Visa’s stablecoin settlement volume has passed a $20 billion annualized run rate, up more than 15x from a year earlier, the payments company said Tuesday. More than 160 stablecoin-linked card programs were live on its network in the fiscal second quarter, and payment volume on those programs grew nearly 200% year over year.
The numbers, first reported by The Block, land at an awkward moment for the broader crypto market. Bitcoin is holding near $80,000, down from above $82,000 last week, and ETF flows have been choppy. Yet the plumbing side of the industry, the part that actually moves money for card issuers and fintechs, keeps posting growth that looks nothing like the price charts.
What Visa is actually reporting
The $20 billion figure is settlement volume, not consumer spending on crypto cards. When a stablecoin-linked card is used, the issuer has to deliver fiat or stablecoin value to Visa on a set schedule. That daily obligation is what has been compounding. Visa said payment volume on stablecoin-linked programs specifically rose close to 200% from the same quarter last year.
Scale varies wildly across those 160-plus programs. Some early-stage issuers move only a few million dollars a month, which makes a traditional warehouse credit line uneconomical. A lender has to underwrite, document and monitor a facility, and none of that is cheap when the loan is small. That gap is where a newer financing model has taken hold.
A credit line wired to settlement files
Credit Coop, working with Visa, has built a stablecoin-denominated revolving credit facility secured by settlement receivables. The facility reads Visa’s daily settlement files and uses Credit Coop’s Spigot smart contract to size funding and automate repayments. Because the loan is collateralized by money already owed rather than by speculation, underwriters have warmed to the structure. Visa said borrowing costs for participating programs have fallen by as much as 30% as more lenders have come in to underwrite these facilities.
Rain, a Visa Principal Member, has been the anchor borrower. Since August 2023 the company has financed roughly $2 billion through the facility to cover its daily settlement obligations, across more than 2,000 onchain borrow events and 7,000-plus repayment events, with zero defaults. That track record matters more than any marketing deck. Settlement lending only works if the repayment is boring.
Travel card issuer Karta shows the other end of the lifecycle. It launched and scaled on a Credit Coop facility, then raised $140 million in June 2026: a $15 million Series A led by Galaxy Ventures and a $125 million institutional credit facility from Community Investment Management. A company that once needed daily micro-loans now has conventional institutional debt, which is roughly the graduation path this model was designed for.
The numbers at a glance
| Metric | Figure | Period |
|---|---|---|
| Stablecoin settlement run rate | $20 billion annualized, up 15x YoY | Fiscal Q2 2026 |
| Stablecoin-linked card programs | 160+ live globally | Fiscal Q2 2026 |
| Payment volume on those programs | Up nearly 200% | Year over year |
| Rain financing via Credit Coop | ~$2 billion, zero defaults | Since Aug 2023 |
| Credit Coop cumulative volume | $2.5 billion+, 3,000+ borrows | Since 2023 |
| Karta raise | $140 million | June 2026 |
Across its whole platform, Credit Coop has financed more than $2.5 billion in cumulative volume since 2023, with over 3,000 borrow events and 9,000 repayment events executed onchain. Visa also flagged that direct settlement-data integration can enable same-day funding based on the net amount owed in each settlement cycle, which compresses the working-capital window for issuers even further. Same-day funding against a settlement file is something a conventional lender can rarely offer, because the file itself is the collateral record.
Why the card stack leaned on stablecoins
The card business has a cash-flow problem baked into its design. A cardholder spends today; the issuer collects from the customer weeks later; the issuer owes Visa on a fixed settlement date. Big banks bridge that gap with cheap warehouse lines. Small fintechs either cannot get those lines or cannot afford them at low volume. Stablecoin treasuries gave issuers a way to hold settlement capital onchain, and settlement lending gave them a way to borrow against receivables without a bank relationship.
None of this required retail users to touch crypto. A customer tapping a card in Buenos Aires or Lagos sees a normal payment. The stablecoin leg sits between the issuer and settlement, which is exactly why the volume has grown quietly while headline crypto sentiment swung around. It also explains why the growth figure did not show up in any onchain activity dashboard most analysts watch. The money moves on settle dates, not in mempool chatter.
How this sits with the wider stablecoin race
Visa is not alone. Mastercard has its own stablecoin settlement integrations, and banks from DBS to Citi have been testing tokenized-deposit payments; DBS and Citi said Monday they completed the first weekend USD payment between Singapore and the US via tokenized deposits. The competitive logic is straightforward: whoever settles fastest and cheapest keeps issuer relationships. Stablecoins happen to be good at both right now.
For crypto markets, the significance is in what the figure does not depend on. ETF flows rose and fell over the past month, Solana fund inflows collapsed 97% in a single week, and bitcoin traded sideways near $80,000 while Fed rate-hike odds climbed back to around 60% ahead of this week’s CPI print. Meanwhile the settlement run rate grew 15x. The two tracks have largely decoupled, and the settlement track is the one with recurring revenue attached.
The open question is regulation, not technology. Stablecoin reporting rules are rolling out across 76 jurisdictions under OECD frameworks, and US legislation passed last year put federal issuers under bank-style supervision. Growth at this pace will draw scrutiny of the credit facilities too, since settlement lending is, functionally, shadow banking with a smart contract in the middle. So far the zero-default record has kept regulators asking questions rather than filing objections.
What to watch next
Three things. Whether the run rate keeps compounding into Visa’s fiscal third quarter, or plateaus now that the easy programs have launched. Whether more lenders enter settlement lending and compress borrowing costs below the 30% reduction already recorded. And whether Visa starts disclosing stablecoin figures as a standing line item rather than a milestone announcement, which would signal the business has moved from experiment to reporting segment.
There is also the issuance side. Most settlement volume today runs on USDC and similar dollar tokens, but issuers are starting to hold yield-bearing alternatives, and banks are pushing tokenized deposits as a regulated substitute. If tokenized deposits capture the bank-issued share of settlement, the onchain token portion grows more slowly than the headline suggests. If they do not, Visa’s $20 billion is the floor, not the ceiling.
For now the takeaway is plain. The largest card network on earth is settling tens of billions a year in dollar tokens and lending against the receipts, and it did it while almost nobody was watching the plumbing.
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