Visa Confirms Plans to Integrate Settlements in Stablecoins

Visa, the payments company, is seeking to develop “muscle memory” for settlements that would enable converting digital assets into fiat currencies on its platform. Cointelegraph reports.

During the StarkWare Sessions 2023 conference in Tel Aviv, Visa’s head of the crypto division, Kai Sheffield, confirmed that the company was testing the possibility of carrying out settlement operations in the USD Coin stablecoin (USDC) on Ethereum. He noted that these were high-value payments.

“This is one of the areas where we want to build muscle memory. Just as we can convert dollars and euros in cross-border transactions, we should have the ability to exchange between digital tokenised currencies and traditional currencies,” Sheffield said.

He reminded that Visa’s platform runs entirely on top of the interbank SWIFT system. Because of the limitations in the latter, the company cannot settle payments as often as it would like, Sheffield noted. Therefore, the firm is exploring the possibility of incorporating blockchain into its existing network.

“Of course, we have experimented and publicly announced this. We have tested how, in practice, settlement payments [in stablecoins] would work,” the head of Visa’s crypto division clarified.

In January, CEO Alfred Kelly expressed confidence that “stablecoins” and CBDC could play a meaningful role in the payments space. The firm has a number of initiatives in this direction, he said.

According to Sheffield, Visa is considering how to apply new technologies to improve its existing interbank channels.

“If we think there are huge opportunities in this area, we simply must not stop developing,” he concluded.

Earlier, in December 2022, Visa conducted a proof of concept for automated recurring payments via Ethereum-layer-2 solution StarkNet from StarkWare.