In a significant push to integrate traditional finance with decentralized finance, Visa, the global payments giant, is set to empower financial institutions to tap into the vast potential of the $670 billion stablecoin credit market. With its latest report, “Stablecoins Beyond Payments: The Onchain Lending Opportunity,” Visa is rebranding decentralised finance as “onchain finance,” aiming to make it more appealing to institutions in the era of the GENIUS Act.
By providing the infrastructure for programmable finance, Visa is set to connect traditional lenders with decentralised lending protocols, paving the way for a new era of financial innovation and inclusion. As the company looks to extend its reach beyond payments, the potential implications for the future of finance are vast and exciting.
Visa Eyes DeFi Lending
Visa’s payment network, which processes almost $16 trillion in transactions, has been a resounding success. Now, the company is looking to replicate this success in decentralised finance (DeFi) lending. In a report entitled “Stablecoins Beyond Payments: The Onchain Lending Opportunity,” Visa has rebranded DeFi as onchain finance and announced its plans to extend its payment network to decentralised finance. The report stated,
“On-chain lending reimagines financial services by using smart contracts to automate and facilitate intermediation instead of traditional institutions. When combined with stablecoins, these products enable new ways to lend and borrow with automated execution, near-instantaneous settlement and borderless capital flows — essentially creating a global credit market that never closes.”
Notably, this move comes on the heels of Visa’s collaboration with Ethereum, allowing users to settle their high-value USDC payments.
Explaining the Vision
With its whitepaper, Visa is marking a clear transition from crypto experimentation to developing infrastructure for institutions. The company highlights that the onchain finance market has seen over $670 billion in stablecoin loans since 2020, with mid-2025 witnessing record lending activity.
Notably, Visa’s vision involves institutions acting as liquidity providers to programmable lending protocols, with the payment network supplying critical infrastructure and expertise. By leveraging its trusted brand and rails, Visa aims to attract trillions of dollars in institutional capital to DeFi.
The payments giant will focus on providing essential infrastructure, including APIs, settlement systems, analytics, and compliance tools, to support institutional participation in onchain finance. Importantly, the firm announced that it will not issue tokens or assume credit risk, instead serving as a bridge between traditional finance and crypto markets without taking on counterparty exposure.
Stablecoin-Based Credit
The report outlines three real-world examples of stablecoin-based credit models that are already operating at scale. They are:
- Morpho: A liquidity “meta-layer” connecting institutional wallets and exchanges, enabling borrowers to use tokenized bitcoin as collateral for USDC loans.
- Credit Coop: A platform that uses smart contracts to split and redirect merchant receivables, with Visa as a direct partner.
- Huma Finance: A platform that supports cross-border working-capital loans, automating supplier payments and generating double-digit annual and generating double digit annual yields through liquidity recycling.
