Visa Taps Solana For Merchant Settlements In USDC

Payments giant Visa is launching a pilot program that will enable merchants to receive USDC payments on Solana.

“By leveraging stablecoins like USDC and global blockchain networks like Solana and Ethereum, we're helping to improve the speed of cross-border settlement and providing a modern option for our clients to easily send or receive funds from Visa’s treasury,” said Cuy Sheffield, Head of Crypto at Visa.

SOL, the native token of the Solana blockchain, is up nearly 5% on the news. With a market capitalization of $26B, USDC is crypto’s second-largest stablecoin.

Visa is no stranger to crypto payments, having previously deployed a pilot program over two years ago enabling Crypto.com to send USDC on Ethereum. Now, the $500B financial services giant is working with payment processing firms Worldpay and Nuvei to receive and settle transactions in USDC.

Visa noted that these firms service a “growing number of merchants interacting with the blockchain and crypto economy including on-ramp providers, games, and NFT marketplaces who may prefer to receive stablecoins over traditional fiat currencies for the card payments they accept.”

The move marks a major endorsement of Solana — Visa used Ethereum for its previous pilot and introduced a recurring payments feature using Starknet, a scaling solution for Ethereum, late last year.

Sheffield was bullish on stablecoins at the Starknet Summit last week. “Being able to represent dollars over blockchains is a really big deal,” he told The Defiant at the event.

“Two years ago, we had stablecoins, but most blockchains that existed two years ago didn’t really scale. We think that stablecoins, running through many different blockchains, are one of the most important and interesting innovations happening in payments today,” he said.