The On-Chain Battle of Payment Giants: A Fight for the $40 Trillion Settlement Layer

The payment industry may seem "old," but it has always been the earliest and most easily restructured part of the financial system by technology.

While the market is still debating whether cryptocurrency is an asset, the two payment giants, Visa and Mastercard, have reached a consensus on a more fundamental engineering issue: Is there a more efficient settlement layer that can be embedded in the existing payment system instead of starting from scratch?

The answer is stablecoins.

Recently, Visa announced that it is opening up USDC settlement to banks in the United States through Solana; previously, Mastercard partnered with Ripple to test RLUSD-based transaction settlement on XRPL.

This is not a short-term pilot program, but rather a clear signal that global payment infrastructure is beginning to migrate to a new generation of settlement layers.

Visa: Turning stablecoins into a "settlement plugin"

Visa's actions may appear cutting-edge, but its underlying logic remains highly restrained.

Instead of building its own closed blockchain system, it directly integrated the Solana network and USDC stablecoin into its own settlement backend as an available option in the existing clearing process.

Key data: Within the United States, institutions such as Cross River Bank have begun using USDC for settlements through Solana. Visa has disclosed an annualized settlement rate exceeding $3.5 billion.

Seamless experience: For consumers, the card-swiping experience remains unchanged.

For banks, this change is extremely intuitive: the T+1 / T+2 clearing cycle that originally relied on working days has been compressed into continuous settlement 24/7, significantly reducing the time funds are in transit and liquidity occupation.

It's worth noting that Visa did not package this capability as a "financial paradigm shift" or a "disruptive innovation." Instead, it repeatedly emphasized standardization and productization—viewing stablecoin settlement as a deployable and replicable foundational capability.

This also explains why Visa recently launched a stablecoin advisory service: its goal is not to push banks to "go crypto," but to help them understand and access next-generation settlement tools.

In this system, stablecoins are not independent financial products, but rather more like basic modules embedded in the payment network.

Mastercard: Building a "Compliance Connection Layer"

Unlike Visa's "direct connection to public blockchains," Mastercard has chosen a more complex path of "strategic alliances and mergers."

Multi-chain collaboration: Instead of betting on a single path, it collaborates with Ripple (XRPL), Gemini, and Middle Eastern institutions.

Compliance puzzle: It tends to build a "pluggable compliance connection layer".

Mastercard's self-positioning is very clear: it does not attempt to become an extension of any public chain, but rather places itself at the interface between the traditional financial system and on-chain settlement networks.

The core advantage of this architecture lies in its flexibility—regardless of which stablecoin or technological path becomes mainstream in the future, Mastercard can quickly integrate through connectivity and adaptation. This model is particularly suitable for complex scenarios with high compliance requirements, such as cross-border payments, B2B settlements, and RWA.

The battle over the settlement layer points to a redistribution of $40 trillion.

Despite their different management paths, Visa and Mastercard are highly consistent on a key judgment.

What they are really concerned about is not the growth in the size of a single stablecoin, but whether future settlement activities will break away from the existing payment network and complete a closed loop on a new technology layer.

Once fund transfers can be settled peer-to-peer on the blockchain, the intermediary value of traditional clearing networks will be reassessed. This is precisely why the two major card organizations must get involved early and clarify their own positions.

The claim in Visa's latest report that "stablecoins may reshape the global $40 trillion credit market" is not simply a narrative about scale, but a structural judgment: when settlement tools become programmable, the underlying logic of credit issuance, risk control, and fund allocation will all be adjusted accordingly.

Whoever controls the settlement layer is closer to defining the next generation of rules for fund flows.

This is a revolution that is happening outside the public eye.

It's not a user-facing celebration, but a technological migration happening in the backend system: quiet, gradual, but once completed, almost irreversible.

When the world’s largest payment network begins to regard on-chain settlement as a fundamental capability, blockchain is no longer an external variable of the financial system, but is becoming part of its internal engineering.

Payments appear to be proceeding as usual, but the underlying settlement logic is entering a new technological phase.