Visa Adopts Open USD as First Stablecoin on New VSP, Backed by 140+ Firms

Crypto News

Visa unveiled the Visa Stablecoin Platform (VSP) on July 16, a single environment that lets banks, fintechs and crypto firms mint, redeem, transfer and custody stablecoins through one interface. According to the company’s investor-relations disclosure, the platform folds stablecoin issuance directly into Visa’s existing settlement rails, risk controls and fraud-detection systems. VSP also ships with a new Wallet-as-a-Service layer for building on-chain wallets, plus institutional safeguards such as dual-control approval, audit logs, passkeys and allowlists that cap where funds can move. Visa has opened the platform in beta to a selected group of clients, with broader availability staged in three phases.

The first stablecoin supported on VSP is Open USD (OUSD), a dollar-pegged token unveiled on June 30 by the Open Standard consortium. Open Standard says more than 140 companies have joined at launch, including PayPay, Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, Mizuho and Rakuten from Japan, and the token will offer fee-free minting and redemption while routing nearly all reserve income back to participants. Unlike algorithmic stablecoins, OUSD is reserve-backed. The consortium has drawn scrutiny, however: some listed Korean partners have denied formal involvement, and Circle chief executive Jeremy Allaire argued that durable liquidity and regulatory compliance, not the number of logos, ultimately decide competitiveness. OUSD is still slated to go live later this year.

Visa’s move builds on nearly five years of stablecoin settlement work. The company became the first major payments network to settle a transaction in USD Coin (USDC) back in March 2021, then expanded pilots across Europe and Latin America before launching USDC settlement for US partner institutions on December 16, 2025. By the company’s own figures, stablecoin settlement volume was running at an annualized pace above 3.5 billion dollars as of November 30, 2025. Chief product and strategy officer Jack Forrestell framed the challenge bluntly, noting that the difficulty for most institutions is not the concept but the operational reality of running it day to day.

The same convergence of stablecoins and payments is accelerating in Japan. In early July, a vending-machine trial in Kyoto began accepting the yen-pegged JPYC token, described as the country’s first real-world consumer payment settled in a yen stablecoin. Convenience-store operator Lawson has since signed a basic agreement with KDDI and HashPort to test JPYC checkout at Tokyo stores from August. These pilots push stablecoin settlement out of trading venues and into everyday retail, where the appeal is instant, low-cost transfer rather than speculative exposure to altcoin markets. Each trial remains small in scale, but together they mark a rapid two-week expansion of on-chain payment rails.

Payment-card issuer JCB is preparing its own experiment aimed at inbound travelers, planning to roll out USDC-based settlement for foreign visitors within the year. The goal is to cut the friction of currency exchange and the roughly 1.5% to 3% overseas handling fees that typically erode cross-border card spending. By settling directly in a dollar stablecoin on-chain, JCB aims to give tourists a cheaper, faster alternative to traditional foreign-exchange conversion at the point of sale. The initiative underscores how established card networks — not just crypto-native firms — are treating stablecoins as practical settlement instruments rather than speculative assets, a shift that Visa’s VSP is designed to industrialize at global scale.

Japanese financial institutions are moving in parallel. A trust bank wholly owned by Sony Bank has secured preliminary approval from US authorities to issue a dollar-denominated stablecoin, extending a Japanese banking presence into the American market. Separately, the SBI Group is advancing a trust-type yen stablecoin, JPYSC, designed to serve as a settlement and collateral instrument for tokenized real-world assets. Together with the retail and card-network pilots, these bank-led efforts show stablecoin infrastructure taking shape across every layer of the payment stack — storefront, card rail and regulated bank — rather than in a single niche. The pattern suggests institutional adoption is broadening well beyond early crypto exchanges.

Our reading of these developments points to one arc: stablecoins are graduating from trading collateral into mainstream payment infrastructure, and the largest card networks now want to own that transition. Visa’s VSP, JCB’s tourist pilot and Japan’s bank-led issuance all target the same operational gap — moving regulated value on-chain at retail scale. Yet sentiment across the broader market remains cautious: COINOTAG’s aggregate data shows the Fear and Greed Index at 27, firmly in fear territory, Bitcoin dominance at 69.8% and total crypto market capitalization near 1.84 trillion dollars. That divergence — heavy payments buildout against risk-off positioning — suggests the push is infrastructure-led, not driven by speculative appetite in decentralized-exchange venues such as Aave.