s the operational reality,” said Jack Forestell, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Visa. “With the Visa Stablecoin Platform, we’re giving our clients a single place to mint, move and manage stablecoin operations with the controls, security and network reach they already expect from Visa.”
He added that “it’s how we help them turn interest in stablecoins into real products and real payment flows.”
Specifically, the platform provides the on-chain wallet infrastructure needed to make stablecoins usable inside real-world treasury, settlement, and product stacks; integration of stablecoins into Visa’s network and tools, allowing users to embed stablecoin capabilities into existing payment flows, treasury operations, and settlement processes; and allows institutions to interact with stablecoin flows “with the same security and trust that Visa is known for.”
The VSP is also interoperable with Visa’s existing stablecoin offerings, including stablecoin settlement, stablecoin-linked cards, and stablecoin money movement.
In its press release, Visa said that the first stablecoin on the VSP would be Open USD, a dollar stablecoin recently introduced by Open Standard, a consortium that counts Visa, BlackRock (NASDAQ: BLK), Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL), and Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) amongst its backers. The new platform will provide access to Open USD, giving clients a way to easily mint, burn, manage, and transfer it.
Visa has been exploring the digital asset space for some time. In October, the payments giant published research arguing that stablecoins become the foundation for a new cross-border lending and global credit ecosystem, citing more than $670 billion in stablecoin-denominated loans over the past five years.
Visa’s move into the booming stablecoin space—whose current market cap is over $312 billion with some predicting it to achieve a $1.9 trillion valuation by the end of the decade—is an example of an increasing urgency from the traditional powerhouses of finance and payments to embrace the technology, for fear of being left behind.
Earlier in July, the world’s largest messaging network for international payments, SWIFT, announced that its blockchain-based ledger was ready for initial use, after only nine months from concept to activation.
The SWIFT blockchain ledger enables financial institutions to support 24/7 cross-border payments with tokenized deposits, with 17 banks from six continents reportedly already preparing to pilot live transactions using tokenized deposits.
Visa said its VSP, including the Wallet-as-a-Service, is initially only available for beta testing with select clients. It hopes this will provide an early opportunity to explore how stablecoins fit into the company’s strategies, with the tests used to inform how and where the platform scales for broader market availability.
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