Visa announced a major expansion of its stablecoin capabilities during its fourth-quarter earnings call Tuesday, revealing plans to support four new digital currencies across four distinct blockchains as stablecoin-linked card spending quadrupled compared to a year ago.
The payments giant's aggressive push into digital assets comes as stablecoins have processed $46 trillion in transactions over the past year, surpassing Visa's own volume by a wide margin, according to a recent report from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
"We are adding support for four stablecoins, running on four unique blockchains, representing two currencies, that we can accept and convert to over 25 traditional fiat currencies," Visa CEO Ryan McInerney told investors. The company did not disclose which specific stablecoins or blockchains would be added to its platform.
The announcement underscores Visa's growing confidence in stablecoins as a bridge between traditional finance and blockchain-based payments. The company has already facilitated nearly $140 billion in crypto and stablecoin flows since 2020, with more than $100 billion coming from users purchasing crypto and stablecoin assets using their Visa credentials.
Visa reported $10.7 billion in net revenue for the quarter ending September 30, up 12% year-over-year, narrowly beating Wall Street expectations. Full-year revenue hit $40 billion, driven by higher transaction volume and increased demand for value-added services, including its expanding stablecoin offerings.
The company now operates more than 130 stablecoin-linked card issuing programs across over 40 countries, with monthly settlement volume surpassing a $2.5 billion annualized run rate. This represents a dramatic acceleration in adoption as financial institutions and consumers increasingly turn to digital dollars for faster, cheaper transactions.
Stablecoins Rival Traditional Payment Networks
The explosive growth in stablecoin adoption reflects a fundamental shift in how value moves globally. According to Andreessen Horowitz's State of Crypto 2025 report, stablecoins processed $46 trillion in raw transaction volume over the past year - nearly three times Visa's annual throughput and approaching the scale of the U.S. banking system's Automated Clearing House network.
Even when adjusted to filter out bots and artificial activity, stablecoins moved $9 trillion in organic transactions, up 87% year-over-year. This figure is more than five times PayPal's annual volume and represents over half of Visa's adjusted transactions.
Monthly adjusted stablecoin transaction volume hit an all-time high of $1.25 trillion in September 2025 alone, with activity largely decoupled from broader crypto trading volumes - indicating genuine economic use beyond speculation.
The total supply of stablecoins has surpassed $300 billion, with Tether's USDT and Circle's USDC controlling 87% of the market. Together, these digital dollars now represent more than 1% of all U.S. dollars in existence and collectively hold over $150 billion in U.S. Treasury securities, making them the 17th-largest holder of U.S. government debt - ahead of many sovereign nations.
"In years past, stablecoins were used mostly to settle speculative crypto trades; as of the last couple years, they have become the fastest, cheapest, and most global way to send a dollar," the a16z report noted.
Targeting Emerging Markets and Cross-Border Payments
McInerney emphasized that Visa's stablecoin strategy focuses on markets where the company sees the strongest product-market fit. "The areas where there's product-market fit for stablecoins in the world are the areas where there's significant [total addressable markets] and largely where we're underpenetrated," he said during the earnings call. "That's emerging markets, and that's cross-border money movement."
The CEO highlighted opportunities across remittances, business-to-business payments, and gig economy payouts, noting that a significant portion of Visa's product roadmap targets capturing cross-border money movement through stablecoin integration.
In September, Visa launched a stablecoin prefunding pilot through Visa Direct, its real-time payments platform. The initiative allows banks, remitters, and financial institutions to use stablecoins as a funding source for global payouts, providing faster access to liquidity without locking capital in multiple currencies.
The pilot uses Circle's USDC and EURC stablecoins and is designed to modernize treasury operations for the digital-first economy. Instead of tying up capital in advance across multiple fiat currencies, businesses can now prefund Visa Direct with stablecoins, which Visa treats as "money in the bank," making funds immediately available for local currency payouts.
"Cross-border payments have been stuck in outdated systems for far too long," said Chris Newkirk, President of Commercial Money Movement Solutions at Visa. "Visa Direct's new stablecoins integration lays the groundwork for money to move instantly across the world, giving businesses more choice in how they pay."
Platform Enables Banks to Issue Their Own Stablecoins
Looking ahead, Visa plans to enable banks to mint and burn their own stablecoins using the Visa Tokenized Asset Platform (VTAP), which was introduced in October 2024 and is expected to support live programs in 2025.
VTAP provides banks with the infrastructure to mint, burn, and transfer fiat-backed tokens, including stablecoins and tokenized deposits, through simple API connections. The platform enables banks to experiment with use cases in a sandbox environment before launching with customers, requiring minimal technical integration with existing financial infrastructure.
Spanish banking giant BBVA has been testing VTAP's core functionalities throughout 2025, including the issuance, transfer, and redemption of bank tokens on a testnet blockchain, with plans to launch an initial live pilot on the public Ethereum blockchain with select customers.
"This collaboration marks a significant milestone in our exploration of the potential of blockchain technology and will ultimately help enable us to broaden our banking services and expand the market with new financial solutions," said Francisco Maroto, Head of Blockchain and Digital Assets at BBVA.
The platform's programmability features could help banks digitize and automate existing workflows, such as administering complex lines of credit using smart contracts that automatically release payments when terms are met.
Final thoughts
Visa currently supports several major stablecoins including Circle's USDC and Euro Coin (EURC), PayPal's PYUSD, and Global Dollar (USDG) across multiple blockchains including Ethereum, Solana, Stellar, and Avalanche.
The company has also partnered with numerous crypto-native firms over the years to expand settlement options and improve cross-border payment capabilities. In 2023, Visa became one of the first major payments networks to settle transactions in stablecoin when it piloted enabling clients to fulfill their settlement obligations in USDC.
CFO Chris Suh projected continued low double-digit growth in fiscal 2026, pointing to stable consumer spending and the company's investments in stablecoins, artificial intelligence, and agentic commerce as key drivers.
"I don't ever recall being so excited about the opportunities ahead of this company," McInerney told investors during the earnings call, signaling Visa's intent to turn stablecoins into a mainstream payments rail for global commerce.
The expansion comes as traditional financial institutions increasingly embrace digital assets. Major players including BlackRock, JPMorgan, Fidelity, Citi, and PayPal have all expanded their presence in the digital asset space, while blockchain infrastructure advances have enabled networks to process over 3,400 transactions per second—a more than 100-fold increase in throughput over the past five years.
With regulatory clarity improving through recent U.S. legislation like the GENIUS Act and growing institutional adoption, stablecoins appear poised for further mainstream integration. a16z projects that the stablecoin market could grow tenfold to more than $3 trillion by 2030, cementing their role as a cornerstone of the evolving digital financial system.