Visa announced on March 29, 2021 that it had completed a settlement transaction using USD Coin, or USDC, over Ethereum. In the test, Crypto.com sent USDC to a Visa-controlled Ethereum address maintained through digital-asset custodian Anchorage. Visa said the pilot would let Crypto.com settle part of the obligations generated by its Visa card program without first converting the relevant funds into conventional bank money.
The development placed a public blockchain inside the treasury operations of a major global card network. Its scope was nevertheless narrower than the phrase “Visa accepts cryptocurrency” might suggest: the test concerned back-end settlement between institutional partners, not a general option for cardholders or merchants to pay Visa directly with USDC.
What Visa changed
Visa described its standard process for a crypto card program as requiring the partner to convert digital assets into a fiat currency accepted by Visa, deposit that money in a bank account and transfer it through established banking channels for settlement. The pilot added another route. Crypto.com could transfer USDC on Ethereum to the designated Visa address, with Anchorage serving as Visa’s digital-asset settlement agent.
Visa’s own technical account said its treasury work included support for stablecoin reconciliation and currency conversion, integration with Anchorage and a new settlement report combining payment obligations with public blockchain addresses. The company said the first successful transaction occurred during March 2021 after several months of preparation.
This did not move Visa’s entire payment network onto Ethereum. Card authorization, consumer spending and merchant receipt of funds remained distinct from the settlement leg being tested. The change was important because it connected an established card network’s treasury system directly to a public blockchain asset rather than placing every crypto-related flow behind a final fiat conversion.
Why the institutional setting mattered
Anchorage independently confirmed that Crypto.com had sent test payments to Visa’s Ethereum address through Anchorage APIs and that some Crypto.com card-program obligations would be settled in USDC during the pilot. The company’s role also carried a specific regulatory context: on January 13, 2021, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency conditionally approved Anchorage Trust Company’s conversion into Anchorage Digital Bank, National Association. The approval included an operating agreement imposing capital, liquidity and risk-management expectations.
That charter did not amount to regulatory approval of USDC or Visa’s pilot. It did, however, show why Anchorage could serve as an institutional bridge between a card network’s treasury controls and an Ethereum token transfer.
USDC was already material within cryptocurrency markets. Circle, one of the organizations then responsible for USDC, reported on March 19, 2021 that the token’s market capitalization had exceeded $10 billion, up from less than $4.5 billion at the beginning of 2021. Those figures were issuer-reported snapshots rather than an independent audit of circulating supply or reserves.
Market reaction and limits
Reuters reported during its March 29 coverage window that bitcoin had risen as much as 4.5% to $58,300, described as a one-week high. That was an intraday observation, not evidence that Visa’s announcement alone caused the move. Cryptocurrency trades continuously across venues, and Reuters did not identify a single consolidated price feed in the report.
The verified achievement was a pilot transaction involving one named partner, one stablecoin and one blockchain. Visa and Anchorage did not disclose the transfer amount, transaction hash, Ethereum fee, settlement time or independently measured cost saving. Visa’s plan to extend the capability to additional partners during 2021 was forward-looking on March 29, not a completed rollout. The announcement therefore demonstrated technical and institutional integration, but not broad adoption, regulatory certainty or production-scale economics.
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