By Jason Nelson
2 min read
Visa has introduced a new platform that enables banks, fintechs and payment providers to issue, hold and transfer stablecoins through its payments network.
In a blog post on Thursday, Visa said Visa Stablecoin Platform, or VSP for short, combines stablecoin minting, redemption, wallet infrastructure, and treasury management into a single enterprise system. Rather than requiring financial institutions to build their own blockchain infrastructure, the platform integrates stablecoin operations into existing payment and settlement workflows.
"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," Visa Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jack Forestell said in a statement. "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."
As their name implies, stablecoins are cryptocurrencies designed to maintain a fixed value, most commonly by being pegged to the U.S. dollar. Together, they have grown into a roughly $304 billion market, according to CoinGecko.
At launch, the Visa Stablecoin Platform supports Open USD (OUSD), a stablecoin introduced by the Open Standard consortium in June, alongside Visa's existing support for Circle's USDC and Paxos' USDG, according to Fortune. The platform, initially available to select beta users, also lets institutions manage wallets, transfer funds, and integrate those wallets with existing treasury and settlement systems, and includes transaction approval controls and audit logs.
The news follows several moves by Visa in the stablecoin market.
In October, the payments giant published research arguing that stablecoins could bring portions of the $40 trillion global credit market onto blockchain rails, citing more than $670 billion in stablecoin lending over the previous five years.
In March, Visa became the first major payments company to join the Canton Network as a Super Validator, a role intended to help banks use stablecoins for payments, settlement and treasury operations on a privacy-focused blockchain network.
In April, Visa expanded its stablecoin settlement program by adding Base, Polygon, Canton, Arc and Tempo, bringing the total number of supported blockchain networks to nine. At the time, the company said its annualized stablecoin settlement volume had reached $7 billion and that it supported more than 130 stablecoin-linked card programs across 50-plus countries.
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