Visa is doubling down on blockchain-based payments, expanding its pilot program for stablecoin settlement to nine distinct blockchain networks. The move revealed on April 29, 2026, signals the payments giant’s objective of giving clients more flexibility while remaining a trusted settlement layer across numerous ecosystems.
Launched in 2023, the pilot now includes support for Polygon, Base, Canton Network, Arc, and Tempo, in addition to the Ethereum, Solana, Stellar, and Avalanche networks already available. The program has reached an annualized transaction volume of nearly $7 billion, up 50% from the previous quarter, according to Visa. The growth is in line with rising desire from institutions and enterprises to use stablecoins for faster and more efficient cross-border settlements.
The reason for the growth was said to be: Rubail Birwadker Global Head of Growth Products and Strategic Partnerships Visa
“Extending our stablecoin settlement pilot to more blockchains provides our partners with the flexibility to select the network that best meets their needs, while still utilizing Visa as the consistent settlement layer across all networks.”
Base & Polygon
Visa’s stablecoin settlement experiment, which debuted in 2023, was based on a surprisingly simple idea: ditch the slow, expensive old banking system and allow corporate partners to settle their accounts directly on public blockchains with stablecoins.
In the early days, the program was based on a curated list of proven networks like Ethereum, Solana, Stellar, and Avalanche. These chains offered a mix of deep liquidity and high throughput, but the contemporary Web3 ecology has fragmented into a highly specialized, multi-chain environment. Visa is now adjusting to that reality.
The latest expansion adds five additional networks to the list of settlements: Polygon, Base, Canton Network, Arc and Tempo.
What’s especially interesting is the addition of Polygon and Base. Both are Ethereum-based Layer-2 scaling solutions that are supposed to substantially lower transaction fees while carrying out transactions in a fraction of a second. Base, the incubator of the American crypto exchange Coinbase, has recently taken over the Layer-2 space, as far as daily active users and total value locked are concerned. Visa is integrating these particular networks to target contexts where micropayments and high-frequency corporate settlements can occur with near-zero friction.
The inclusion of networks like Canton, Arc, and Tempo meanwhile suggests a more complex corporate strategy, enabling institutional partners who may demand specific compliance, privacy or localised liquidity solutions.
Visa’s Global Head of Growth Products and Strategic Partnerships, Rubail Birwadker, explained the idea behind the agnostic, multi-chain strategy.
In an official announcement Thursday, Birwadker noted that by extending the stablecoin settlement experiment to more blockchains, partners can choose the network that best matches their individual operating requirements. “They can keep relying on Visa as the single settlement layer across all of these different networks,” he said, “but then be able to settle at the Visa level.”
24/7 Settlement Mechanisms
To understand why a $7 billion volume is going down these alternative tracks, we have to look at the inherent inefficiencies of the legacy system.
Stablecoins are cryptographic assets that are pegged to fiat currency 1:1, most typically to the US Dollar. Unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum, which are prone to violent speculative price movements, stablecoins are digital bearer assets. They let the stability of the dollar move at the speed of the internet.
In the conventional model, to settle a daily balance with Visa in the United States, a merchant acquiring bank in Europe had to move funds through the SWIFT network, through intermediary correspondent banks, through foreign exchange conversions, and wait for domestic banking hours to open. This method ties up working capital for days.
Visa’s partners can use stablecoins on networks like as Solana or Polygon to settle these multi-million-dollar transactions in real time, directly from point to point. The blockchain is open 7 days a week, and does not shut down for national banking holidays. And this continuous 24/7 settlement cycle frees up huge amounts of corporate liquidity and fundamentally changes the capital efficiency of international trade.
The Payment Processors’ Cold War
Visa’s ambitious expansion is not taking place in a vacuum. Legacy financial institutions are in a furious arms race after realizing stablecoins are the better tech routing mechanism for global payments.
Visa’s biggest worldwide rival, Mastercard, has also aggressively pursued the Web3 space. The corporation has been aggressive in rolling out cryptocurrency-linked payment cards across the US. Recently, Mastercard took its strategy up a notch by integrating directly on MetaMask – the world’s most popular self-custodial Web3 wallet. The connection will allow users to make card purchases in their day-to-day lives using their on-chain stablecoin holdings, connecting on-chain storage to traditional point of sale systems.
The enterprise software industry is getting into gear too. Recently, San Francisco-based, significant financial software company Modern Treasury, used by companies to automate money transfer, announced a native interface with the Polygon network. The idea is to give mainstream enterprises the back-end infrastructure they need to transport stablecoin payments as simply as they would move an ACH transfer or wire.
The Stripe-Bridge Connection
Visa’s strategy is very much built around strategic alliances to remain the connective tissue of this new financial stack.
This multi-chain expansion comes after a very clever move just one month ago. In a major move to deepen its operational collaboration, in March 2026, Visa teamed with Bridge, a specialized digital asset platform under the umbrella of the financial behemoth Stripe. That collaboration was expressly created to assist the issuance and maintenance of global, stablecoin-funded corporate card schemes.
With the backend settlement layer secured across nine different blockchains, and the frontend issuance layer secured with partnerships like Stripe, Visa is building an inescapable net around the stablecoin ecosystem.
Going Beyond Speculation
The first decade of the bitcoin sector was defined primarily by its speculative volatility. Traditional finance mostly considered the underlying tech as a chaotic casino.
Visa’s $7 billion stablecoin settlement officially concludes that chapter. The story has transitioned from the realm of theory to practical use.
It’s the ultimate endorsement of decentralized ledger technology when the world’s largest payment network attests that moving capital across nine separate public blockchains is faster, cheaper and more efficient than the traditional banking rails it helped develop. Stablecoins are no longer the safe haven for crypto day traders. They are quickly becoming the plumbing of the global economy of the 21st century.
Read Also: Meta Starts Paying Facebook Creators in Stablecoins
