Visa Expands USDC Settlement Pilot to Solana

Visa announced on September 5, 2023 that it was expanding its stablecoin settlement capabilities to the Solana blockchain and starting pilots with merchant acquirers Worldpay and Nuvei. The development connected Circle’s USDC, a public blockchain and two established payment processors to Visa’s treasury-settlement operations.

Visa said its live pilots with issuers and acquirers had already moved “millions” of USDC between participating partners over Solana and Ethereum. The company did not disclose an exact amount, transaction count, wallet addresses, participating merchants or pilot schedule. Its statement therefore verifies that settlement transfers occurred, but does not permit an independent calculation of their scale.

The announcement mattered because it extended Visa’s blockchain experiment beyond a crypto-native card issuer and into the acquiring side of its network. It also gave Solana a defined role inside a large payments company’s live treasury workflow rather than a demonstration conducted solely on a test network.

What the pilot changed

Card authorization and settlement are separate processes. A consumer can receive a rapid authorization at checkout while money between the issuing institution, Visa’s treasury and the merchant acquirer moves through a later settlement process. Visa’s pilot addressed that institutional back end; it did not move ordinary card authorizations onto Solana or require cardholders to hold cryptocurrency.

Visa had announced a USDC settlement pilot with Crypto.com on March 29, 2021, using Ethereum. In that arrangement, Crypto.com could send USDC to Visa as part of settling obligations arising from its card program. The September 5, 2023 expansion added Solana as another supported network and extended the model to payouts from Visa’s treasury toward the acquiring side.

Under the new pilots, Visa could use its Circle account to send USDC settlement funds to Worldpay and Nuvei. Those acquirers could then route USDC to eligible merchant clients that preferred the stablecoin over a conventional fiat payment. Participation was optional and limited to the pilot relationships described by the companies.

Visa characterized itself as one of the first major payments companies operating at scale to use Solana directly for live settlement between clients. That is an attributable company claim, not a conclusion established by a disclosed industry-wide comparison.

Why the institutional signal mattered

The significant change was not that consumers could spend USDC with a Visa card. Crypto-linked cards already existed. The institutional signal was that a global card network was treating a public blockchain as one possible treasury rail alongside established banking channels.

That distinction also limited what could be inferred. Solana supplied transaction execution and USDC supplied the settlement asset, but VisaNet continued to authorize the underlying fiat-denominated card payments. Visa remained the coordinator of the pilot, and Worldpay and Nuvei remained the merchant-facing acquirers.

Visa’s crypto head, Cuy Sheffield, told Fortune on September 5 that the initial design gave partners another way to send or receive settlement funds but did not necessarily make transfers into or out of Visa’s treasury faster. The immediate benefit was therefore optionality and infrastructure testing, while broader claims about faster end-to-end settlement remained prospective.

Market reaction and limits

CoinDesk reported at 2:55 p.m. on September 5 that SOL was up nearly 2% following the announcement while bitcoin and the CoinDesk Market Index were lower. That contemporaneous observation did not identify an exchange, price baseline, timezone-adjusted window or calculation method. It should be read as a directional snapshot reported by CoinDesk, not as a reproducible event study or proof that the announcement caused the entire move.

The strongest verified conclusion on September 5, 2023 was narrower: Visa had broadened a live USDC settlement pilot to Solana and two merchant acquirers. The disclosed record did not establish production-wide deployment, merchant adoption, cost savings or settlement volumes beyond Visa’s nonspecific statement that millions of USDC had moved across the Ethereum and Solana pilots.