Visa Pilots USDC Settlement for Card Payments on Solana and Ethereum

Visa's 2023 USDC Settlement Pilot

An IOSG research report published on Friday, October 10, argues that blockchain is entering card payments from the back office rather than the storefront, and it builds the case around Visa's USDC pilot. The report surveys four named firms: payment infrastructure providers Visa and Stripe, consumer finance platform PayPal, and Robinhood, which mixes brokerage and crypto services. Its framing is deliberately narrow. These companies are not replacing conventional finance, in IOSG's reading; they are wiring distributed ledgers into the settlement and liquidity layer that sits behind it. Within that design, a stablecoin serves as the connector between fiat money and on-chain markets, and IOSG expects it to shorten settlement times and cut friction in cross-border transfers. The report is equally clear that realized savings and processing gains will vary with each company's payment structure and deployment conditions. USDC settlement is the concrete case behind the abstraction. USD Coin (USDC) is the instrument Visa selected for its pilot, announced in September 2023. The company said it had moved USDC, a token pegged to the US dollar, across the Solana (SOL) and Ethereum networks to settle fiat payments approved on VisaNet. Nothing changed in the cardholder's authorization flow. The alteration sat one step later, in the movement of funds between banks and merchants, where Visa transferred USDC between issuer and acquirer partners through the two public chains, a role that resembles what cross-chain bridges perform between networks. The token therefore replaced the fiat leg between participating banks, not the consumer's card swipe. The USDC price itself is not part of this story: the token continues to trade at its dollar peg, and the development concerns rails, not valuation. IOSG cites the pilot as evidence that settlement, the slowest and costliest stage of card economics, is where distributed ledgers earn their first keep, while cautioning that a single program cannot measure industry-wide adoption.

Stripe's Bridge Deal and $1.4 Trillion Volume

Stripe supplies the second case study. The company announced in February 2025 that it had completed its acquisition of Bridge, a firm that builds infrastructure for stablecoin payments, giving Stripe in-house rails for the same settlement thesis Visa tested. Scale context matters here. Stripe disclosed 2024 annual payment processing volume of $1.4 trillion, a figure the company and the IOSG report both treat as Stripe's total processing across all payment methods. It is not stablecoin payment volume, and it is not revenue generated by the Bridge acquisition, a distinction the report draws explicitly. The two moves, read together, are what IOSG calls a pattern: blockchain applied either directly to settlement, as at Visa, or secured through infrastructure ownership, as at Stripe. The report extends the argument to dapps built for on-chain lending and liquidity, suggesting enterprises can draw on those markets in the back office while offering consumers regulated products with standard protections. IOSG presents that as a business opportunity, and it flags the limits: not every firm in its survey has deployed decentralized finance, and the pattern it describes is direction, not a completed rollout. On the competitive side, the report names four factors that will decide winners: large distribution networks, user trust, the ability to respond to regulation, and control over payment infrastructure. It also proposes designs for connecting stablecoins to multiple payment networks at once. Whether any of this turns into durable margin depends, in the report's own accounting, on regulatory requirements, redemption and custody structures, operating costs, and actual usage demand. Regulation is already shaping the field: Circle, USDC's issuer, has urged the EU to scrap a 60% bank deposit rule under MiCA, and the ECB has pushed to extend the MiCA yield ban to staking, decisions that will bound what settlement pilots can do in Europe.

Settlement Rails Over Retail Apps

The report's most useful contribution is where it places the technology. Visa's pilot names the mechanism precisely: authorization untouched, settlement tokenized, with USDC moving between issuer and acquirer partners on Solana (SOL) and Ethereum, a design from September 2023 that IOSG treats as the template. Stripe's February 2025 Bridge acquisition secures the infrastructure layer for the same idea. What neither case settles is breadth. The report names four firms, and nothing in it says that roster is complete or that their programs reflect industry-wide deployment, so the picture is partial as reported. Retail usage is meanwhile compounding on its own: USDC card payments topped $439 million in September, triple USDT volume, in our earlier coverage. Against that, Bitcoin (BTC) trading near $82,866 on Saturday marks how separate the settlement build-out and the speculative market still are.