Visa Partners with WorldPay, Nuvei to Extend USDC Settlement to Solana Blockchain

Some traditional financial institutions are increasingly leaning toward cryptocurrencies.

Payments giant Visa has expanded its U.S. Dollar Coin (USDC) settlement capabilities to the Solana (SOL) blockchain while partnering with merchant acquirers Worldpay and Nuvei, according to a Sept. 5 statement.

The move means that WorldPay and certain Nuvei-affiliated merchants can now receive payments directly in USDC instead of traditional fiat currency when customers make purchases with Visa cards.

Cuy Sheffield, head of cryptocurrency at Visa, explained the significance of this in a thread on X (formerly known as Twitter). According to him, Visa has been testing USDC as a financial option since 2021, when it partnered with Crypto.com for a live pilot.

The program enables payment companies to accept settlements for Australia's Crypto.com card program via the Ethereum network using Visa-managed Circle accounts.

The company is implementing the same plan on Solana and will use its dedicated Circle accounts for on-chain payment settlement to WorldPay and Nuvei, which allows service providers to settle payments directly with stablecoins instead of fiat currencies.

Cryptocurrencies are penetrating the traditional financial system

While regulatory uncertainty remains around cryptocurrencies, stablecoins have attracted more attention from these traditional players due to their similarities to central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).

PayPal announced last month that it would issue PYUSD, an ethereum-based stablecoin, which Paxos will issue. The stablecoin is fully backed by U.S. dollar deposits, treasury bonds and other assets, the company said.

At the same time, Mastercard also announced a CBDC partnership program with several crypto companies such as Ripple and ConsenSys to collaborate on the development of CBDC.

Another traditional payment infrastructure company, Swift, has partnered with Chainlink to experiment with tokenization.

However, traditional players’ interest is not solely due to the novelty of blockchain technology. It's also because most of them recognize the technology's potential to become a serious competitor.

London-based hedge fund Brevan Howard reports that USD-pegged stablecoin settlement transactions will reach $11 trillion by 2022. That's 10 times the transaction volume processed by PayPal and only $600 million less than that processed by Visa.