Visa built the world’s largest payments network, pushing nearly $16 trillion in payments through its virtual pipes. Now it wants to do the same for lending in the world of decentralized finance (DeFi).
The report titled Stablecoins Beyond Payments: The Onchain Lending Option, reframes decentralized finance as “onchain finance”—a deliberate rebrand aimed at making decentralized credit sound compatible with institutions in the era of the GENIUS Act—and outlines how banks and private credit funds could join it.
Visa envisions institutions acting as liquidity providers for programmable lending protocols while providing the data, compliance and infrastructure that make participation viable. The payments network believes its well-known name and trusted rails would entice institutions — with their trillions in capital — to come on board.
Visa’s white paper marks a clear shift in tone from crypto-experimentation to institutional infrastructure. The company says the new “onchain finance” market has already issued more than $670 billion in stablecoin loans since 2020, with lending activity reaching new highs in mid-2025.
This scale, Visa claims, shows that stablecoins have evolved beyond trading tools to become the backbone of automated credit markets that run continuously and settle instantly.
To illustrate the model, the report highlights three examples where stablecoin-based credit is already working at scale.
Morpho, a liquidity “meta-layer,” connects institutional wallets and exchanges like Coinbase, Ledger, and Bitpanda, allowing borrowers to pledge tokenized bitcoin as collateral for USDC loans. Credit Coop, with which Visa is a direct partner, uses smart contracts to segment and redirect merchant accounts receivable.
And finally, Huma Finance, which supports cross-border working capital loans, automates supplier payments and recycles liquidity to generate double-digit annual returns.
As the report outlines, Visa’s strategy is very similar to that of TradFi. It does not plan to issue tokens or directly fund loans. Rather, it is a technology play with no exposure to counterparty lending risk.
Instead, the payment network wants to own the rails: the APIs, analytics and settlement systems that allow programmable credit to join the traditional financial world. It would not be involved in crypto projects, just facilitate the connections between them and TradFi.
Just as it once made card payments a global network, Visa now hopes to do the same for onchain credit, positioning itself as the infrastructure layer for programmable finance.
