Your card purchase could settle in stablecoins without you buying crypto
Visa’s 2023 pilots used USDC behind the scenes to settle ordinary card payments with merchant payment providers.
From the archive · 5 Sept 2023
A retrospective written for Chain Perspective. It describes the source at that date and does not imply current availability or status.
Reported development: · AI-assisted, source-linked brief
In brief
- Worldpay and Nuvei joined the announced settlement pilots.
- Card authorization and movement of settlement funds are separate steps.
The development
Visa announced an expansion of USDC settlement in September 2023, adding merchant acquirers Worldpay and Nuvei and support for Solana. It said live pilots had moved millions of USDC over Ethereum and Solana to settle fiat-denominated payments authorized through VisaNet. The experiment extended earlier work with an issuer to the companies serving merchants on the receiving side of card transactions.
Why it matters
A customer sees a card approval almost immediately, but institutions must still move the associated funds. This is the layer the announcement addressed. It did not mean cardholders had to own USDC, or that all Visa transactions had moved to a blockchain. The useful perspective is that digital currencies can change a financial workflow behind an unchanged checkout experience. Actual availability remained a matter of participating institutions and the pilot’s scope.
Sources and verification
Based on an official announcement
Based on the dated primary source. This retrospective does not establish current availability or subsequent outcomes.
- Visa Expands Stablecoin Settlement Capabilities to Merchant Acquirers ↗Visa · Primary document · 5 Sept 2023
Prepared with AI assistance from the linked sources. This is not a claim of independent field reporting or human review. How we publish · Report a correction
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