Some traditional financial institutions are increasingly leaning towards cryptocurrencies.

Payments giant Visa has expanded its USD Coin ( USDC ) settlement capabilities to the Solana ( SOL ) blockchain, working with merchant acquirers Worldpay and Nuvei, according to a Sept. 5 announcement.

The move means that when customers make purchases using Visa cards, certain merchants affiliated with WorldPay and Nuvei can now receive payments directly in USDC, rather than traditional fiat currencies.

Cuy Sheffield, head of cryptocurrency at Visa, explained the significance of this in a post on X (formerly known as Twitter). According to him, Visa has been testing USDC as a financial option since 2021, when it partnered with Crypto.com for a live pilot.

The program enables the payments company to accept settlements for Australia’s Crypto.com card program over the Ethereum network using a Visa-managed Circle account.

The company is implementing the same initiative on Solana and will use its dedicated Circle account for on-chain payment settlements to WorldPay and Nuvei, which allows service providers to settle payments directly in stablecoins instead of fiat currencies.

Cryptocurrency is penetrating the traditional financial system

While regulatory uncertainty remains around cryptocurrencies, stablecoins have attracted more attention from these traditional players due to their similarities to central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).

PayPal announced last month that it would issue an Ethereum-based stablecoin, PYUSD, which will be issued by Paxos. The company said the stablecoin is fully backed by U.S. dollar deposits, Treasury bonds and other assets.

At the same time, Mastercard also announced a CBDC Partner Program with several crypto companies such as Ripple and ConsenSys to collaborate on the development of CBDC.

Swift, another traditional payment infrastructure company, has partnered with Chainlink to conduct tokenization experiments.

However, the interest of traditional players is not just due to the novelty of blockchain technology. It is also because most of them recognize the technology’s potential to become a serious competitor.

London-based hedge fund Brevan Howard reports that by 2022, USD-pegged stablecoins will settle $11 trillion in transactions. That’s 10 times more than PayPal handles and just $600 million less than Visa. #SOLANA  #支付  #Visa