Visa adds Monad as stablecoin settlement tops $25 billion

Visa's stablecoin settlement run rate topped $25 billion on Oct. 27, and the card network added Monad to its settlement program on Nov. 10, according to CEO Ryan McInerney's earnings-call remarks and Monad's announcement.

Monad said participating issuers and acquirers can now settle Visa obligations in stablecoins on its network. The arrangement covers funds moving between payment institutions after card transactions: issuers provide customer cards, while acquirers process merchant payments. Participants can move amounts owed to Visa through stablecoins, including outside conventional banking hours.

Visa's $25 billion figure is an annualized pace, not a statement that the company processed that amount throughout fiscal 2026. It also is not Monad's own settlement volume; Visa reported it across the network's supported blockchains and regions.

How fast is Visa's stablecoin settlement growing?

Visa disclosed a run rate above $20 billion in a Sept. 8 announcement about onchain lending, more than 15 times the year-earlier level. By Oct. 27, McInerney said the “annualized run rate had surpassed $25 billion,” up tenfold year over year.

The same earnings call counted 10 supported blockchains, settlement across all five Visa geographic regions, more than 225 stablecoin-linked card programs, and 5 million cards in more than 50 countries. Card-program volume grew more than 150% year over year.

Participating issuers included crypto exchanges, digital wallets, neobanks and remittance providers. Visa's disclosure aggregates activity across multiple networks rather than isolating settlement performance on any one chain.

What did the Lloyds pilot demonstrate?

A seven-day pilot announced Sept. 30 had Lloyds Banking Group settle $750,000 of live dollar payment obligations to Visa. Lloyds bought USDC through Archax, a UK-regulated digital asset exchange, and booked the transactions through its Corporate Markets branch in Jersey. Funds reached Visa in the United States in under an hour, including over a weekend.

The $750,000 represented the combined value of a series of transactions. Visa said “conventional cross-border settlement can take a day or longer when initiated outside banking hours.” Lloyds ran its own node on Canton while Visa supported settlement on a separate public blockchain, testing movement between private and public blockchain environments.

What changes with Monad's private settlement design?

Monad is building infrastructure for institutions that need confidential financial records. Category Labs introduced the Private Settlement design on Oct. 6. Businesses could configure execution domains by selecting validators, permitted assets and access policies, with transactions, contract code and state encrypted while those domains remain connected to Monad's shared liquidity.

Auditors and regulators could receive scoped access. Access would be denied by default, with separate policies governing balances, addresses, logs and receipts. Authorized operators could set a jurisdictional context and update configurations, while connected domains retain access to shared liquidity.

Proposed use cases include payroll, supplier payments, tokenized funds and private trading positions. Monad describes Private Settlement as a published design that is not yet live, with Category Labs working alongside early design partners and operators.

Why do issuers need a separate funding line?

Visa's Sept. 8 financing explainer said issuers must fund settlement before collecting money from cardholders. Some early programs require only a few million dollars, drawn and repaid daily, including on weekends and holidays, making conventional credit facilities difficult to justify at that scale.

Visa's work with Credit Coop describes a stablecoin-denominated revolving facility secured against settlement receivables. With customer authorization, the arrangement combines daily Visa settlement files with onchain repayment records to assess borrowers and calibrate funding. Credit Coop's Spigot smart contract routes incoming receivables for repayment before the remaining proceeds reach the borrower's operating account.

Rain has used the Credit Coop arrangement to fund daily Visa settlement obligations since August 2023. The structure addresses the working-capital requirement Visa identified: issuers need funds available before cardholder collections arrive.

The next checkpoint is operational: moving Private Settlement from published design into live deployment while Visa's Monad route brings issuer-to-acquirer settlement onto a public network. Until then, private institutional execution remains a proposal, and the $25 billion run rate remains a network-wide measure rather than a Monad volume figure.