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For years, onchain lending existed almost entirely within the self-contained world of crypto markets, useful mainly to traders who wanted liquidity without selling their holdings. Visa is now attempting something more ambitious: pulling that lending infrastructure into the plumbing of mainstream payment settlement, where it could serve businesses that have never thought of themselves as crypto participants at all.
The company announced on Tuesday that settlement data from VisaNet, its core transaction network, will be combined with blockchain-based lending protocols. The practical effect is that lenders can use Visa’s own settlement records alongside onchain transaction data to assess creditworthiness and finance the settlement obligations of card programme operators. It is a small but structurally significant step, because it treats a public blockchain ledger as a legitimate input into a credit decision made at the scale of a global payments network.
What Visa Is Actually Building Here
The mechanism is worth unpacking carefully, because the announcement is easy to overread. Visa is not issuing loans itself, nor is it putting customer funds onchain. What it is doing is opening a data bridge: VisaNet settlement records, which reflect real commercial activity, flow into the underwriting process used by blockchain-based lenders. Those lenders can then extend credit lines to businesses that need to fund their payment obligations, using a richer picture of the borrower’s actual transaction behaviour rather than relying solely on traditional credit assessments.
Visa pointed to Credit Coop as the clearest working example of this model. Credit Coop is a blockchain-based protocol that extends credit lines to businesses, and it has financed more than $2.5 billion in cumulative settlement volume since 2023 across participating facilities, involving more than 3,000 borrowing events and 9,000 repayments. Those figures suggest the model is already operating at meaningful scale, not merely in a proof-of-concept phase.
Rubail Birwadker, Visa’s global head of growth products and partnerships, framed the rationale plainly, saying stablecoins are “changing how money moves” and creating opportunities to rethink the financial infrastructure supporting payments. That framing is consistent with what Visa’s management told investors during its fiscal third-quarter earnings call in July, when the company said it is “investing in each layer of the stablecoin stack,” covering blockchains, wallets, infrastructure, and applications.
The Stablecoin Business Is Growing Fast Enough to Demand This
The onchain lending initiative does not exist in isolation. It is a response to the rapid expansion of Visa’s stablecoin-linked card business, which has grown to more than 160 active programmes on its network. Payment volume across those programmes is up nearly 200% year over year, and Visa’s stablecoin settlement volume has now surpassed a $20 billion annualised run rate, which is more than 15 times the level recorded a year ago.
Broader market data reinforces the momentum. Adjusted stablecoin transaction volume reached a record $1.79 trillion globally in June, according to Visa’s own analytics dashboard, with volume over the trailing 30 days running at roughly $1.2 trillion. At that scale, the working capital needs of businesses operating stablecoin-linked card programmes become a genuine operational problem, not a theoretical one. A card programme that processes millions of dollars in transactions daily needs reliable access to liquidity to meet settlement obligations on time. Onchain lending, if it can be underwritten with confidence using real settlement data, offers one answer to that problem.
Visa has also been broadening its stablecoin alliances. The company has joined the OpenStandard consortium, which plans to issue the OpenUSD stablecoin and counts Stripe among more than 140 participating businesses. Separately, Visa has been working with Dunamu, the parent company of South Korean exchange Upbit, on stablecoin payment and AI commerce initiatives, signalling that its stablecoin strategy extends well into Asia.
Why This Matters Beyond the Crypto Sector
The deeper significance of this announcement is not about stablecoins specifically. It is about what happens when a network with Visa’s reach begins treating onchain data as a credible financial signal. For businesses in Malaysia and Singapore operating in cross-border commerce, where payment settlement across currencies and jurisdictions is a persistent friction point, stablecoin-linked card programmes represent a genuinely practical alternative to traditional correspondent banking rails. The addition of onchain credit access makes those programmes more operationally viable, because it reduces the working capital strain that has historically limited their adoption among smaller businesses.
Regulators in the region will be watching closely. Bank Negara Malaysia and the Monetary Authority of Singapore have both been developing frameworks around digital assets and stablecoin issuance, and the integration of onchain lending into a network as systemically significant as Visa’s raises questions about how credit risk, liquidity risk, and consumer protection obligations apply when the lending infrastructure sits on a public blockchain rather than inside a licensed financial institution.
None of those questions are resolved by Tuesday’s announcement, and Visa has been careful not to overstate what the initiative currently delivers. But the trajectory is clear. Visa is methodically connecting the onchain financial system to its existing network layer by layer, and the pace of that work is accelerating. The businesses and regulators that treat this as a distant future concern are likely to find themselves catching up rather than shaping the outcome.
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