Visa has built one of the largest working onchain credit operations in crypto, and most of the market missed it. The payments company said this week that its lending model with Credit Coop has financed more than $2.5 billion in cumulative settlement volume since 2023, with zero defaults across the participating facilities. More than 3,000 borrowing events and 9,000 repayment events have executed programmatically onchain, each one a public transaction on the underlying blockchain.
How the plumbing works
The system targets a specific gap. Stablecoin-linked card programs settle with Visa on a fixed schedule, but they often need funding before cardholder payments arrive. Traditional bank credit lines can take months to negotiate, require blanket liens on corporate assets and depend on manual daily draws during banking hours. None of that fits a settlement cycle that runs seven days a week, including the stretch from Friday afternoon through Monday morning when bank rails sit idle.
The Credit Coop model replaces that paperwork with a smart contract called the Spigot. Settlement receivables from a card program’s crypto wallet flow through the Spigot before reaching the borrower’s operating account, and the contract automatically routes repayments from incoming proceeds. It works like a lockbox under a deposit account control agreement, enforced in code instead of through manual sweeps by a trustee. Underwriting draws on Visa settlement data combined with onchain records, so lenders can see repayment performance directly rather than relying on a borrower’s own reporting.
According to the project’s data, borrowing costs for participating programs have dropped by as much as 30 percent. The reduction comes from two sources: more lenders willing to participate because the onchain data is transparent, and lower operational overhead once middlemen leave the process.
Rain anchors the book
Rain, a Visa Principal Member that powers stablecoin-linked card programs around the world, has been the largest user of the facility since Credit Coop went live in August 2023. Rain alone accounts for roughly $2 billion of the total volume, making it the anchor tenant of what is effectively a new category of financial infrastructure. Its daily cycle is the template: Rain draws on the Credit Coop facility to fund its Visa settlement obligation, funds move to the Visa settlement address, and as cardholders pay, proceeds flow back through Rain’s smart contracts to the Spigot, which services interest and replenishes the line so the facility revolves continuously.
The model has also produced a graduation case. Karta, a card program launched on this infrastructure, announced a $140 million raise in June 2026, including a $125 million institutional credit facility, after scaling on Credit Coop financing. That path, from settlement financing to an institutional facility of its own, is the proof of concept lenders watch for.
The stablecoin card market behind it
Visa’s disclosure sits inside a fast-growing business. The company reported more than 160 stablecoin-linked card programs on its network in the second quarter of fiscal 2026, with payment volume on those programs up nearly 200 percent year over year. Stablecoin settlement volume has passed a $20 billion annualized run rate, up more than fifteenfold from a year earlier.
Those numbers explain why financing became the bottleneck. Fast-growing payment firms need capital before traditional lenders have enough operating history or completed underwriting to extend it. Visa is not the lender in this model. It supplies settlement data and infrastructure, while outside lenders extend the facilities through programmable rails.
The company cites its own Onchain Analytics Dashboard for the broader market context: since 2020, more than $694 billion in stablecoin-denominated loans have moved through onchain lending protocols. That is a credit market operating continuously, without banking hours, and Visa’s settlement financing is now one of its cleaner commercial use cases. The announcement builds on the Visa Stablecoin Platform, the company’s rails for stablecoin settlement across its network.
“We’re seeing how trusted payment data and onchain technologies can work together to unlock new forms of liquidity, helping businesses access capital in ways that are more transparent, programmable and aligned to the speed of modern commerce,” Visa said in the announcement.
What to make of the numbers
Two caveats apply. The performance figures, 3,000 borrows, 9,000 repayments, zero defaults, are Visa’s account of its own program, not an independently audited industry result. And the sample is concentrated: one anchor tenant accounts for most of the volume, so the default-free record reflects a small number of large, closely watched borrowers rather than a broad book of anonymous credit. A record built on four programs is a strong start, not a stress test.
Even with those caveats, the operational record matters. Settlement financing failed repeatedly in earlier crypto credit experiments because collateral was volatile and repayment depended on human operations teams. Here the collateral is a stream of settlement receivables from one of the world’s largest payment networks, and repayment is enforced by a contract rather than a phone call. That structure, not the headline volume, is the part other issuers are likely to copy.
Visa says the template is meant to be repeatable, a financing path for the next hundred stablecoin-linked card programs that launch on VisaNet. If the default record holds as the book diversifies beyond Rain, the model will have answered the question earlier crypto credit never could: who bears the risk when a borrower fails? In this design, the Spigot answers it in code, before the failure happens. The alternative, manual collection against a defaulting fintech, is what the traditional market already does, slowly and at legal expense.