Visa Broadens Stablecoin Infrastructure with Zerohash, Scaling Cross-Border Payout Options
Visa Direct clients can now prefund accounts and send stablecoin-based payouts globally, as Visa deepens its commitment to making blockchain-based settlement available across its payment network.
Expanding Stablecoin Access Through Visa Direct
Visa has announced a meaningful expansion of its stablecoin infrastructure through a new partnership with crypto infrastructure provider Zerohash. According to the companies, eligible Visa Direct clients can now prefund their accounts using stablecoins and execute cross-border payouts directly in digital currencies, marking another strategic advance in Visa’s push to embed blockchain-based payment capabilities into its global settlement network.
The new functionality operates through Visa Direct, Visa’s established money movement platform, and enables participating businesses to maintain liquidity in stablecoins and conduct transactions outside the limitations of traditional banking hours. Payment recipients have the option to receive funds directly in stablecoins rather than converting to local fiat currencies, a feature designed to reduce settlement delays and friction in cross-border transactions where currency conversion creates additional operational complexity.
Zerohash’s Institutional Infrastructure Play
Zerohash, which has operated as a crypto infrastructure provider for financial institutions since 2017, occupies a key position in this latest move. The company has been systematically building out institutional-grade capabilities and recently applied for a national trust bank charter to expand its custody and settlement services. Zerohash’s recent work includes helping power Morgan Stanley’s integration of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana trading access on its E*Trade platform, completed in July.
“Unlocking stablecoin use cases at the core network level further accelerates adoption globally,” Edward Woodford, Zerohash’s founder and CEO, stated regarding the partnership. The collaboration underscores how traditional finance infrastructure is increasingly depending on specialized crypto firms to architect bridges between legacy payment systems and blockchain-native settlement mechanisms.
Visa’s Widening Stablecoin Footprint
The Zerohash partnership represents the latest move in a coordinated stablecoin strategy from Visa. Earlier this year, the payments processor piloted comparable stablecoin prefunding and payout capabilities with BVNK, testing the model before broader deployment. In July, Visa unveiled its Stablecoin Platform, a dedicated suite of tools enabling banks and fintech companies to issue, hold, and transfer stablecoins while maintaining seamless integration with their existing treasury and payments infrastructure.
Mark Nelsen, Visa’s global head of product, outlined the rationale behind the company’s stablecoin focus: “Stablecoins are creating new opportunities to make money movement faster and more flexible, particularly for cross-border use cases. Working with zerohash helps us bring stablecoin capabilities to our clients at scale, in a way that’s reliable and interoperable with the financial systems they already rely on today.”
These coordinated announcements demonstrate Visa’s conviction that stablecoins will constitute a significant portion of future global payment flows. By embedding stablecoin settlement directly into its infrastructure layer, Visa is positioning itself to capture transaction volume as institutional demand for faster, more efficient cross-border payment mechanisms grows. For the crypto market more broadly, deep integration of stablecoins into legacy payment rails represents institutional validation that tokenized settlement will play a lasting role in global finance.
Source: Visa and Zerohash, via Decrypt. Not financial advice.