Visa says it wants to build lending rails to ‘Onchain Finance,’ its new name for Defi
Visa has built the largest payment network in the world that drives almost $16 trillion in payments through its virtual pipes. Now it wants to do the same for lending in the world of decentralized finance (defi).
The report, titled StableCoins Beyond Payment: The Onchain Lending Opportunity, Reframes decentralized finance as “onchain finance” – a deliberate rebrand aimed at making decentralized credit sound compatible with institutions in the era of the Genius Act – and outlines how banks and private credit funds can be plugged.
VISA envisions institutions acting as liquidity providers in programmed lending protocols, while providing the data, compliance, and infrastructure that make participation viable. The payment network believes the familiar name and trusted railroads will entice institutions — with their trillions in capital — to come.
Visa’s whitepaper marks a clear shift in tone from crypto experimentation to institutional infrastructure. The company says the emerging “Onchain Finance” market has issued more than $670 billion in StableCoin Loans since 2020, with lending activity reaching new highs by mid-2025.
That scale, VISA argued, shows StableCoins have evolved beyond trading tools to become the backbone of automated credit markets that continue to operate and settle instantly.
To illustrate the model, the report highlights three examples where StableCoin-based credit is already working at scale.
Morpho, a liquidity “Meta-Layer,” connects institutional wallets and exchanges like Coinbase, Ledger, and Bitpanda, allowing lenders to post tokenized Bitcoin as collateral for USDC loans. Credit Coop, a direct partner of VISA, uses smart contracts to separate and redirect received merchants.
And finally, Huma Finance supporting cross-border working-capital loans, automating supplier payments and recycling liquidity to generate double-digit annual yields.
As the report outlines, Visa’s strategy looks similar to what it does for Tradfi. It does not plan to issue tokens or directly fund loans to the fund. Rather, it is a technology play without exposure to counterparty lending risk.
Instead, the payment network wants to own the railroads: the APIs, analytics, and settlement systems that allow programmable credits to plug into the traditional financial world. It is not involved in crypto projects, just facilitate connections between them and Tradfi.
Just as it turned card payments into a global network, VISA now hopes to do the same for onchain credit, positioning itself as the infrastructure layer of programmable finance.
