Written by: Eric, Foresight News
On the evening of July 16th Beijing Time, Fortune magazine reported that Visa, one of the world's largest payment networks, has officially launched the Visa Stablecoin Platform (VSP). This is an enterprise-grade stablecoin service platform aimed at banks and fintech companies, enabling these institutions to directly process stablecoins within Visa's existing payment and treasury workflows, covering approximately 15,000 financial institutions and over 200 million merchants in its network. The platform starts with the new stablecoin OUSD, which was released just two weeks ago by the Open Standard alliance, while continuing to be compatible with Circle's USDC and Paxos's USDG.
VSP even provides wallet infrastructure. According to Visa's announcement, VSP bundles wallet infrastructure, controls, and workflows to enable stablecoins to be used in real-world Vault, settlement, and product stacks to meet the needs of various institutional use cases.
Placing this "one-click deployment" new product within the timeline of Visa and stablecoins, you see a very clear, step-by-step path climbing upstream.
Visa's relationship with stablecoins began at the settlement end. In March 2021, it became the first mainstream payment network to complete transaction settlements using USDC. The posture at that time was more like "testing the waters": the crypto industry needed a traditional financial endorsement, while Visa wanted to understand "if there's actual flow in this new pipeline." In 2023, the settlement pilot expanded to Solana and the acquirer side, with stablecoins beginning to evolve from an experiment into a real option in Visa's network backend. By October 2024, Visa launched the VTAP tokenized asset platform, expanding from using stablecoins for its own settlements to providing banks with tools to issue and manage stablecoins.
The real acceleration happened in the past year. In 2025, Visa partnered with Bridge (owned by Stripe) to issue stablecoin cards, allowing users to spend their stablecoin balances at merchants globally; it invested in stablecoin infrastructure company BVNK; in September, it piloted a program allowing businesses to pre-fund Visa Direct cross-border payments using stablecoins; and in November, it announced at the Singapore FinTech Festival that businesses could send payments directly to recipients' stablecoin wallets. In December, USDC settlements officially went live in the United States, with Cross River Bank and Lead Bank becoming the first banks to settle with Visa via Solana. Entering 2026, Bridge's stablecoin card plan expanded to over 100 countries; at the June Visa Payments Forum, a tokenized deposit technology layer was announced, by which time its annualized stablecoin settlement volume had reached approximately $7 billion.
Stringing these actions together, the logic becomes clear: initially, Visa was just a "user" of stablecoins, employing them for backend settlements; later it became a "distributor," delivering stablecoins to consumers and businesses via cards and Visa Direct; then it evolved into an "enabler," using VTAP to help banks issue coins; and last night's platform consolidates these scattered capabilities into a unified hub. Visa's official statement is: it will serve as the primary entry point for all of the company's existing stablecoin services.
From supporter, to entry point, to hub, Visa's position in the industry chain has moved up layer by layer. What seems to lie before it now is only the final step: issuing its own stablecoin.
Interestingly, various indications suggest that Visa precisely does not want to take this step, or rather, it has found a smarter alternative.
The most direct reason is a conflict of interest. Visa's stablecoin business is built on neutrality: USDC, USDG, PYUSD are all willing to access the Visa network because Visa does not compete with them. If Visa were to issue its own coin, Circle and Paxos would immediately transform from clients into competitors, and Circle and Tether would have every incentive to divert settlement volume to Mastercard or other channels. Visa earns "toll fees," not reserve interest income. It never issues cards or makes loans; its business model is to be a non-aligned fee-charging network. Issuing a coin would mean putting tens of billions of dollars in reserves on its balance sheet, taking on the entire set of bank-like regulatory burdens for licensing, reserves, and redemptions under legislation like the GENIUS Act. This is a heavy and risky business, running counter to Visa's asset-light DNA.
OUSD is precisely the answer to this alternative plan. This alliance stablecoin, formed by over 140 institutions, features zero fees for minting and redeeming, no upper limits, distributes reserve earnings (after deducting small management fees) to partners, and governance rests with the alliance board, not a single company. As an alliance member, Visa can share in the economic benefits of the issuance layer without having to be the issuer itself and become a target. The new platform uses OUSD as its starting point while keeping USDC and USDG at the table—a rather nuanced stance. It shows Circle that "I have other options," yet without truly burning bridges.
In September of last year, when asked if Visa would issue its own stablecoin, a Visa spokesperson's response was: "In the stablecoin ecosystem, it's difficult to rule anything out." This statement will likely remain valid for a long time. For Visa, the most comfortable position has never been that of an issuer, but rather the layer that all issuers cannot bypass. While its competitor Mastercard chose to directly acquire BVNK, buying the infrastructure, Visa chose to use an alliance and a platform to bind issuers, banks, and merchants to its network. Whoever becomes the "default entry point" for the stablecoin era won't have to mint the coins themselves.
From this perspective, Visa is not many steps away from the upstream end point after all.
