In brief
- A new pilot scheme from Visa will enable companies to send USD and recipients to receive Circle’s USDC stablecoin.
- The company says the scheme can help support gig economy workers and will roll out in the second half of 2026, pending regulators’ approval.
- Visa has been making numerous investments and partnerships in the stablecoin space throughout 2025.
Visa is piloting a new scheme that will allow companies to send payments directly to recipients’ stablecoin wallets, while only sending conventional fiat USD.
Firms will pay out money in fiat USD, and recipients will receive the money in dollar-pegged stablecoins like Circle’s USDC, the world’s second largest stablecoin by capitalization. It doesn’t appear that companies will be able to send stablecoins directly via the scheme.
Visa did not mention if or when support for stablecoins other than USDC would be added, though it didn’t say the service would be exclusive to USDC. Anyone who wants to use the service to receive payments will need both a stablecoin wallet and to pass customary AML/KYC checks, and the pilot is currently limited to platforms and businesses based in the U.S.
Visa earmarked the service as being useful for the creator and gig economy. For example, firms like TikTok or YouTube, which deliver small, irregular payments to millions of people globally, though no participants were announced.
Visa says it is in the process of onboarding partners, with wider access projected for some point in the second half of 2026, depending on local regulations. The pilot comes as part of Visa Direct, the payment giant’s service that allows users to conduct payments using its own payment rails rather than, for example, those of two banks.
The payments giant also didn’t confirm what payment rails the service might use, but it’s been linking up with Circle on stablecoin infrastructure as of late.
In late October, Circle announced that Visa was among the firms participating in its new public testnet for Arc, its Layer-1 blockchain network, alongside companies such as BlackRock and Goldman Sachs.
Visa eyes stablecoins
Visa has made a series of increasingly bullish moves in the stablecoin space during 2025. In May, it poured an unspecified amount into London-based stablecoin infrastructure company BVNK as a “strategic investment” via its Visa Ventures arm.
Earlier this month, Visa issued a report predicting an increased role for stablecoins in the $40 trillion global credit market, saying that stablecoin-based lending could allow traditional institutions to bring parts of that market onto programmable, blockchain-based rails.
Meanwhile, like rival Mastercard, Visa has been adding support for stablecoin-based crypto credit cards—including with fintech Rain in the U.S., and Bridge, a unit of payments giant Stripe, in Latin America.
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