Visa (NYSE: V) is expanding its role in digital finance by pairing its traditional settlement network with blockchain-based credit tools. On September 8, 2026, the payments company outlined a model meant to help fintechs and issuers of stablecoin-linked cards obtain working capital more quickly than they often can through conventional lenders.
Onchain lending has grown into a large, always-on market. Visa’s own analytics show more than $694 billion in stablecoin-denominated loans have moved through blockchain protocols since 2020.
Most of that activity has stayed inside crypto markets rather than supporting everyday payment businesses.
Visa’s new approach tries to close that gap by letting authorized lenders review VisaNet settlement data together with onchain records.
The combination is intended to give a clearer picture of how a card program is performing and whether it can support additional financing.
The company already has more than 160 stablecoin-linked card programs on its network.
Payment volume in that segment has risen nearly 200 percent year over year, and Visa’s stablecoin settlement volume has reached an annualized run rate above $20 billion — more than 15 times the level a year earlier.
That growth has created a familiar problem for newer issuers: they generate receivables from card activity, but traditional banks often want a longer operating history, larger scale, or time-consuming underwriting before they will extend credit.
Visa argues that programmable lending infrastructure, backed by trusted payment data, can ease those constraints.
An early version of the model has been running with Credit Coop, which uses smart contracts to automate funding, collateral management, and repayment for stablecoin-linked programs.
With a customer’s permission, Credit Coop overlays Visa settlement information on blockchain transaction records to evaluate performance and to pull repayments directly from incoming settlement flows.
Since 2023 that arrangement has supported more than $2.5 billion in financed settlement volume, with no defaults across the participating facilities.
It has also handled more than 3,000 borrow events and 9,000 repayment events onchain, creating an auditable trail of activity.
Credit Coop founder and CEO Chris Walker said payment firms have long held useful collateral in their settlement receivables but lacked a real-time way to show lenders how those receivables perform.
Combining Visa data with onchain tools, he said, lets lenders assess live performance and extend capital as a program grows.
Visa frames the effort as part of a wider stablecoin strategy that also includes its Visa Stablecoin Platform and continued expansion of stablecoin-linked cards.
Rubail Birwadker, Visa’s global head of growth products and partnerships, said stablecoins are changing how money moves and creating room to redesign the infrastructure behind payments.
Trusted payment data and onchain technology together, he added, can unlock liquidity that is more transparent, programmable, and matched to the pace of modern commerce.
The company presents onchain credit as a natural next step in connecting traditional payment rails with tokenized assets and automated financial services.
As digital payment ecosystems scale, access to liquidity remains a constraint. Visa’s bet is that models built on settlement data, programmable contracts, and customer-authorized sharing can support new forms of working capital, treasury operations, and settlement without replacing the security and reliability it has spent decades building into card payments.