Visa Direct moved stablecoin-powered prefunding from pilot to commercial production on October 15, 2026, naming Inyo Global as the first processor to deploy the service. Eligible money transmitters, fintechs, banks, and payment firms can now use USDC to fund cross-border payouts around the clock ...
"The next chapter for stablecoins is adoption. We're now seeing those efforts translate into live implementations, helping businesses access more flexible and efficient ways to fund and move money globally through Visa Direct." — Vira Platonova, Global Head, Visa Direct
Visa Direct moved stablecoin-powered prefunding from pilot to commercial production on October 15, 2026, naming Inyo Global as the first processor to deploy the service. Eligible money transmitters, fintechs, banks, and payment firms can now use USDC to fund cross-border payouts around the clock through Inyo's APIs, bypassing conventional banking-hour constraints across 180-plus countries.
The launch arrives as Visa's annualized stablecoin settlement volume surpassed $20 billion in September 2026 — more than 15 times its level a year earlier, when the run rate sat at roughly $3.5 billion. Payment volume across Visa's 160-plus stablecoin-linked card programs rose nearly 200% year-over-year in fiscal Q2, with 17% of that volume now occurring on business and commercial card programs. The same week, Marqeta and Coinbase announced a joint infrastructure stack enabling stablecoin-backed payment cards for enterprise clients, routing settlement through the Base Layer-2 network.
Taken together, these moves mark a structural shift: stablecoin payment rails are migrating from sandbox testing into production-grade infrastructure embedded within the existing card-network plumbing that processes trillions of dollars annually.
On October 15, 2026, Visa announced that its stablecoin-powered prefunding and payout capabilities on Visa Direct had graduated from pilot to commercial production. The service enables eligible Visa Direct clients to prefund cross-border payouts using USDC — Circle's dollar-pegged stablecoin, currently the second-largest by market capitalization at approximately $72.8 billion.
The operational mechanics are straightforward. A business deposits USDC into its prefunding account. When a payout is triggered, Visa Direct converts the stablecoin to local currency and routes funds to the recipient through its existing network of cards, bank accounts, and digital wallets. The critical difference from traditional prefunding: the service operates 24/7, eliminating the dependency on banking-hour windows that constrain conventional cross-border settlement.
Visa partnered with zerohash to expand stablecoin funding and payout options for eligible Visa Direct clients. The service is accessible through Visa Direct's reach across 195 countries and territories, connecting to more than 18 billion endpoints — a figure Visa disclosed on August 5, 2026 when it first announced stablecoin deployment across the platform.
The growth trajectory in Visa's stablecoin settlement is the most concrete evidence of adoption velocity:
| Period | Annualized Settlement Run Rate | Change | |---|---|---| | November 2025 | ~$3.5 billion | Baseline | | April 2026 | ~$7 billion | +100% in 5 months | | September 2026 | $20+ billion | +186% in 5 months |
The fifteen-fold year-over-year increase reflects compounding from multiple sources: new card programs onboarding, geographic expansion to 40-plus countries, and increasing share from business and commercial programs.
Visa's stablecoin card ecosystem now comprises more than 160 live programs globally, according to fiscal Q2 2026 data. The company expanded partnerships to more than 100 countries by March 2026 and added five additional blockchain networks to its infrastructure by April 2026 — extending beyond its original support for Ethereum, Solana, Stellar, and Avalanche to a total of nine chains.
Stablecoin-linked card volume in calendar year 2025 reached approximately $5.2 billion, up 319% year-over-year, across more than 130 programs in 50-plus countries. The 2026 trajectory suggests the full-year figure will be meaningfully higher.
Inyo Global, a payments infrastructure provider serving money transmitters, fintechs, banks, and payment companies, became the first Visa Direct processor to bring stablecoin prefunding into commercial production. The company provides onboarding, fraud and compliance services, payment acceptance, and domestic and international payouts through Visa Direct across more than 180 countries.
"We're giving [clients] a new way to fund their payouts, one that is available around the clock," said Robson Dantas of Inyo Global, according to reports from CoinPaprika and CoinTribune.
The choice of Inyo as the first enabler is notable. The company's client base — money transmitters and cross-border payment firms — represents the use case where stablecoin prefunding delivers the clearest economic advantage. Traditional correspondent banking requires pre-positioned liquidity in destination currencies, often locked in nostro accounts for days. USDC prefunding compresses that cycle to near real-time while maintaining dollar-denominated value throughout the settlement process.
The commercial production launch follows a seven-day pilot between Lloyds Banking Group and Visa conducted in October 2026. Lloyds' Corporate Markets branch in Jersey transferred $750,000 via USDC to Visa in the United States, with settlement completing in under one hour — including weekend processing.
The pilot tested interoperability across different blockchain networks. Lloyds operated its own node on Canton, while Visa used a separate public blockchain. The cross-chain settlement demonstrated that institutional-grade transfers can function across heterogeneous blockchain infrastructure.
Peter Left, Lloyds' digital assets head, stated: "Digital money could help make international payments faster, more transparent and more flexible for businesses." Rob Cameron, Visa's UK and Ireland country manager, added: "Stablecoins can work alongside existing banking infrastructure to give financial institutions more choice over settlement methods."
The Lloyds pilot is significant for one specific reason: it demonstrates a top-20 global bank by assets executing a production-scale stablecoin transfer through card-network infrastructure. Traditional settlement outside banking hours for transactions of this size typically requires a day or longer.
On October 16, 2026 — one day after the Visa Direct announcement — Marqeta (NASDAQ: MQ) and Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) disclosed a joint infrastructure stack for stablecoin-backed payment cards targeting enterprise clients.
The architecture divides responsibilities across three layers:
"As we build out the complete stack for stablecoin-backed cards, expanding our partnership was a natural next step," said Anthony Peculic, Marqeta's Chief Strategy Officer. Marqeta CEO Mike Milotich framed the strategy as making "digital dollars spendable through the same trusted card rails our customers and users already utilize."
Alec Lovett, Coinbase's Head of Infrastructure, stated: "Our collaboration will combine stablecoin payment rails with their issuing capabilities to deliver real-time global transactions."
The deal expands an existing crypto-backed card collaboration between the two companies. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong indicated in September 2026 that stablecoin payments represent a significant revenue opportunity, with partnerships across banking and fintech sectors already underway.
The economic infrastructure supporting stablecoin card programs has matured. Data from the Credit Coop facility — a DeFi-native lending structure that finances stablecoin card settlement — illustrates the credit dynamics:
Rain, one of the larger stablecoin card issuers, has financed approximately $2 billion in settlement volume through the facility, with more than 2,000 borrow events, 7,000-plus repayments, and $1.58 million in interest paid — with no defaults.
In June 2026, Karta raised $140 million including a $125 million institutional credit facility from Community Investment Management, led by Galaxy Ventures. The firm had grown tenfold during 2025.
USDC and USDT together represent 84% of stablecoin-linked card spending, according to data from Visa's fiscal reporting. The concentration reflects merchant and issuer preference for dollar-denominated stablecoins in cross-border commerce.
The emerging stablecoin payment infrastructure reveals a clear division of labor among incumbents and crypto-native firms:
| Layer | Incumbent | Crypto-Native | |---|---|---| | Card issuance | Visa, Mastercard, Marqeta | — | | Custody & conversion | — | Coinbase, zerohash | | On-chain settlement | — | Base, Ethereum, Solana | | Stablecoin issuance | — | Circle (USDC), Tether (USDT) | | Cross-border routing | Visa Direct, Inyo Global | — | | Credit & financing | Community Investment Mgmt | Credit Coop, Galaxy | | Banking integration | Lloyds, traditional banks | — |
The pattern is consistent: incumbents retain the customer-facing rails and regulatory relationships, while crypto-native firms provide the settlement, custody, and conversion infrastructure. Neither side is displacing the other. Instead, a hybrid stack is forming where stablecoins function as an infrastructure layer within existing payment networks.
Mastercard is pursuing a parallel strategy. The company completed its acquisition of BVNK on August 3, 2026, and INFINIOS became the first issuer in Bahrain to settle with Mastercard in stablecoins. Mastercard now supports settlement in USDC, PYUSD, RLUSD, and USDG.
The October 15 production launch on Visa Direct, combined with the Marqeta-Coinbase enterprise card stack announced the following day, represents an inflection point in stablecoin payment infrastructure. The question is no longer whether card networks will integrate stablecoins. They have. The question is how quickly the $20 billion settlement run rate compounds as more processors, geographies, and enterprise clients connect to live production rails.
The data indicates that stablecoins are not replacing card networks. They are being absorbed into them. The economic logic is clear: 24/7 settlement, reduced prefunding requirements, and dollar-denominated stability solve concrete operational problems in cross-border payments. The hybrid infrastructure stack — traditional rails on top, blockchain settlement underneath — is the architecture that is actually shipping in production.
Circle reported $14.8 trillion in on-chain USDC volume in Q2 2026, up 151% year-over-year. Visa processes roughly $15 trillion annually across its network. The stablecoin-to-traditional ratio remains small, but the growth vectors — 200% card volume increase, 15x settlement growth, zero-default credit infrastructure — point in one direction. The plumbing is being installed while the regulatory frameworks, including the U.S. GENIUS Act and MiCA in Europe, are still being finalized.