Visa has opened its settlement data to blockchain lenders, letting them underwrite working capital for stablecoin-linked card programs against daily VisaNet flows. A pilot with decentralized lender Credit Coop has financed more than $2.5 billion in settlement volume since 2023 with zero defaults, the company said.
Every card payment creates a timing gap for the issuer behind it. A card program owes Visa through daily settlement before money arrives from cardholders, leaving a short but recurring funding need. Bank credit lines were built for monthly cycles, not for programs that settle seven days a week, often in amounts too small for warehouse lending economics.
Credit Coop built a stablecoin-denominated revolving facility that funds daily Visa settlement and takes the settlement receivables themselves as collateral. Those receivables pass through a smart contract called the Spigot, which routes repayment automatically before proceeds reach the operating account of the borrower.
“It mirrors a lockbox operating under a deposit account control agreement (DACA), enforced programmatically rather than through manual sweeps,” Visa wrote in its explainer.
Three years of onchain record
The infrastructure has executed more than 3,000 borrow events and over 9,000 repayment events onchain, each a public transaction, with no trustee and no discretionary sweeps. Underwriting draws on settlement data from VisaNet rather than on blanket liens against corporate assets.
Rain, a Visa Principal Member that powers stablecoin card programs for fintechs and wallets, has used the facility since August 2023. The company has financed roughly $2 billion in settlement volume, paid $1.58 million in interest and recorded no defaults. Each day, funds move from the Credit Coop facility to Rain and on to the Visa settlement address once the daily VSS-110 settlement file arrives. As cardholders repay, proceeds flow through the smart contracts of Rain to the Spigot, servicing interest and replenishing the credit line.
Rain announced its participation in the settlement pilot several years ago and has fully tokenized its credit card receivables, transitioning all settlement transactions for its Visa cards to USDC. That lets it settle with Visa seven days a week, 365 days a year, outside traditional banking hours. The company provides backend infrastructure, including APIs, compliance layers and settlement logic, that lets fintechs and wallets launch their own stablecoin-linked card programs without building the plumbing themselves.
Karta, a premium Visa credit card issued under the BIN of Rain, launched on the same infrastructure before it had much of a track record. After growing tenfold in 2025, the company announced a $140 million raise in June 2026, made up of a $15 million Series A led by Galaxy Ventures and a $125 million institutional credit facility from Community Investment Management. Karta is the clearest sign yet that the model can graduate young programs into institutional-grade borrowers.
Why Visa is doing this
Stablecoin-linked cards have become one of the fastest-growing corners of the Visa network. The company reported more than 160 live programs in its fiscal second quarter of 2026, with payment volume up nearly 200 percent year over year. Stablecoin settlement volume recently passed a $20 billion annualized run rate, more than 15 times higher than a year earlier. In April, Visa expanded its settlement pilot to nine blockchains, adding Arc, Base, Canton, Polygon and Tempo to existing support for Avalanche, Ethereum, Solana and Stellar.
Visa also described a just-in-time funding model in which the daily settlement file triggers a same-day disbursement for exactly the net amount owed. Programs pay for capital only while it is deployed, and the window is measured in hours rather than days. That matters for small programs that cannot keep large reserve balances on hand and for larger ones that would rather not park idle capital against a settlement obligation that clears overnight.
Traditional financing never fit this shape. Bank warehouse lines take months to negotiate, often require blanket liens on all corporate assets, and rely on manual daily draws constrained by banking hours. A card program that settles on Saturday cannot draw from a bank that opens on Monday, so the weekend gap has been a structural cost for every crypto-native issuer.
What it means beyond crypto
The arrangement matters outside the stablecoin economy. If settlement data can safely back onchain loans, the same plumbing could extend to other receivables financing that today depends on slow, manual bank processes. Lenders get collateral they can verify transaction by transaction, and borrowers get credit decisions based on actual payment flows rather than balance-sheet snapshots.
It also keeps Visa at the center of a payments shift it could otherwise lose. Card programs that settle in USDC on weekends do not need a bank open on Monday to keep running. If Visa supplies the data layer that makes such lending safe, it stays inside the transaction even when the money moves on public chains.
Risks remain. The model depends on the data feeds of Visa itself, and a disruption in card volume would hit the collateral backing the loans at the same time as it hits the borrowers, a correlation any lender should price. Visa and Credit Coop have not disclosed facility sizes, interest margins or borrower concentration. Regulators have yet to weigh in on how smart-contract-enforced collateral control maps onto existing deposit account control agreements. Still, three years and $2.5 billion without a default is a record no comparable crypto credit desk can claim, and it was earned on live settlement obligations rather than demo portfolios.