Visa launches stablecoin platform offering access to OUSD for clients

Visa's new stablecoin platform gives financial institutions a single gateway to mint, move and manage Open USD, challenging Circle's dominance in the $70 billion stablecoin market.

Visa on Thursday launched the Visa Stablecoin Platform, an enterprise service that lets financial institutions mint, hold and transfer Open USD — a new stablecoin backed by more than 140 companies including Visa, Mastercard and BlackRock.

"Stablecoins are opening up a new layer of programmable money, but for most institutions the hard part isn't the concept, it's the operational reality," Jack Forestell, chief product and strategy officer at Visa, said in a statement. "With the Visa Stablecoin Platform, we're giving our clients a single place to mint, move and manage stablecoin operations with the controls, security and network reach they already expect from Visa."

The platform integrates directly with Open Standard, the consortium behind OUSD, providing wallet infrastructure, dual-control approval workflows and audit logging. Visa's existing stablecoin offerings — including settlement, linked cards and money movement — are interoperable with VSP, creating a full-stack solution for banks and fintechs. The service is initially available for beta testing with select clients.

The launch positions OUSD as a direct competitor to Circle's USDC, which commands a $70 billion market cap — roughly 25 times the size of PayPal's PYUSD at $2.8 billion, according to The Block's data. With Visa processing transactions across more than 200 million merchants globally, the platform could accelerate the shift of corporate treasury and settlement flows onto blockchain rails.

The Visa Stablecoin Platform marks the payments giant's deepest integration with blockchain-based money to date. Unlike earlier experiments that focused on settlement between specific partners, VSP packages the full operational stack — wallet management, bank account connectivity, and mint/burn controls — into a single Visa-managed environment.

Open USD, the stablecoin at the center of the platform, uses a "pass-through" model that routes nearly all reserve yield to distributors while retaining a small management fee. Analysts have said the structure could pressure Circle to lower fees or expand its distribution network to defend market share.

The move comes one day after reports that Stripe and Advent International offered to acquire PayPal for $53 billion — a deal that Polygon Labs executive Aishwary Gupta said "simply speeds up the transition" of money moving onchain. William Blair analysts were more measured, noting that PYUSD's $2.8 billion market cap represents just 4% of USDC's supply, limiting the combined entity's stablecoin heft.

For Visa, the platform extends its crypto strategy beyond card-linked products into core treasury operations. Financial institutions can now mint OUSD, hold it in Visa-managed wallets, and burn it for fiat — all within the same compliance framework they use for traditional payments.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.