Anouncement
Anouncement
San Francisco, CA — Global payments giant Visa has significantly expanded its footprint in the digital asset space, announcing that it now supports more than 160 live stablecoin-linked card programs globally. The milestone comes as payment volumes across these crypto card initiatives surged by nearly 200% year-over-year.
Alongside the growth in card availability, Visa revealed that its annualized stablecoin settlement volume surpassed $20 billion during its fiscal second quarter—a more than 15-fold increase compared to the same period in the prior year.
The growth surge coincides with Visa’s expanded strategic partnership with Credit Coop, a specialized credit infrastructure protocol designed to resolve operational liquidity bottlenecks for card issuers.
Historically, emerging stablecoin card operators faced steep financial hurdles: to process real-time card transactions across Visa’s global network of 175 million merchant locations, programs must settle daily balance obligations before receiving payouts from cardholders. Smaller card issuers often struggled to secure conventional credit facilities due to high administrative costs.
To solve this, Visa and Credit Coop deployed a stablecoin-denominated revolving credit facility secured by settlement receivables.
Crypto infrastructure provider Rain—a principal member of Visa offering stablecoin settlement in USDC seven days a week—served as the flagship operator for the credit mechanism, accounting for roughly $2 billion of the total settlement financing.
The mechanism also provided proof-of-concept for consumer card issuers like Karta, a premium crypto card operating on Rain’s infrastructure. By building a verified on-chain credit history through Credit Coop’s facility, Karta subsequently secured $140 million in institutional funding, including a $15 million Series A led by Galaxy Ventures and a $125 million credit facility from Community Investment Management.
Looking forward, Visa and Credit Coop are testing just-in-time (JIT) funding models. Under this upcoming architecture, daily Visa settlement notifications will automatically trigger exact-amount stablecoin disbursements straight to the required settlement address.
This automated liquidity flow aims to collapse settlement borrowing windows from days down to hours, optimizing capital requirements for Web3 financial products and expanding crypto card availability worldwide.
