Visa said on April 29 that it is adding Base, Polygon, Canton, Arc, and Tempo to its stablecoin settlement pilot, bringing the total number of supported blockchains to nine. The company also said the program has reached a $7 billion annualized settlement run rate, up 50% from the prior quarter.

What changed

The pilot lets issuers and acquirers settle obligations with Visa using stablecoins rather than relying entirely on traditional banking rails. The five new networks join Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, and Stellar, expanding the program from a smaller set of early integrations into a broader multichain setup.

That matters because settlement liquidity is no longer concentrated on one chain. Visa is effectively positioning itself as an interoperability layer for institutional partners that want onchain settlement without having to standardize on a single network.

Why it matters

The more important signal is not the headline network count by itself, but that Visa says the pilot is already operating at multi-billion-dollar annualized scale. In the same release, the company said it now has 130+ stablecoin-linked card programs in more than 50 countries, suggesting the settlement infrastructure is being built alongside a wider stablecoin payments stack.

This is still a pilot, and Visa did not break out transaction counts by chain or disclose how much of the $7 billion run rate comes from each partner. But adding both public-chain networks like Base and Polygon and institution-oriented infrastructure like Canton makes the program look more like real payments plumbing than a one-chain crypto experiment.