Visa Stablecoin Settlement Volume Tops $25 Billion Annualized

Ten Blockchains Carry Visa's Settlement

Visa's stablecoin settlement volume has passed $25 billion on an annualized basis, a figure Chief Executive Ryan McInerney gave on the company's latest earnings call and one that stands roughly ten times higher than a year earlier. The number is a run rate, recent volume multiplied across 12 months, rather than booked revenue for a completed period. Annualized figures of this kind track the most recent pace, so the reading reflects where the business sits now, not where it averaged across the year. Management also did not tie the figure to guidance for low-double-digit revenue growth in fiscal 2027, and no split of that volume by token or by chain was published alongside it. What the number measures is throughput on the settlement leg of the card network, the step in which issuers and their providers square what they owe one another. That leg now runs across five tokens: Circle-backed USDC, USDG and EURC, PayPal's PYUSD, and SBC, a dollar stablecoin issued by Brale. Each of the five carries a named issuer behind it, from Circle on the dollar and euro side to PayPal and Brale on the newer entries. Settlement itself executes on 10 blockchains, more than double the count of a year ago, and each chain added is another route an issuer can take for its flow. The disclosure, shared in a post on X after the call, frames the card network as neutral infrastructure rather than a sponsor of any single token. The company has kept the door open for any issuer that wants the channel, which is the practical meaning of the neutrality language. For the five issuing camps, the prize is a settlement channel that grew close to tenfold within a single year. Asked how Visa would treat competing tokens, McInerney kept the policy flat: “We are neutral on stablecoins. We are neutral on blockchain.”

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Neutrality Meets the Open USD Consortium

Neutrality meets an obvious complication in Visa's own portfolio. The company participates in the Open USD consortium, whose OUSD token is positioned as a competitor to USDC. OUSD is linked to Visa's Flexible Credential payment product and had generated more than $800 million in trading volume as of October 15. McInerney said the token will be integrated with other Visa products, including Visa Direct, the company's platform for instant money movement. That dual role, hosting rivals while promoting a house token, is the tension the neutrality policy has to carry. The spending side of the stablecoin business is scaling alongside settlement. Visa counts more than 225 stablecoin-linked card programs, an increase of more than 70% over one year, and spending on close to 5 million of these cards has grown by more than 150% across more than 50 countries. The card figures cover purchases, so they track stablecoins as a spending instrument rather than as settlement collateral. The company's stablecoin platform, a service for launching token-based products, operates in six markets including the United States, Mexico and the United Kingdom, and it exists so banks and fintechs can ship their own stablecoin products on Visa rails, with more than 300 partners in the implementation pipeline. Management's stated aim is to be the venue where bank demand for stablecoins is met, and the pattern suggests token-versus-token competition will be decided on the network rather than outside it. That positioning holds only while banks and issuers route settlement through a card intermediary. If they settle directly on-chain, moving value across cross-chain bridges and their own infrastructure, the intermediary's share of the flow thins. The same pressure shows at the point of sale, where wallet-based payment products such as Tangem Pay compete for card transactions without a network in the middle.

Issuer Competition Reaches the Chains

A network that refuses to pick winners turns settlement flow into an open competition among issuers, and by extension among the chains that host the tokens. Sui network is one of the altcoin projects courting that role: its directed acyclic graph design is built around parallel execution, the property a settlement-heavy chain needs when volume concentrates. Our earlier coverage of Coinbase's $1.2 billion quarter already recorded Sui among the venue's traded assets, and a November 1 Sui unlock returning 13.15 million SUI, worth about $12.11 million at the time of that report, sits on the supply calendar. For holders of Visa stock, the earnings call supplied a tenfold volume datapoint to set against the low-double-digit revenue guidance the company kept.