The only thing left to do now—but what it hesitates to do—is issue its own stablecoin.
Written by: Eric, Foresight News
On the evening of July 16 Beijing time, Fortune magazine reported that Visa, one of the world's largest payment networks, officially launched the Visa Stablecoin Platform (VSP)—an enterprise-grade stablecoin service platform for banks and fintech companies. This allows these institutions to directly process stablecoins within their existing Visa payment and treasury workflows, covering approximately 15,000 financial institutions and over 200 million merchants in its network. The platform starts with OUSD, a new stablecoin released just two weeks ago by the Open Standard Alliance, while continuing to support Circle's USDC and Paxos' USDG.
VSP even provides wallet infrastructure. According to Visa's announcement, VSP packages wallet infrastructure, controls, and workflows, enabling stablecoins to be used in real-world vaults, settlement, and product stacks to meet the needs of various institutional use cases.
Putting this "one-click deployment" new product into the timeline of Visa and stablecoins, you will see a very clear path of climbing upstream step by step.
Visa's relationship with stablecoins began at the settlement end. In March 2021, it became the first major payment network to complete transaction settlement using USDC, and its posture at that time was more like a "test run": the crypto industry needed an endorsement from traditional finance, and Visa wanted to figure out "whether this new pipeline actually has water". In 2023, the settlement pilot expanded to Solana and the acquirer side, and stablecoins began to transform from experimental products to a real option in the Visa network's backend. By October 2024, Visa launched the Tokenized Asset Platform (VTAP), expanding from using stablecoins for its own settlement to providing banks with tools to issue and manage stablecoins.
The real acceleration happened in the past year. In 2025, Visa partnered with Stripe's Bridge to issue stablecoin cards, allowing users to spend their stablecoin balances at merchants worldwide; it invested in BVNK, a stablecoin infrastructure company; in September, it piloted allowing enterprises to pre-fund Visa Direct cross-border payments with stablecoins, and in November, it announced at the Singapore FinTech Festival that enterprises could directly transfer funds to recipients' stablecoin wallets. In December, USDC settlement was officially launched in the U.S., with Cross River Bank and Lead Bank becoming the first banks to settle with Visa via Solana. Entering 2026, Bridge's stablecoin card program expanded to over 100 countries, and at the June Visa Payments Forum, a tokenized deposit technology layer was announced—by then, its annualized stablecoin settlement volume had reached approximately $7 billion.
Putting these moves together, the logic becomes clear: initially, Visa was just a "user" of stablecoins, using them for settlement in the backend; later, it became a "distributor", delivering stablecoins to consumers and enterprises via cards and Visa Direct; then it became an "enabler", helping banks issue coins with VTAP; and the platform launched last night consolidates these scattered capabilities into a unified hub. Visa's official statement says: it will serve as the central entry point for all of the company's existing stablecoin services.
From support to entry point to hub, Visa's position in the industry chain has moved up layer by layer. Now, the only thing left in front of it seems to be the final step: issuing its own stablecoin.
Interestingly, various signs indicate that Visa does not want to take this step, or rather, it has found a smarter alternative.
The most direct reason is conflict of interest. Visa's stablecoin business is built on neutrality: USDC, USDG, and PYUSD are all willing to connect to the Visa network because Visa does not compete with them. Once Visa issues its own stablecoin, Circle and Paxos will immediately turn from customers to competitors, and Circle and Tether will have every incentive to divert settlement volume to Mastercard or other channels. Visa makes "toll fees", not reserve interest—it never issues cards or lends money, and its business model is to be a neutral fee-charging network. Issuing a stablecoin would mean putting tens of billions of dollars in reserves on its balance sheet and bearing the full set of bank-like regulatory burdens under the GENIUS Act, such as licensing, reserves, and redemptions. This is a heavy and risky business, which runs counter to Visa's light-asset DNA.
OUSD is exactly the answer to this alternative. This alliance stablecoin, composed of more than 140 institutions, has zero fees for minting and redemption, no upper limit on amounts, and reserve earnings are distributed to partners after deducting a small management fee. Governance rights belong to the alliance board rather than a single company. As a member of the alliance, Visa can share the economic benefits of the issuance layer without having to be the issuer itself and become a target of criticism. The new platform starts with OUSD while keeping USDC and USDG on the table, striking a rather subtle posture: it shows Circle that "I have other options" without actually breaking ties.
Last September, when Visa was asked whether it would issue its own stablecoin, a Visa spokesperson replied: "In the stablecoin ecosystem, it's hard to rule out any possibility." This statement will probably remain valid for a long time. For Visa, the most comfortable position has never been that of an issuer, but the layer that all issuers cannot bypass. While competitor Mastercard chose to directly acquire BVNK and buy the infrastructure, Visa chose to bind issuers, banks, and merchants to its network through alliances and platforms. Whoever becomes the "default entry point" in the stablecoin era won't need to mint coins themselves.
From this perspective, Visa is actually only a few steps away from the end of the upstream journey.