Visa expands card partnership with Stripe’s Bridge to more than 100 countries

The cards, now in 18 countries, allow customers to take stablecoin balances held in cryptocurrency wallets and use them to pay for purchases at businesses such as delis, clothing stores or any merchant that accepts Visa. Companies, including wallet startup Phantom, are coming to Bridge to create their own debit cards backed by the stablecoin, and Visa acts as the card payments network.

“Anyone who is building a stablecoin wallet needs to have a card attached to it if they want consumers and businesses to be able to keep that value in the wallet for real-world spending,” said Coy Sheffield, head of crypto at Visa. luck.

Friends or enemies?

Some proponents of stablecoins, or cryptocurrencies tied to real assets like the US dollar, say they threaten dominant companies like Visa and… MasterCard. Instead of relying on decades-old networks, consumers can send and receive dollars instantly via blockchain technology. This perception has made some investors nervous about credit card companies. The next day the Senate Pass With the passage of the Genius Act, a bill regulating stablecoins, shares of the two dominant card giants declined.

But Bridge’s expanding partnership with Visa underscores how much talk about disruption has been overblown, and how fintech companies have become more integrated with legacy payment companies. Another stablecoin startup is Rain, which was launched recently He grew up $250 million at a valuation of nearly $2 billion, and also issues stablecoin-linked cards in partnership with Visa.

“For consumers who buy things individually, online, and in stores, over the last 40 years, we’ve built this very strong network of merchants and acceptance,” said Zach Abrams, co-founder and CEO of Bridge. luck. “This network will be really valuable in a world with stablecoins and in a world without stablecoins.”

One area where Abrams sees stablecoins potentially replacing card networks is proxy commerce, a term that describes a not-yet-realized arena in which AI agents make purchases on behalf of humans. “There’s this whole new world that can be created when agents want to do transactions and get things incrementally and quickly that is very unique from the way card networks are built,” he said.

In addition to expanding its work with Visa, Bridge will participate in an ongoing process pilot From a payments network giant that is exploring the feasibility of settling fees using stablecoins on the blockchain, instead of traditional bank transfers. Participants in the pilot already include fintech companies Worldpay and Nuvei. “We believe that if we can move billions of dollars across the chain, we can move trillions of dollars across the chain,” said Sheffield, the Visa CEO.