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- Visa already has more than 160 stablecoin-linked card programs globally, with payment volume nearly tripling year over year.
- Reap’s infrastructure can use stablecoins as collateral as well as a funding and repayment asset.
- The companies are also exploring multicurrency stablecoins and payments executed by authenticated AI agents.
Visa and Reap are expanding stablecoin-linked credit card infrastructure to more than 100 markets, pushing crypto further into a part of payments where users may never need to interact with a blockchain themselves.
The collaboration extends Reap’s existing Visa card infrastructure beyond Asia and Latin America into Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Fintechs, businesses and other platforms will be able to launch Visa programs where stablecoins can fund spending, serve as collateral or repay card balances, while transactions still reach merchants through Visa’s existing network of more than 175 million acceptance locations.
The more consequential part sits behind the card. Reap already settles obligations with Visa directly in stablecoins in Asia-Pacific, moving part of the card settlement process onto blockchain rails rather than limiting crypto to the customer-facing balance.
The Stablecoin Sits Behind the Visa Card
The structure is different from simply loading cryptocurrency onto a prepaid card.
Reap provides authorization, processing, compliance infrastructure and card-program operations. Partners can then build their own products on top of that stack rather than establishing separate issuing infrastructure in each market. The programs remain subject to local regulatory requirements.
Stablecoins can enter the system at several points.
Businesses can use them to fund corporate spending, secure credit exposure or repay balances. Platforms can incorporate the same infrastructure into cross-border payouts and vendor payments. The merchant, however, continues receiving payment through the familiar Visa acceptance network rather than having to accept a stablecoin directly.
That separation is important.
For stablecoins to become useful in everyday commerce, every merchant does not necessarily need a crypto wallet. The digital asset can operate inside the funding and settlement layer while the existing card network handles acceptance.
Reap co-founder Daren Guo described the objective as making stablecoins as usable for businesses as other payment methods, arguing that the larger opportunity is creating a compliant infrastructure route through which companies can issue cards across multiple markets.
Visa’s $20 Billion Number Shows Where Adoption Is Moving
Visa’s own network data suggests stablecoin-linked cards are moving beyond a niche experiment.
More than 160 stablecoin card programs were already operating globally during Visa’s fiscal second quarter.
Payment volume across those programs increased nearly 200% year over year, while Visa says stablecoin settlement volume has surpassed a $20 billion annualized run rate, more than 15 times the level a year earlier.
Those figures measure activity within Visa’s ecosystem, not the entire stablecoin payments market. But they provide a useful distinction between two different types of adoption.
One is consumer-facing: someone holds USDC or another stablecoin and wants to spend it.
The other is infrastructural: stablecoins become a funding, collateral and settlement asset inside a conventional payment product.
The Reap collaboration targets both, but the second may ultimately be more important.
Visa’s research identifies daily settlement funding as one of the less visible constraints on new stablecoin card programs. Issuers must fund obligations before collecting from cardholders, creating a working-capital gap that becomes particularly difficult for smaller programs operating continuously across weekends and holidays.
Blockchain settlement does not eliminate that credit requirement. It can, however, change when money moves and how much idle liquidity needs to be held.
Reap Already Settles With Visa in Stablecoins
Reap is not waiting for the 100-market expansion to test that model.
The company participates in Visa’s stablecoin settlement program in Asia-Pacific and settles its payment obligations to Visa directly using stablecoins. Because blockchain settlement is not tied to conventional banking hours, the companies say the structure can continue operating through weekends and other periods when traditional banking rails are unavailable.
For card issuers, the potential advantage is liquidity efficiency.
Traditional global payment operations can require companies to maintain pre-funded balances across accounts, currencies and jurisdictions. Reap says stablecoin settlement reduces some of that requirement by allowing obligations to move through blockchain infrastructure instead.
Visa has been working on the financing side of the same problem separately.
In September, the payments network detailed stablecoin-denominated revolving credit facilities designed to fund daily Visa settlement obligations. Credit Coop’s infrastructure has financed more than $2.5 billion in cumulative settlement volume since 2023, according to figures published by Visa, using settlement receivables and onchain repayment mechanisms.
The pieces increasingly resemble a full financial stack: stablecoins can fund the card program, finance settlement obligations, repay balances and settle between payment-network participants.
The consumer-facing card is only the visible endpoint.
Reap Is Also Building Toward Multicurrency Stablecoins
The next phase could move beyond dollar-denominated tokens.
Reap plans to introduce multicurrency stablecoin capabilities, allowing card programs to support additional currencies for funding and settlement. The company is exploring stablecoins linked to currencies including the Mexican peso, Hong Kong dollar, euro, Korean won and Japanese yen, according to founder Daren Guo.
A local-currency stablecoin changes the use case.
A business collecting revenue in one market and paying expenses in another could potentially move between tokenized currencies outside conventional banking hours instead of using dollar stablecoins as an intermediate asset for every transaction.
That model remains at an earlier stage than today’s dollar-stablecoin infrastructure, and issuance, redemption, liquidity and regulation would have to work market by market.
But it helps explain why the geographic scale of the Visa collaboration matters. Reaching more than 100 markets gives Reap a distribution layer on which additional settlement currencies could eventually operate.
AI Agents Are the Longer-Term Experiment
Visa and Reap are also exploring a less mature extension of the infrastructure: agentic commerce.
The companies plan to examine how authenticated AI agents could execute payments within limits established by users, with compliance and security controls built around those transactions.
That remains exploratory rather than a commercial product available across the newly announced markets.
Still, stablecoins have characteristics that make them relevant to machine-initiated payments. They can move continuously, settle programmatically and operate without requiring banking systems to be open at the moment an automated transaction is initiated.
The important development today is more concrete.
Visa is not asking 175 million merchant locations to become crypto businesses. Reap is instead putting stablecoins behind an existing payment interface, where they can handle funding, collateral, repayment and settlement while the merchant continues seeing a Visa transaction.
That may be the more scalable version of stablecoin adoption: less crypto at the checkout, and more crypto underneath it.
