Visa and Mastercard knew how to adapt to financial innovation.
The infrastructure is decentralized, but the assets are not.
Payment processors like Visa and Mastercard are not driven by ideology, but by survival and adaptation. When most traditional finance rejected cryptocurrencies, they kept quiet and did business under the table. Today, in full boom, they already have the task advanced and their hands shaken.
On April 29, 2026, Visa announced the addition of Polygon, Base, Arc, Canton, and Tempo to its Global Stablecoin Settlement Pilot Program. This initiative already had support for Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche and Stellar. With that decision, the network went from four to nine cryptocurrency networks enabled for their issuers and acquirers to settle directly on-chain. The program reached an annualized rate of USD 7,000 million in the first quarter of the year, a growth of 50% compared to the previous quarter.
Seven billion dollars. Liquidated in chain. Through a single card network.
The figure does not look like much compared to the more than 700 million daily transactions that VisaNet moves, nor compared to its technical capacity of up to 83,000 messages per second. But that is not the correct comparison. The correct comparison is against zero. Three years ago, the amount Visa settled with stablecoins was statistically irrelevant. Today it grows 50% per quarter. That is the slope, and it is the slope, in conjunction with the actors, that matters.
Visa was founded in 1958 by Bank of America. Mastercard, in 1966, as a response from a consortium of competing banks. Almost seventy years later, they are the two axes of the global payment system. Visa processed 257.5 billion transactions in 2025 worth $14.2 trillion, according to your annual tax report. Mastercard moved USD 2.82 trillion alone in the fourth quarter of the same year. Between them, there are more than 8.5 billion cards in circulation—a figure greater than the world’s population.—, presence in more than 200 countries and acceptance in 150 million businesses. When these two companies move their rails in one direction, the direction is global.
For years, the dominant conversation in the ecosystem was whether cryptocurrency networks could match Visa’s technical prowess. Bitcoin processes about 7 transactions per second at its base layer. Ethereum, around 15. The gap was the main argument against the mass use and justification of solutions like the Lightning Network. But the current outcome was never considered: that The most important payment processors in the world, without saying it, will end up running on cryptocurrency networks.
Global financial infrastructure is being rewritten on public networks
In October 2017, Mastercard’s then-CEO Ajay Banga called rubbish non-government issued cryptocurrencies. He argued that no anonymous medium of exchange, with fluctuating value and outside the State, “deserves to be considered a medium of exchange.” Banga is today president of the World Bank. The company he ran just acquired BVNK for up to $1.8 billion to integrate on-chain payments with its traditional fiat rails and is closing on the purchase of stablecoin company Zerohash for up to $2 billion to bolster the same layer.
In 2018, then-Visa CEO Al Kelly stated that Bitcoin was “more of a speculative commodity” and that Visa “will not process cryptocurrency-based transactions,” while suspending services with cryptocurrency card providers like Bitpay. Just a year later, Visa was already investing millions of dollars in cryptocurrency startups, and in 2019 it would launch its own cross-border payments network based on distributed ledger.
From “we will not process cryptocurrency-based transactions” to the pilot program on nine public networks. From “trash” to a Crypto Partner Program with 85 companies and a Mastercard Product Director who hopes “that the majority of financial institutions and fintechs offer digital currency services in the future. The change of discourse is total. And the change in discourse, in companies of this size, always comes after the change in infrastructure.
The nine networks that already make up the Visa pilot program – Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, Stellar, Polygon, Base, Arc, Canton and Tempo – are, for the most part, public and auditable networks. They are not the permitted networks that banking consortia predicted between 2017 and 2019, when they spoke of “blockchain yes, Bitcoin no” as a way to stick with distributed accounting without touching the ideological discomfort of the decentralized asset. Although Canton Network is the result of the work of the former JP Morgan, Blythe Masters, at Digital Assets Holdings, in general, the The networks that prevailed were those that anyone can read in a block explorer.
The consequence is one that should be formulated in its own terms: in a very short time, a significant portion of the people who pay by card in any business in the world They will be moving money on cryptocurrency rails, without knowing it and without needing to know it.
The user layer will remain identical—same plastic, same logo—but settlement between the issuing bank, the acquirer, and the network will occur in USDC, EURC, or another stablecoin, traveling over Ethereum, Solana, or Polygon rather than through systems like ACH or correspondent banks. This is already a reality in cards issued by cryptocurrency companies; It will soon be the case for payments in general.
The rails won, but not decentralization
There are two different battles that the ecosystem mixed for years: the battle for the best payments infrastructure and the battle for the separation between money and state. They are independent problems, and the outcome of each one is different.
The first battle, that of infrastructure or rails, is resolved in favor of cryptocurrency networks, with a clarity that would have surprised almost anyone in 2017.
We call rails the infrastructure layer through which money moves between the institutions that participate in a transaction: the card-issuing bank, the acquirer that operates with the merchant, clearing houses, banking correspondents, interbank transfer systems.
The end user does not see that layer. He only sees the plastic, the dataphone, the ticket. But between the client paying and the business receiving the money, a chain of settlements passes that traditionally runs through systems such as ACH or SWIFT with times ranging from hours to several business days.
Now, with cryptocurrencies, these payment processors have settlement seven days a week. Almost instantaneous. Without depending on correspondent banks. No operational closures on holidays. Programmable. Auditable in real time.
Visa, as we already covered in CriptoNoticias when it began to settle in USDC with Paxos, Circle and PayPal, did not take this direction out of ideological conviction: it took it because it modernized its infrastructure along these lines. It lowers costs, optimizes times and allows you to reach markets where traditional banking does not reach.. Stablecoins work, and they work better.
Mastercard did something similar by incorporating the stablecoins issued by the companies PayPal, Paxos, Fiserv and Circle to its global payments network, and joining the Global Dollar Network.
The second battle, that of monetary sovereignty, is another, and is not fought in the corridors of Visa. It is waged from bitcoiner citadels, from circular economies, from those who practice self-custody, from person-to-person payments that do not need an intermediary. That battle is not massive. It’s a different trench. Recognizing that the infrastructure battle has a winner does not imply that the sovereign asset battle is lost; implies that they were being confused.
As we wrote when covering the program Mastercard Crypto Partnerthere is a pattern to how these integrations occur. They are not advertised with dramatic headlines. They happen gradually, and then suddenly. A partnership with Paxos, another with Circle, a pilot, an acquisition, another network added to the program. And one day most of the world’s payments are running, in their settlement layer, on the same networks that the official discourse despised five years ago.
Unlike the banks that during Operation Chokepoint closed accounts of cryptocurrency companies due to government pressure, Visa and Mastercard soon changed their position regarding cryptocurrencies with a more strategic, more forward-looking perspective. They kept the door ajar, they waited, they did business.
Visa itself declares, in its crypto solutions corporate pagework with “more than 70 leading cryptocurrency platforms” to issue cards linked to wallets. According to a report According to the consulting firm McKinsey, spending with cards linked to stablecoins reached USD 4.5 billion in 2025, a year-on-year growth of 673%. AND according to The Kobeissi Letterspending volume with stablecoin cards reached $600 million per month, with 90% of transactions captured by Visa. Not very decentralized.
When the United States passed the Genius law giving explicit regulatory support to stablecoins, they put the accelerator on. Now, Visa has even started a program to advise banks on the integration of stablecoins and Mastercard is partnering with Coinbase to promote cryptocurrency payments among AI agents. Payments hegemony is not defended by closing itself to new technology, but by absorbing it.
Has “blockchain yes, Bitcoin no” expired?
Seen from a certain perspective, what is happening is the posthumous victory – partial, still in development – of that speech of 2017 and 2018 that sought to adopt distributed accounting without touching Bitcoin. The difference is that those consortia opted for permitted networks, while this 2026 version happens mainly in public, open networks, where any independent auditor can verify the settlement. That transparency, paradoxically, it is a direct inheritance from the architecture that Bitcoin demonstrated was possible.
The money that runs on these rails, however, is not Bitcoin. It is tokenized fiat: USDC, EURC, USDT, USDG, PYUSD. Programmable dollars issued by private parties, freezable, dependent on an identifiable issuer and subject to Law. The infrastructure is distributed, but the asset is not decentralized. It is a real achievement for technology and, simultaneously, an expansion of the dollar in a way that the traditional banking system would never have allowed.
Furthermore, although the networks are public and open, they are still controlled by companies or foundations. None have the decentralized nature that Bitcoin has. It is a Theater of Decentralization, as we showed in our editorial last week.
The global financial infrastructure is being rewritten in cryptocurrency networks, mostly public but not uncensorable, and the processors that would use it in a few years will continue to be the same two as always. Mass adoption is here. Only, as often happens with structural changes, it came disguised as continuity.