Visa added Base, Polygon, Canton, Arc, and Tempo to its global stablecoin settlement pilot on April 29, bringing the total to nine supported blockchains and reaching an annualized settlement average of $7 billion, up 50% from last quarter.
Summary
- The five new additions join Avalanche, Ethereum, Solana, and Stellar, giving Visa issuers and acquirers nine blockchain options for processing transactions outside of traditional banking channels.
- Visa serves as a verification point for Tempo alongside Stripe’s Zodia Custody and Standard Chartered, making it one of the first payment companies to run a blockchain verification infrastructure directly.
- Visa now operates more than 130 stablecoin-linked card programs in more than 50 countries, integrating digital assets and general merchant acceptance around the world.
Visa stablecoin settlement reached the $7 billion run for the year as the company announced the addition of five blockchains to its global pilot on April 29. “Our partners are building in a multi-chain world, and they expect their options to reflect that reality,” said Rubail Birwadker, Visa’s Global Head of Growth Products and Strategic Partnerships.
The Visa stablecoin network now includes nine blockchains with different institutional roles
Each new chain targets a different segment of the payments market. Arc is Circle’s Layer-1 blockchain built for programmable money and real-world economic activity. Base is Coinbase’s most efficient stablecoin payment chain. Canton is built with adjustable privacy in large regulated markets and institutional compliance. Polygon handles high-volume stablecoin transfers with penny payments, and already processes about 35% of all USD stablecoin transfers worldwide. Tempo, backed by Stripe, focuses on real-time stablecoin transactions and settlement flows. As crypto.news reported, Visa and Stripe’s Bridge had already expanded the installation of stablecoin cards to 100 countries by the beginning of 2026, with this expansion of nine chains deepening the infrastructure behind those cards. As crypto.news is written, Polygon has processed nearly $650 billion in stablecoin transactions in February 2026 alone, the highest monthly volume of any blockchain, making it one of the most influential new additions to the Visa pilot.
That marks an average run of 7 billion on traditional residential rails
As crypto.news tracked, stablecoin compensation is accelerating across all major payment networks simultaneously. Jumping from about $4.7 billion to $7 billion in one quarter means the Visa pilot added about $2.3 billion in annual volume in 90 days, a pace that suggests institutional partners are treating stablecoins as a primary settlement option rather than a trial. Visa’s decision to use validator nodes in Tempo is structurally significant: it means that Visa is not only using the blockchain infrastructure but actively participating in its governance and operation, a position that no major payment network has taken before.
