Visa Brings Stablecoins To $1.7 Trillion Platform In BVNK Partnership

bitcoinistОпубликовано 2026-01-15Обновлено 2026-01-15

Введение

Visa has partnered with stablecoin infrastructure provider BVNK to integrate stablecoin payments into its Visa Direct platform, a $1.7 trillion real-time global payout system. This collaboration aims to modernize money movement by reducing friction and providing faster, more efficient payment options, including during non-banking hours. Initially targeting markets with strong digital payment demand, the service will include stablecoin pre-funding and payouts. The partnership follows an investment by Visa Ventures in BVNK in May 2025. Both companies emphasize the transformative potential of stablecoins as a core payments infrastructure. This move comes as stablecoin adoption grows, with total transaction volume reaching a record $33 trillion in 2025, led by USDC and USDT.

Visa has partnered with BVNK to bring stablecoin payments to the Visa Direct platform, expanding its digital payments infrastructure.

BVNK Will Power Visa Direct’s Stablecoin Infrastructure

As announced in a Wednesday press release, BVNK and Visa have formed a strategic partnership to enable stablecoin payments on the latter’s Visa Direct platform. Based in the US, Visa is the second-largest card payment organization globally, behind only China’s UnionPay. In fact, when excluding China, the firm is the single largest, making up for 50% of total card payments.

Lately, Visa has been exploring digital asset payments, particularly those involving stablecoins, in a bid to modernize money movement. In 2025, the payments giant ran multiple stablecoin pilots related to Visa Direct, its $1.7 trillion real-time global payouts platform.

Now, it seems Visa has taken the next step by partnering with BVNK, a stablecoin infrastructure provider processing over $30 billion in payments annually. Mark Nelsen, Visa’s head of product, commercial, and money movement, said:

Stablecoins are an exciting opportunity for global payments, with enormous potential to reduce friction and expand access to faster, more efficient payment options – including during weekends, holidays and when banks are closed.

Starting with markets with strong demand for digital payments, BVNK will power a few different Visa Direct services, including stablecoin pre-funding and payouts. Visa’s new deal with BVNK hasn’t come out of the blue. Back in May 2025, Visa Ventures made an investment in the digital asset payments rail company. Jesse Hemson-Struthers, BVNK CEO, noted:

Visa and BVNK both believe in the transformational potential of stablecoin technology, not just as a payment method, but as a powerful layer of payments infrastructure.

Following the initial rollout, a broader global expansion of the service is planned, but so far, it’s unconfirmed which markets will be included, only that Visa will decide it based on “customer needs.” Stablecoins have witnessed growing adoption during the past year, as multiple countries have pushed on with legislation related to the sector. Among the most notable developments was the signing of the GENIUS Act by US President Donald Trump.

According to a report from Bloomberg, total stablecoin transaction volume rose 72% to $33 trillion in 2025, a new record.

The breakdown of transactions across the major fiat-tied tokens | Source: Bloomberg

Tether’s USDT is the largest fiat-tied cryptocurrency based on market cap, with a valuation that’s more than double Circle’s USDC, but the latter still dominated in transactions during 2025. USDC made up for $18.3 trillion of the total volume, while USDT accounted for $13.3 trillion.

Together, the two tokens covered an extreme majority of the total volume last year, suggesting that activity related to other dollar-pegged tokens and non-USD stablecoins remained low.

Bitcoin Price

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading around $95,000, up more than 3% over the past week.

Looks like the price of the coin has surged over the past day | Source: BTCUSDT on TradingView

Связанные с этим вопросы

QWhat is the main purpose of the partnership between Visa and BVNK?

AThe partnership aims to enable stablecoin payments on Visa's $1.7 trillion Visa Direct platform, expanding its digital payments infrastructure.

QHow much payment volume does BVNK process annually according to the article?

ABVNK processes over $30 billion in payments annually.

QWhich two stablecoins dominated transaction volume in 2025, and what were their respective volumes?

AUSDC dominated with $18.3 trillion in transaction volume, while USDT accounted for $13.3 trillion in 2025.

QWhat significant development in US stablecoin legislation is mentioned in the article?

AThe signing of the GENIUS Act by US President Donald Trump was mentioned as a significant development in stablecoin legislation.

QWhat was Bitcoin's approximate price and weekly performance at the time of writing?

ABitcoin was trading around $95,000, up more than 3% over the past week.

Похожее

Silicon Valley 'Startup Guru' Steve Hoffman: Web3 + AI Could Be a Trap

Silicon Valley investor and "Godfather of Startups" Steve Hoffman warns that combining Web3 with AI is likely a trap, not a promising venture. In an interview, Hoffman argues that while AI is a foundational technology touching all industries, Web3 adds complexity, friction, and regulatory risk without solving mainstream consumer or business needs. He advises founders to focus on deep, specialized applications where startups can out-iterate giants, rather than on generic features easily replicated by large tech companies. Hoffman observes that Silicon Valley will lead foundational AI research, while China excels at rapid, large-scale application and commercialization, particularly in robotics. He stresses that AI-driven autonomous agents capable of collaborative, multi-step tasks are 2-4 years away, which will cause significant job displacement. The solution is not to slow AI but to redesign business models around human-AI collaboration and reform social systems like education and retraining. For startups, Hoffman recommends focusing on vertical, expertise-heavy domains to build defensibility. He sees major opportunities in AI fraud detection and cybersecurity. Key founder mindsets include systemic thinking over feature-focus, relentless customer centricity, building adaptive teams, and deeply understanding AI's capabilities and limits. Hoffman is also leading a non-profit initiative to establish university centers aimed at training future leaders in responsible, human-value-aligned AI innovation.

marsbit1 ч. назад

Silicon Valley 'Startup Guru' Steve Hoffman: Web3 + AI Could Be a Trap

marsbit1 ч. назад

Token Inefficient, Economy Tokenless

The article "Tokens Aren't Economical, Economics Aren't Tokenized" analyzes a pivotal shift in the AI industry from a technology-driven narrative to one dominated by capital efficiency. It highlights two concurrent trends: a severe capital shortage due to the exorbitant and recurring costs of compute (e.g., OpenAI's high burn rate) and a wave of corporate spin-offs where major tech companies are separating their AI units (like Kuaishou's Kling and Baidu's Kunlunxin). The core argument is that AI's "anti-internet" business model, where user growth increases costs rather than profits, has created a disconnect between high valuations and actual cash flow. Spin-offs address this by allowing AI assets to be valued independently. Within a parent company, they are seen as cost centers, but as standalone entities, they are priced based on their growth potential and scarcity in the primary market, leading to massive valuation premiums (e.g., Kling's estimated value tripling post-spin-off). The industry is at an inflection point, moving from "model worship" to "value realization." The competition is evolving from a pure compute (GPU) race to a broader focus on systemic efficiency and full-stack engineering (involving CPUs and orchestration) to achieve viable commercialization. The year 2026 is framed as a critical moment where the industry must definitively answer how to economically translate AI capability into tangible business value, reshaping the sector's future power structure.

marsbit1 ч. назад

Token Inefficient, Economy Tokenless

marsbit1 ч. назад

Crossing the 'Memory Wall': The Wafer-Level Revolution and Computing Power Routes in the AI Inference Era

In 2026, a historic shift occurred in AI as major cloud providers' inference spending surpassed training spending for the first time, signaling a move from "building large models" to "using large models." This shifts the core challenge from computing power to the "memory wall"—the bottleneck of data movement (model weights, activations, KV Cache) between external DRAM and processors, where energy and latency from data transfer far exceed computation itself. Companies like Nvidia face GPU idle time due to bandwidth limits. In contrast, Cerebras Systems adopts a radical "wafer-scale" approach with its Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE). Instead of cutting a silicon wafer into many chips, Cerebras uses almost the entire wafer as one massive chip (WSE-3). This design provides 44GB of on-chip SRAM, delivering memory bandwidth thousands of times higher than traditional HBM (e.g., 21 PB/s vs. Nvidia B200). For LLM inference, weights are streamed layer-by-layer from external MemoryX storage to the chip, avoiding HBM bottlenecks. This results in token generation speeds 1.5–5 times faster than Nvidia's B200 in some models and significant advantages in first-token latency and long-context tasks. Additionally, Cerebras's architecture offers much lower interconnect power consumption (0.15 pJ/bit vs. GPU's ~10 pJ/bit). However, Cerebras faces challenges: SRAM scaling has slowed with advanced nodes, limiting future capacity gains; the chip requires specialized liquid cooling and custom software stacks; and its external I/O bandwidth (150 GB/s) is low compared to NVLink, hindering multi-system scaling for very large models. Competition is intensifying. Major players are pursuing three paths: 1) Developing proprietary inference ASICs (e.g., Google TPU, Microsoft Maia), 2) Leveraging advanced packaging (e.g., TSMC's SoW) to democratize wafer-scale-like integration, potentially eroding Cerebras's process advantage within a few years, and 3) Exploring optical interconnects for ultimate bandwidth. Commercially, Cerebras is transitioning from a hardware vendor to a service provider, facing the immense challenge of building high-power, specialized data centers to meet large contracts (e.g., 250MW/year from 2026–2028). In conclusion, the AI inference era presents a fundamental architectural trade-off. Cerebras opts for extreme physical optimization for low-latency, single-task performance, while Nvidia prioritizes versatility and massive cluster throughput. The path forward remains uncertain, with technology and business models still evolving in the race toward advanced AI.

marsbit1 ч. назад

Crossing the 'Memory Wall': The Wafer-Level Revolution and Computing Power Routes in the AI Inference Era

marsbit1 ч. назад

Has Bitcoin's 'Rebound Ended', Officially Entering the Late Bear Market Phase?

**Title: Has Bitcoin's Rebound Ended, Entering the Late Bear Market Phase?** **Summary:** Bitcoin's price has declined by 13% this week, signaling a potential return to late-stage bear market conditions. The price fell to around $67k, positioned between the Realized Price and Realized Cap Weighted Average. For the first time since early 2022, the Short-Term Holder cost basis has dropped below this key average, confirming a hallmark of late-cycle bear markets. Profitability metrics have collapsed sharply. The 7-day average of the Realized Profit/Loss ratio plummeted from a local high of 3.16 to 0.29, mirroring the February panic sell-off. Critically, the 90-day average never breached the threshold of 2, indicating the recent rally to $82k was a bear market bounce, not a structural shift. Realized losses surged to $1.35 billion daily, with $770 million coming from Long-Term Holders selling at a loss. This accelerating redistribution of supply from weak to strong hands is a necessary but ongoing process for a market bottom. The rally stalled almost precisely at the aggregate cost basis (~$83k) of US spot Bitcoin ETF investors, turning that level into strong resistance and leaving the average ETF holder underwater again. Spot market flows have turned decisively negative, showing sellers are dominating order books despite the price drop. While a significant futures long liquidation event cleared over $400 million in leverage, providing a potential reset, sustained spot demand is yet to materialize. Options markets continue to price in higher future volatility (Implied Volatility) than recent price action (Realized Volatility) has shown, with a persistent skew towards put options, indicating ongoing demand for downside protection. In conclusion, multiple metrics point to a fragile market structure. Resistance at the ETF cost basis, accelerating realized losses, dominant spot selling, and cautious options pricing all suggest the bear market trend persists. A sustainable recovery likely requires a resurgence of spot demand, ETF holders returning to profit, and a clear reduction in selling pressure.

marsbit1 ч. назад

Has Bitcoin's 'Rebound Ended', Officially Entering the Late Bear Market Phase?

marsbit1 ч. назад

Торговля

Спот
Фьючерсы
活动图片