Visa and Zerohash announced Wednesday that eligible Visa Direct clients can now prefund accounts and send payouts in stablecoins through a partnership that extends stablecoin capabilities across Visa's global money movement network.
Visa Direct reaches more than 18 billion endpoints across eligible cards, accounts, and digital wallets in 195 countries and territories. The integration, powered by Zerohash's regulatory and technical infrastructure, gives businesses a way to manage settlement and move money across borders around the clock. Recipients can receive payouts directly in stablecoins rather than waiting for local currency conversion through traditional banking rails.
Mark Nelsen, Visa's global head of product, described the rationale.
"Stablecoins are creating new opportunities to make money movement faster and more flexible, particularly for cross-border use cases," he said. "We continue to invest in the infrastructure that extends the reach of Visa Direct and gives clients more ways to move money. 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."
What Zerohash contributes to the partnership
Zerohash provides the compliance and technical stack for the integration. The company holds regulatory approvals across the European Union, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, Bermuda, and the United States, and operates regulated entities in 51 US jurisdictions. Its infrastructure covers dozens of blockchains and stablecoins, with tools for customer onboarding alongside the settlement layer.
Edward Woodford, Zerohash founder and CEO, placed the announcement in the context of the company's broader payments relationships.
"ZeroHash's infrastructure powers partners across the payments and money movement stack, including banks like Morgan Stanley, card issuing partners such as Marqeta, and PSPs like Worldpay," he said.
"Unlocking stablecoin use cases at the core network level further accelerates adoption globally. This partnership helps extend access to onchain money into Visa Direct. It gives businesses a faster way to prefund and manage liquidity across borders, and gives recipients quicker access to money and ultimately more choice."
Zerohash was founded in 2017 as a crypto infrastructure provider for financial institutions. In March 2026, the company applied for a national trust bank charter to expand its custody and settlement business. In July, it helped power Morgan Stanley's rollout of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana trading on E*Trade.
How this fits into Visa's stablecoin build-out
Wednesday's announcement is not Visa's first move in the stablecoin space. In January, the company partnered with BVNK to pilot stablecoin prefunding and payouts on Visa Direct. In July, Visa launched the Visa Stablecoin Platform, giving banks and fintechs tools to issue, hold, and transfer stablecoins while connecting them to existing treasury and payment systems.
The Zerohash partnership operationalizes those tools at the network level. Where the Visa Stablecoin Platform established the architecture, the Zerohash integration brings that capability across Visa Direct's existing client infrastructure. Businesses that already use Visa Direct can access stablecoin prefunding without rebuilding their payment workflows.
The economic pressure behind the move is structural. The World Bank puts the average cost of sending a $200 remittance at 6.35 percent, more than double the United Nations' target of 3 percent. Stablecoin rails have been shown to reduce that cost below 1 percent. For a network built on cross-border money movement, the cost differential is not a minor efficiency gain. It represents a fundamental shift in what payment infrastructure can offer.
The wider pattern across legacy payment firms
The Visa-Zerohash announcement arrived in a week when multiple legacy payment institutions moved simultaneously on stablecoin infrastructure. On August 4, Western Union launched Stablecard, routing consumer value onto the Solana blockchain through its USDPT stablecoin. Mastercard completed its $1.8 billion acquisition of BVNK the same day to deepen its own stablecoin settlement capabilities.
The GENIUS Act, passed in 2026, created a federal regulatory framework that allows chartered banks to issue compliant stablecoins. That legislation addressed the compliance uncertainty that had kept major financial institutions cautious about committing to stablecoin infrastructure at scale.
Visa did not disclose which specific stablecoins the Zerohash integration will support at launch or which Visa Direct client segments will be eligible first. The announcement described the new capabilities as available for "eligible Visa Direct clients," without specifying the criteria for that designation.
Anastasiia G
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