Visa expands stablecoin capabilities on Visa Direct with Zerohash

Visa Direct and Zerohash have announced a partnership that gives Visa Direct clients the ability to prefund accounts and disburse merchant payouts in stablecoins — with Zerohash, an infrastructure provider for crypto, stablecoins and tokenized assets, powering the underlying technology.

Zerohash offers clients APIs and embeddable development kits for cross-border payments, trading, remittances, payroll, tokenization and on/off-ramps, running its own regulatory and technical stack across dozens of blockchains and stablecoins. The company has a regulatory footprint across the EU, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, Bermuda and the U.S., including regulated entities in 51 U.S. jurisdictions.

Stablecoins are creating new opportunities to make money movement faster and more flexible

— Mark Nelsen, Global Head of Product at Visa

Unlocking stablecoin use cases at the core network level further accelerates adoption globally

— Edward Woodford, CEO of Zerohash

• Visa Direct's network reaches over 18 billion endpoints — cards, accounts and digital wallets — across 195+ countries and territories
• Zerohash provides the regulatory and technical stack across dozens of blockchains and stablecoins
• For merchants, the practical upshot is round-the-clock cross-border money movement without the usual banking-hours constraints

Visa's move fits the broader race among payment networks to own stablecoin infrastructure: we previously covered how Mastercard closed its $1.8 billion acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure firm BVNK, and before that, how Visa itself, alongside Mastercard, Coinbase and more than 140 other companies, launched the Open USD stablecoin, which shares reserve revenue with partners. The difference here is that this Zerohash partnership isn't about issuing its own stablecoin — it's about plugging someone else's infrastructure directly into the existing Visa Direct network rather than building new rails from scratch.

For the market, it's another signal that stablecoins are gradually becoming less of a standalone product and more just another settlement option inside existing payment networks — sitting alongside cards and bank transfers rather than replacing them.

None of this should be read as personalized investment advice.