Visa Stablecoin Platform

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Exec Summary

  • Consumers never wanted stablecoins, they wanted 5% yield or a crypto off ramp, BIS data confirms retail use is under 1% of volume
  • Stablecoins are a settlement innovation, networks did not hijack them, incumbents always adopt new tech to compete
  • Visa’s value is governance, operations, and distribution, VSP is just the next network in the network of networks
  • VSP = single Visa managed environment to mint, burn, move, and manage OUSD, with wallet as a service, passkeys, maker/checker controls
  • OUSD first because compliance and trust win, banks trust banks, not Circle, 63% of corporates want stablecoin access via their bank (EY Parthenon)
  • Use cases anchor on ramps and off ramps, treasury funding, global payouts, merchant settlement, stablecoin linked cards ($7B settlement run rate, 160+ programs)
  • VSP is to stablecoin what Visa DPS is to debit, same playbook, different rails and connection points
  • Visa enables Bank Issuers without picking winners, Mastercard bought BVNK and owns a single roadmap, overlap is real but philosophies differ
  • Enablement models win, every member becomes an investor in the network’s growth

Background

Last week Visa announced the Visa Stablecoin Platform (VSP), an enterprise platform that gives financial institutions, fintechs, and crypto natives a single Visa managed environment to mint, move, and manage stablecoins, beginning with Open USD (see previous blogs Stablecoins Will Drive Network Growth and Open USD analysis). Before diving into the platform, let me recap the three points I have been hammering on in my stablecoin coverage.

A Recap of My Key Points on Stablecoin

1. Consumers never wanted “stablecoins.” They wanted yield, or an off ramp. The consumer stablecoin story was always a mirage. What consumers actually wanted was the 5% yield that money market rates made possible, or a clean off ramp for their crypto gains. Strip out the bot activity and exchange flows and the data is stark: the BIS found that adjusted stablecoin transaction values are roughly 1% of reported volumes, and only 0.4 to 0.9% of that adjusted activity is retail sized, under $250 (IBIS Papers No. 170, May 2026). A UBS panelist from Fnality put it well, stablecoins are “money in transit,” not “money at rest,” because they pay zero yield to the holder (Justin Forsythe et al., UBS Global Research, “The Institutionalization of Blockchain and Stablecoins,” November 2025). I covered the consumer economics in detail in Stablecoins Are Not Free, stablecoins are a rail, not a consumer product.

2. Stablecoins are a settlement innovation, and the networks did not “hijack” them. A popular narrative holds that the card networks co-opted a technology that was supposed to disrupt them. Nonsense. In every industry, existing competitors adopt new technologies to improve their competitive position. That is not hijacking, that is how competition works. Stablecoins are the “platform” use of distributed ledger technology (DLT), the first DLT application with genuine product market fit in payments. Autonomous Research reached the same conclusion: “in the long term, traditional networks are likely to adopt stablecoin-based settlements rather than be disrupted,” with the networks retaining their roughly 20 basis points while providing global acceptance (Rahul Jindal et al., Autonomous Research). My friend Simon Taylor observed, “when banks choose to innovate, they often win. Card networks, SWIFT, CLS, even Zelle, all dominant. All were built by banks willing to embrace new infrastructure” (Simon Taylor, Fintech Brainfood, “The Stablecoin Opportunity That Banks Are Missing,” October 2025).

3. Visa’s value is governance, operations, and a network to distribute. Visa is a network of networks. Its core competency has never been any single rail, it is the governance, standards, risk management, and commercial model that let thousands of institutions transact with counterparties they have never met, at a uniform level of trust. VSP is simply the next network, one that enables banks to interact with stablecoins consistently, and at the same trust/compliance level as the rest of the Visa network.

What VSP Is

VSP is an enterprise platform for stablecoin operations. Per Visa’s announcement, it provides:

  • Access to Open USD. Eligible clients can mint, burn, manage, and transfer OUSD directly through VSP, bringing fiat onchain in an environment they already trust. VSP is the access point for OUSD.
  • Onchain wallet infrastructure. A new Wallet as a Service (WaaS) offering where Visa provides secure key management technology while the client remains its own custodian. Clients who prefer to keep an existing wallet provider can bring their own wallet and use VSP for on ramps and off ramps.
  • Integration into Visa’s network. VSP connects stablecoin flows into Visa’s existing settlement, treasury, and currency solutions, so stablecoins slot into the workflows institutions rely on today.
  • Bank grade controls from day one. Maker/checker dual approval on sensitive operations, device bound passkey signing instead of shared credentials, destination wallet allowlists, and comprehensive audit logging. Ethereum, Solana, and Tempo are supported at launch, with core controls applied consistently across all three chains.

Jack Forestell, Visa’s Chief Product and Strategy Officer, framed it precisely the way I would have: “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.” That is the insight. The technology was never the barrier. The barrier was operations, compliance, custody, controls, and trust. Those happen to be the things Visa has spent seven decades industrializing. VSP is in beta with select clients, with the portal live now and API access coming.

Why Open USD First: Compliance and Trust

VSP launching with OUSD as its first supported stablecoin is not an accident, and it validates the thesis I laid out in my Open USD blog. OUSD was purpose built as the compliance first, bank friendly stablecoin: pre transaction compliance through transfer hooks that block sanctioned counterparties before settlement rather than freezing funds after, burn and clawback authority demanded by the regulatory environment, confidential transfers with regulatory viewing keys, shared reserve economics, and neutral governance with no single corporate controller. It was designed from day one as a Permitted Payment Stablecoin Issuer under the GENIUS Act framework.

Here is the blunt version: banks would rather place their trust in other banks than in Circle holding funds for settlement. That is not prejudice, it is risk management. In March 2023 USDC traded below par when Silicon Valley Bank, where a portion of Circle’s reserves sat, failed (Aldasoro, Frost, and Ito, BIS Papers No. 170, May 2026). Tether has never issued audited financial statements, only attestation reports (same BIS paper). A bank treasurer evaluating settlement counterparties sees a consortium governed stablecoin, with OCC regulated banks in its governance, reserves custodied by institutions like BNY, and architectural OFAC compliance, as a categorically different risk than a single proprietary issuer. The corporate demand data confirms the channel preference: after the GENIUS Act passed, EY Parthenon interviewed 350 senior finance executives at global corporates and found that 63% want stablecoin access through traditional banks, not new providers, and 54% intend to be live within 6 to 12 months (Simon Taylor citing EY Parthenon, Fintech Brainfood, October 2025).

VSP is how that preference gets served. Banks get OUSD access through Visa, a counterparty they have trusted for decades, with the controls and audit trails their regulators expect.

Key Use Cases: On Ramps and Off Ramps

The truth about stablecoins is that most of the value sits at the edges, where fiat becomes stablecoin and stablecoin becomes fiat. VSP is built around exactly those edges. With WaaS, a client gets a dedicated virtual account, sends funds by ACH or wire to on ramp into OUSD, and off ramps back to a linked bank account the same way.

On ramp examples:

  • Corporate treasury funding. A treasurer moves operating cash onchain Friday evening to fund weekend supplier payments in Asia, capturing 24/7 settlement that ACH and wires cannot offer. Autonomous Research estimates stablecoin rails save roughly 3.6% on average per cross border B2B transaction, with legacy correspondent costs running 2 to 10% (Jindal et al., Autonomous Research, August 2025).
  • Payout providers. Platforms paying gig workers, creators, and marketplace sellers across 150+ countries mint OUSD against a single fiat funding position instead of pre funding nostro accounts in dozens of currencies. This is real institutional volume today, one UBS panelist from Zero Hash noted 50% of its payouts went to the US, evidence stablecoins are not just an emerging markets tool (Forsythe et al., UBS Global Research, November 2025).
  • Fintechs and crypto platforms that need compliant minting capacity without building their own custody, key management, and sanctions screening stack.

Off ramp examples:

  • Merchant settlement. A merchant accepting stablecoin settles into its existing bank account by ACH or wire, no crypto expertise required. Visa’s stablecoin settlement volume was already annualizing at roughly $7 billion in FQ2, as I covered in my Visa and Mastercard strategy comparison.
  • The consumer off ramp. Remember point one, consumers wanted an off ramp for their crypto. Stablecoin linked cards, over 160 programs on Visa’s network growing nearly 200% year over year, are the consumer facing version. VSP gives the issuers and program managers behind those cards an institutional grade back end for the conversion between stablecoin and fiat.
  • Remittance and corridor businesses that collect in OUSD and pay out in local fiat, where the highest fee corridors offer the greatest savings.

Visa Supports Banks. Banks Support Consumers.

There is a simple chain of demand here that most commentary misses. Visa supports what its member banks want. Banks support what their consumers, merchants, and small businesses want. Consumers want yield and off ramps, merchants want cheaper and faster settlement, small businesses want cross border payments that do not take four days and cost 6%. VSP provides banks with the best, most “compliance friendly” way to meet all of that demand.

Most banks do not want to hire Rust developers, evaluate custody vendors, or take counterparty risk on an offshore issuer. It connects to VSP the way it already connects to Visa, and its regulator sees maker/checker controls, allowlists, passkey signing, and audit logs, the same governance vocabulary it already speaks. UBS’s panelists were clear that compliance and integration complexity, not technology, are the binding constraints on institutional adoption (Forsythe et al., UBS Global Research, November 2025). VSP attacks precisely those constraints.

Wrapping Up: A Network of Networks

Step back and VSP looks like a move Visa has made before. VSP is to stablecoin what Visa DPS is to debit. Visa DPS processes debit transactions for thousands of issuers that would never build issuer processing themselves, Visa runs the infrastructure, banks own the customer, and the network grows. VSP applies the identical logic to stablecoin, with different settlement rails and different connection points: blockchains instead of authorization networks, mint and burn instead of card issuance, wallets and custody instead of PAN management. The strategy is the same, be the operational layer that lets member institutions participate in a new payment flow without each one building the plumbing.

And as I argued in Stablecoin Strategy, Visa and Mastercard Are Taking Very Different Roads, this is a very different road than Mastercard’s. Mastercard bought the infrastructure, acquiring BVNK for $1.8 billion to own a stablecoin platform outright. Visa is not picking winners. It is building a network and enabling shared investment by partners, Stripe, Tempo, Rain, Reap, Bridge, Circle, Coinbase, and now the 140+ institution Open Standard consortium.

VSP vs. BVNK: Different Where It Matters, Overlapping Where It Counts

Where do VSP and Mastercard’s BVNK actually compete, and where do they diverge? My read:

The overlap is real. Both target the same institutional buyer, banks, fintechs, and payment providers that want stablecoin capability. Both offer wallet infrastructure, on ramps and off ramps, and treasury and settlement workflows. Both are chasing the same B2B and cross border settlement dollars. An enterprise evaluating stablecoin operations in 2027 will plausibly have both on the RFP shortlist.

The differences are philosophical, and they compound. BVNK is a multi stablecoin payments processor that Mastercard now owns. It moves value across many stablecoins and fiat rails, monetized through transaction fees and FX margin. Its roadmap, its investment, and its risk all sit with a single owner, and as Simon Taylor noted skeptically even before the deal closed, “I wouldn’t see the BVNK business flourishing there” (Simon Taylor, Fintech Brainfood, October 2025). VSP, by contrast, is much more focused on enabling OUSD, on trust, and on governance, without picking winners at the infrastructure layer. And critically, VSP is about issuer enablement. Visa is giving eligible institutions the ability to mint and burn a consortium governed stablecoin themselves, at the trust level of the Visa network. Mastercard processes stablecoin flows. Visa is enabling its members to become participants in stablecoin issuance and settlement, while the consortium model spreads the investment and the innovation across 140+ institutions rather than concentrating it in one product organization.

If my thesis on trust networks is right, the enablement model wins. Networks that distribute capability to their members grow faster than platforms that centralize it, because every member becomes an investor in the network’s success. IMHO VSP is not Visa’s stablecoin product. It is Visa doing what Visa does, extending the network of networks to the next rail, and inviting everyone it connects to grow with it.

Sources & Further Reading

Prior coverage:

External research:

  • Iñaki Aldasoro, Jon Frost, and Hiro Ito, Bank for International Settlements, “The Impact of Stablecoins on the International Monetary and Financial System,” BIS Papers No. 170, May 2026
  • Rahul Jindal et al., Autonomous Research, “Digital Assets: Floodgates Open,” August 2025
  • Justin Forsythe et al., UBS Global Research, “The Institutionalization of Blockchain and Stablecoins,” November 2025
  • Simon Taylor, Fintech Brainfood, “The Stablecoin Opportunity That Banks Are Missing,” October 2025
  • Visa, Visa Stablecoin Platform product page and launch press release, July 2026

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