Visa Adds 5 Blockchains as Stablecoin Settlement Volume Surges

Visa is adding five more blockchains to its global stablecoin settlement pilot, bringing the total number of blockchains it supports to nine.

The newly supported blockchains are Arc, Base, Canton, Polygon and Tempo, the company said in a Wednesday (April 29) press release emailed to PYMNTS.

They join the four blockchains already supported by Visa: Avalanche, Ethereum, Solana and Stellar.

Increasing the number of supported blockchains gives issuers and acquirers a greater number of ways to settle with the network, the release said.

“Our partners are building in a multi-chain world, and they expect their options to reflect that reality,” Rubail Birwadker, global head of growth products and strategic partnerships at Visa, said in the release. “Expanding our stablecoin settlement pilot program to more blockchains means our partners can choose the networks that best fit their needs, while relying on Visa to provide a common settlement layer across all of them.”

Visa has been conducting live pilots and regional rollouts of stablecoin settlement for years. Over the past year, the company has seen stablecoins evolve from “a promising innovation” to “a practical way to move money globally,” the company said in the release.

Over the last quarter, the pilot’s annualized stablecoin settlement run rate increased 50% to reach $7 billion. Visa said in the release that this growth underscores the increasing confidence financial institutions, FinTechs and payment providers have in blockchain infrastructure.

“Stablecoin settlement over blockchain infrastructure is becoming a viable complement to traditional settlement rails,” the company said in the release.

PYMNTS reported Tuesday (April 28) that during Visa’s latest earnings call, the company provided a detailed articulation of its stablecoin strategy. Management described a model in which stablecoins function primarily as a store of value and settlement mechanism, while Visa’s network handles acceptance and transaction routing.

Examples include stablecoin-linked cards that allow consumers to spend digital assets at traditional merchants, as well as settlement options that enable transactions outside standard banking hours. The company also pointed to its growing role in blockchain infrastructure, including validator positions on select networks.

Visa CEO Ryan McInerney said during the Tuesday earnings call that “we’ve established Visa’s role as a key interoperability layer between this powerful infrastructure and real-world solutions for users.”