Visa is opening up its settlement data and on-chain lending infrastructure to blockchain lenders, giving those lenders better visibility into the financial performance of the fintechs and neobanks behind Visa stablecoin card issuers. The goal is straightforward: make it easier to underwrite companies that are growing quickly but lack the track record traditional lenders expect.
What Visa Stablecoin Card Issuers Actually Need
The underlying problem is a timing mismatch. Stablecoins settle continuously, around the clock, but card issuers still need to manage daily settlement cycles. For an established bank, that is a routine operational matter. For a startup neobank or a recently launched fintech, it creates a liquidity management challenge that can become a ceiling on growth.
By sharing settlement data with on-chain lenders, Visa is trying to lower that ceiling. Lenders get a clearer picture of how the issuers are actually performing. Issuers, in turn, may find it quicker and simpler to access working capital. Whether that loop works smoothly in practice is the question the industry will be watching.
The scale of what Visa is building into gives some sense of why this matters. According to Visa Investor Relations, Visa’s stablecoin settlement volume has recently surpassed a $20 billion annualised run rate, up more than 15x year-on-year. That is not a niche experiment any more.
The on-chain lending market it is connecting those issuers to is itself substantial. According to Quartz, on-chain lending protocols have facilitated more than $694 billion in stablecoin-denominated loans since 2020. Visa is not creating this lending ecosystem, it is plugging its card issuers into one that already exists at scale.
A Growing Network, With Ambitions to Double
Visa already facilitates more than 160 stablecoin-linked card programmes, according to CNBC, with new issuers joining its network each week, a figure that represents roughly 200% growth on the same point last year. Visa currently operates more than 130 programmes across more than 50 countries and expects that number to roughly double in 2026.
The broader context here is the passage of the GENIUS Act in the US, which Visa credited with accelerating its investments in digital assets. The company’s response has been to build infrastructure rather than issue its own stablecoin, an approach it formalised with the launch of the Visa Stablecoin Platform. That product is designed to give financial institutions a way to mint, facilitate and settle stablecoins within their existing payment infrastructure, handling the plumbing so the institutions do not have to build it themselves.
The consumer side of this equation is also shifting. Stablecoin-linked cards work by converting digital dollars into conventional currency at the point of purchase, with no extra steps required from merchants. According to Paymentscan, usage of crypto cards hit an all-time monthly record of roughly $1.04 billion in July, a trend driven largely by stablecoins. Many of those transactions were for everyday purchases: groceries, fuel, ride-sharing.
That pattern matters for how you read Visa’s infrastructure push. If stablecoin card spending were concentrated in large, occasional purchases, the lending and settlement question would be less pressing. But everyday spending creates frequent, smaller settlements, exactly the kind of cash-flow pattern where access to working capital becomes operationally relevant for issuers.
The remaining open question is how lenders price the risk once they have the data. Visa can share settlement figures, but the creditworthiness of a two-year-old neobank issuing stablecoin cards is still a relatively new underwriting problem. Giving lenders better data is a necessary condition for that market to work. It is not, on its own, a sufficient one. Visa expects to roughly double the number of programmes on its stablecoin network this year, which means the pace at which lenders get comfortable with the model matters quite a lot to the companies entering it.
