Visa Launches Stablecoin Platform VSP: On-Chain Capital Operations Model for Global Commercial Banks and Finance in the AI Agent Era

Introduction

Since 2021, global payment giant Visa has been exploring stablecoin settlement based on public blockchains. After initial settlement pilots and prefunding tests on Ethereum and Solana, as of April 2026, the annualized settlement volume of its stablecoin settlement pilot program has reached $7 billion, with quarter-over-quarter growth of 50%, and settlement channels have expanded to nine major blockchain networks. However, merely participating as a settlement channel cannot fully address the pain points financial institutions face in actual operations.

On July 16, 2026, Visa officially announced the launch of the "Visa Stablecoin Platform" (VSP) and entered a limited testing phase. VSP's core positioning is an enterprise-grade cloud operating environment designed for commercial banks, fintech companies, and treasury departments, aiming to provide institutions with full lifecycle management services for stablecoin minting, redemption, custody, and transfers. This move marks Visa's transition beyond its traditional role as a "transaction processor" to becoming a "core infrastructure operator" in the era of programmable digital currency. This article provides an in-depth analysis of VSP's technology landscape, product architecture, commercial ecosystem, and competitive landscape.

I. Product Dual-Track Logic: WaaS and BYOW

For most regulated financial institutions, the primary obstacle to integrating crypto assets into core business is not a lack of theoretical consensus, but rather the underlying technical and operational realities. For traditional banks to independently build on-chain operations, they must overcome high-difficulty engineering challenges including validator node maintenance, hot wallet key management, complex smart contract security audits, and reconciling distributed ledger data with bank core ledgers. VSP's design core lies in abstracting and packaging these complex on-chain interaction processes into out-of-the-box modular services. The VSP platform integrates four technical functional modules at its base layer:

1. Onchain Minting & Redemption Routing: Allows institutions to send instructions directly to supported smart contracts via VSP, completing token issuance and destruction with one click, eliminating the financial and technical costs of manually writing and deploying smart contracts.

2. Centralized Treasury Dashboard: Provides a unified management interface that helps enterprises monitor stablecoin balances, transaction speeds, and capital flows across chains and currencies in real time.

3. Enterprise Compliance & Fraud Monitoring: Directly integrates with Visa's existing global risk control standards, providing on-chain anomaly detection and automated list screening.

4. Turnkey Interoperability: Connects on-chain virtual accounts with traditional banking systems' ACH (Automated Clearing House) or wire transfer channels through modern Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), enabling seamless exchange between fiat currency and digital assets.

In terms of specific wallet custody implementation paths, VSP has designed two parallel product models to accommodate institutions with different regulatory preferences:

1. Wallet-as-a-Service (WaaS) Under the WaaS model, financial institutions do not need to build their own underlying key custody environments. In simple terms, wallet-as-a-service means that a third-party service provider offers enterprises a full suite of wallet development, management, interface, and security control functions in the cloud, eliminating the need for enterprises to build complex nodes and cryptographic ledgers themselves. In VSP's WaaS architecture, Visa provides only the secure key management technology, while legally and operationally, the customer remains the custodian of their own assets. This design avoids the compliance pressure and balance sheet risks that would come with Visa acting as a fiduciary custodian.

Underlying Security: VSP employs a dual security stack at the base layer, combining Multi-Party Computation (MPC) with Hardware Security Modules (HSM) to protect sensitive private key assets. MPC (Multi-Party Computation) is a cryptographic technique that allows several participants to jointly compute an output (such as generating a digital signature), during which no individual or single server holds the complete private key, thereby eliminating the absolute risk of asset theft due to single-point private key leakage. Most crypto asset platforms are fundamentally built on MPC encryption models. HSM (Hardware Security Module) is a physical hardware device, or essentially a dedicated security computer. Its interior is exclusively used to generate and store encryption keys, and no external program can directly extract the plaintext of keys from within, ensuring that key assets remain protected from physical extraction even in the face of network hacker intrusions.

Bank-Grade Internal Controls: To meet the stringent audit requirements of Tier 1 financial institutions, the WaaS model includes multiple operational controls: Maker/Checker (Dual Control Approval Process): As a financial risk control approval mechanism, when the system executes sensitive operations (such as large fund transfers or smart contract parameter modifications), one operator must "Make" the instruction, and another administrator with approval authority must "Check" and approve it before the instruction can be formally executed. Device-Bound Passkey Signing: This replaces traditional shared account passwords that are vulnerable to phishing attacks; every transaction must be locally signed and authorized through hardware-bound biometric authentication or physical passkeys. Wallet Allowlists and Comprehensive Audit Logging: The system mandates that funds can only be transferred between wallet addresses that have been pre-approved and added to the "allowlist," and all sensitive operations are recorded in tamper-proof system logs for compliance teams and regulators to review at any time.

2. Bring Your Own Wallet (BYOW) For mature institutions that have already established and operated private key security environments with third-party custodians such as Fireblocks, BitGo, or Fystack, VSP offers the BYOW integration option. Under this model, Visa does not participate in the institution's private key signing or daily custody processes. VSP primarily serves as an external fiat-to-stablecoin conversion gateway, providing compliance configuration, virtual account deposit/withdrawal routing, and integration with Visa's existing global card payment channels and settlement systems.

Although VSP is positioned for long-term support of a multi-currency, multi-chain open network, its current test version has clear technical boundaries: at the current testing stage, VSP natively supports only one asset — Open USD (OUSD), and the supported blockchain foundations are limited to Ethereum, Solana, and the Tempo chain.

II. VSP Ecosystem Integration: Pismo, Tokenized Deposits, and the Visa Direct Settlement Loop

As a complete digital asset operating system, VSP's core commercial value lies not only in its standalone wallet custody or token minting capabilities, but in its ability to establish deep technical integration between on-chain stablecoins and Visa's existing global real-time payment rail — Visa Direct. In traditional cross-border B2B payments and global fund allocation systems, financial institutions and enterprises have long been constrained by the operational model of Treasury Prefunding. Prefunding refers to a traditional practice in cross-border payments. To ensure immediate payment completion in destination countries, multinational corporations or fintech companies must remit and maintain large amounts of fiat currency in local bank accounts in advance. This results in significant capital being locked up and stranded across global corridors, greatly reducing overall capital efficiency.

VSP allows enterprises to store and hold stablecoins directly in their Visa custody wallets. When they need to initiate payments to overseas suppliers or merchants, the enterprise's finance system can send payment instructions directly to VSP. VSP automatically evaluates the optimal route in the background, converting large stablecoin balances held through the Visa Direct real-time settlement network into local fiat currencies of the destination country (such as Mexican pesos, Philippine pesos, etc.) within seconds, and pushing them directly to recipients' traditional bank accounts or cards. This model enables multinational enterprises to consolidate global reserve funds scattered across the world into a single on-chain treasury account, eliminating the liquidity friction of prefunding large fiat reserves.

Beyond the integration of public chain stablecoins, another more far-reaching technological branch of VSP lies in its integration with Pismo, Visa's core cloud banking software subsidiary. After Visa's full acquisition in 2024, the company plans to leverage Pismo's technical advantages in embedding within bank core systems, enabling VSP to natively support not only third-party stablecoins at the base layer, but also commercial banks' issuance and management of their own Tokenized Deposits. For traditional commercial banks, stablecoins and tokenized deposits are highly similar at the technical level but fundamentally different in their financial, legal, and risk control attributes. Stablecoins are generally off-balance-sheet, non-bank-issued money equivalents without deposit insurance pass-through, and are restricted by legislation from directly generating interest; whereas tokenized deposits allow commercial banks to enjoy the technical dividends of blockchain's 24/7 continuous settlement and smart contract programmability while keeping valuable deposits on their own balance sheets, preserving traditional commercial banks' credit creation capabilities.

Facing this divergence between two digital asset paths, Visa CEO Ryan McInerney explicitly stated that Visa's role is not to predict in advance which token will become the industry's eventual dominant player, but rather to carry both "stablecoins" and "tokenized deposits" in parallel through VSP. This multi-token, multi-chain technology integration strategy ensures that regardless of which token form financial institutions prefer for value transfer in the future, Visa's network settlement interface and per-transaction "toll fee" revenue model will remain well-positioned.

III. VSP's Launch of OUSD and Its Impact on Traditional Stablecoin Models

To understand the changes brought by VSP, one must analyze its core digital asset deeply integrated at launch — Open USD (OUSD). This is not merely a token selection but a "disruptive attack from below" on the monopolistic profit model of traditional stablecoin issuers.

For a long time, traditional stablecoin issuers represented by Tether's USDT and Circle's USDC have had their underlying profitability rely heavily on Float-Capture Economics (exclusive reserve asset spreads). This monopolistic spread economic model is facing increasingly obvious channel backlash as digital currency infrastructure moves toward the mainstream. To break this profit distribution pattern, the Open Standard consortium (founding members include Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, Coinbase, and over 140 global financial and technology giants) jointly launched Open USD (OUSD), a new-generation standard stablecoin. OUSD's reserves are fully collateralized by high-liquidity short-term U.S. Treasury money market funds directly managed by asset management leaders such as BlackRock.

OUSD's disruptive core lies in its innovative Yield-Sharing Model. Given that U.S. stablecoin legislation (such as the GENIUS Act) strictly prohibits stablecoin issuers from directly paying interest to retail end users, OUSD employs a sophisticated technical and contractual solution: it does not directly distribute interest to retail end users; instead, the interest income generated from short-term Treasury reserves is directly distributed and returned proportionally based on transaction and holding volumes to the financial institutions, enterprises, and distribution channels participating in token distribution, acceptance, and operations.

When Visa natively integrates VSP with OUSD and promotes it to its network of 15,000 member financial institutions worldwide, this yield-sharing model demonstrates extremely strong channel persuasiveness. For any traditional bank or fintech company, integrating OUSD settlement through VSP means converting operational capital liquidity that was previously advanced without compensation into yield-generating assets capable of generating compliant returns on an ongoing basis.

This alliance-based profit-sharing model has directly prompted Wall Street investment banks and market analysts to reassess traditional monolithic issuers. On July 16, 2026, as the Visa Stablecoin Platform launched beta testing with OUSD, market concerns over intensifying competitive dynamics quickly fermented. On the day of the joint launch announcement, Circle (the issuer of USDC) saw its stock drop approximately 5%. The primary argument from analysts bearish on traditional stablecoin giants is precisely that the VSP + OUSD "channel ecosystem alliance" will deliver a fatal squeeze and diversion to Circle's existing float arbitrage space by rebating reserve interest dividends, thereby accelerating the entire stablecoin market's spread restructuring from "monopolistic arbitrage" toward "infrastructure dividend sharing."

IV. Industry Assessment

In analyzing VSP's macro-strategic positioning, global payments and fintech expert Tom Noyes offered a classic industry metaphor: "VSP is to stablecoins what Visa DPS is to debit cards." This metaphor directly reveals Visa's intent to play the role of ecosystem foundation in the on-chain financial landscape. (Visa DPS, Debit Processing Service, is a back-office outsourcing service provided by Visa. It processes, verifies, and records cardholders' transaction ledgers behind the scenes on behalf of thousands of banks. Banks don't need to invest heavily in building extremely complex transaction recording and communication infrastructure internally — they simply delegate this cumbersome technical burden entirely to Visa, allowing themselves to focus on customer acquisition and relationship maintenance.) VSP is fully replicating this historically validated network expansion model, except that the underlying rail has shifted from debit card communication message networks to distributed ledgers, the connection point has evolved from primary account number (PAN) management to crypto wallets and multi-signature custody, and the accounting model has progressed from traditional batch reconciliation to on-chain minting and burning. Visa has never directly issued the fiat currency flowing through its network; rather, member banks handle deposit-taking and acceptance, while Visa firmly controls network standards, transaction routing, and dispute arbitration authority. The birth of VSP is the latest extension of this network philosophy.

This approach creates a distinctly different strategic divergence between Visa and competitors Mastercard and emerging technology giant Stripe.

First, Visa has adopted a route of neutral enablement and ecosystem alliance — the "toll fee" model. Visa does not favor selecting or issuing any specific stablecoin itself, but instead focuses on providing a neutral operating system compatible with multiple chains and currencies. Within VSP, Visa has united more than 140 financial and technology giants, including Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, and Coinbase, to jointly form an open standards consortium to promote Open USD (OUSD). Visa itself does not bear the management risk of underlying reserve assets, nor does it need to handle the compliance pressure of token issuance. Instead, it focuses on providing wallets, deposit/withdrawal routing, and card network settlement through VSP, charging transaction toll fees and value-added service fees.

In contrast, Mastercard has taken a route of ownership consolidation and centralized control. Mastercard's stablecoin strategy leans toward heavy-asset acquisitions. For example, in April 2026, Mastercard acquired B2B stablecoin payment processor BVNK for $1.8 billion in an all-cash deal, building its own dedicated stablecoin payment and treasury management system internally. Mastercard attempts to achieve full control over its technology roadmap through direct ownership of infrastructure, while exclusively capturing all transaction fees and exchange rate spreads. However, this centralization strategy also means Mastercard independently bears all operational risks, technology integration barriers, and systemic vulnerabilities arising from single points of decision-making.

Meanwhile, emerging payment giant Stripe has focused on a route of merchant payment closed loops and vertical API dominance. Through its high-premium acquisition of stablecoin platform Bridge, Stripe is committed to building an extremely smooth, low-cost vertical settlement channel for developers and merchants. Stripe's core objective is to help merchants bypass the high fees of traditional card networks through stablecoins, thereby locking in merchant loyalty.

Tom Noyes analyzes that because VSP does not need to develop and maintain all regional underlying deposit/withdrawal channels itself, instead distributing these tasks to partners within the network, this distributed innovation model holds greater advantages in the long term. Stripe provides developer APIs, the Tempo chain handles machine payments, and fintech service providers in various regions each tackle their own local fiat settlement rails. Each partner invests independently, localizes, and bears compliance pressure — yet every increment of new stablecoin flow they drive ultimately converges into the Visa network. This allows Visa to extract a higher proportion of value-added service fees per unit of stablecoin transaction volume with a lighter operational footprint.

This logic of neutrality and ecosystem enablement has also been publicly confirmed by decision-makers.

On earnings calls, Visa CEO Ryan McInerney stated candidly that Visa will maintain a "multi-currency, multi-chain" open attitude over the long term. He emphasized that Visa's role is by no means to predict in the market which stablecoin will be the ultimate winner, because stablecoins as a whole remain in early stages within real commercial payments. The launch of the VSP platform is designed to ensure that regardless of which compliant stablecoin or blockchain network achieves mainstream market adoption in the future, financial institutions will be able to achieve seamless, large-scale connectivity within the Visa security environment they already trust. Visa's Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jack Forestell directly addressed bank pain points, noting that the core bottleneck for stablecoins has never been the macro concept of "programmable money," but rather the extremely granular operational details and practical realities. Before VSP, traditional banks wanting to conduct on-chain business had to cautiously navigate crypto custodians, public chain validators, third-party audit firms, and a bewildering array of smart contract standards. VSP's technical encapsulation allows banks to simply integrate familiar Visa interfaces, transforming complex blockchain backends into invisible underlying plumbing.

V. A Micro-Commerce Foundation for AI Agents (Agentic Commerce)

Traditional card payment systems were designed for "humans." The transaction frequency of human consumers is typically constrained by physiological limits, individual transaction amounts are relatively large, and the system relies heavily on 30-day chargeback mechanisms and traditional credit limit authorization protections. However, as global commerce enters the era of the agent economy, a new commercial paradigm driven by artificial intelligence is rapidly emerging — "Agentic Commerce."

When the commercial entity shifts from humans to AI agents, the underlying limitations of traditional financial rails become fully exposed. Traditional card networks charge fixed per-transaction access fees. If an AI agent needs to pay extremely small amounts for individual data queries or per-second API calls, the fixed fees of traditional card rails would exceed the value of the transacted asset itself by thousands of times, making it economically completely unviable. Furthermore, the frequent, high-volume, 24/7/365 always-online micro-collaborative transactions between AI agents would directly