Visa unveils Stablecoin platform for banks and fintech companies

Visa has introduced a new platform that enables banks, fintechs and payment service providers to issue, hold and transfer stablecoins Through its own payments network.

In a Blog post The Visa Stablecoin Platform, or VSP for short, combines stablecoin mining and redemption, wallet infrastructure and treasury management into one enterprise system, Visa said on Thursday. Instead of asking financial institutions to build their own blockchain Infrastructure,The platform integrates stablecoin operations into existing,payment and settlement workflows.

“Stablecoins open up a new layer of programmable money, but for most institutions, the hard part isn’t the concept, it’s the operational reality,” Jack Forstell, chief product and strategy officer at Visa, said in a statement. “With the Visa Stablecoin Platform, we give our customers a single place to mint, transfer and manage stablecoins with the controls, security and network access they have already come to expect from Visa.”

As their name suggests, stablecoins They are cryptocurrencies designed to maintain a fixed value, most commonly by being pegged to the US dollar. Together, these companies have grown into a market worth approximately $304 billion, according to Queen Gekko.

At launch, the Visa platform supports Stablecoin Open the US dollar (OUSD), a stablecoin introduced by the Open Standard Consortium in June, alongside Visa’s existing support for Circle’s coin US dollars and Paxos USDG, according to luck. The platform, which was initially available to select beta users, also allows institutions to manage portfolios, transfer funds, integrate those wallets with existing treasury and settlement systems, and includes transaction approval controls and audit trails.

This news comes on the heels of several moves made by Visa in the stablecoin market.

In October, the payments giant published research Arguing that stablecoins could bring parts of the $40 trillion global credit market to blockchain rails, citing more than $670 billion in stablecoin lending over the past five years.

In March, Visa became the first major payments company to do so joins Canton Network as a super-validator, a role aimed at helping banks use stablecoins for payments, settlement and treasury operations on the privacy-focused blockchain network.

In April, visa Expanded Its platform for settling stablecoins by adding Base, Polygon, Canton, Arc, and Tempo, bringing the total number of supported blockchain networks to nine. At the time, the company said its annual stablecoin settlement volume had reached $7 billion, and that it supported more than 130 stablecoin-related card programs in more than 50 countries.