Visa has broadened its stablecoin settlement pilot to incorporate Polygon and four additional blockchain networks, signaling a continued push into crypto-native settlement rails for traditional payments. The program, launched in 2023, allows partners to settle transactions using stablecoins instead of conventional banking rails. The newly added networks are Polygon, Base, the Canton Network, Arc and Tempo, joining existing supported chains such as Ethereum, Solana, Stellar and Avalanche.

Visa says the pilot is aimed at evaluating whether stablecoins can offer faster settlement, round-the-clock availability, and efficiencies in cross-border payments. The company disclosed in a press release that the initiative has reached an annualized settlement run rate of roughly $7 billion, up about 50% quarter over quarter. While that growth is meaningful, Visa notes that the volume remains a smaller portion of its broader payments business.

Key takeaways

• Visa expands its stablecoin settlement pilot to five new networks—Polygon, Base, Canton Network, Arc and Tempo—in addition to Ethereum, Solana, Stellar and Avalanche already supported.
• The pilot’s annualized settlement run rate is approximately $7 billion, representing about 50% quarter-over-quarter growth, according to Visa.
• The expansion underscores a deliberate exploration of faster, 24/7 settlement and efficiency gains in cross-border transactions as part of Visa’s broader stablecoin strategy, including related partnerships.
• Industry momentum is rising, with Mastercard enabling stablecoin-linked card spending in the United States and fintechs accelerating blockchain-based settlement workflows, such as Modern Treasury’s Polygon integration.
• Regulatory clarity around stablecoins is evolving in parallel, with legislation like the GENIUS Act shaping the environment for payment stablecoins and on-chain settlement.

Expanding the pilot and what changes

The expansion broadens the scope of Visa’s attempt to validate stablecoin settlement as a practical bridge for traditional finance to move faster and operate more continuously. By adding Polygon, Base, the Canton Network, Arc and Tempo to the existing lineup, Visa is testing a wider array of Layer 2s and cross-chain options that could influence how institutions approach on-chain liquidity and interbank settlement rails. Visa characterizes the pilot as a structured exploration rather than a mass rollout, aiming to quantify potential improvements in settlement speed, reliability, and cost.

As part of its ongoing push into blockchain-based infrastructure, Visa highlighted the broader strategic value of stablecoin settlement. The firm’s comments frame stablecoins as a potential enabler of around-the-clock settlement and cross-border efficiency, which could translate into material benefits for partners that operate at a global scale. The latest numbers—roughly $7 billion in annualized settlement—illustrate tangible progress, even as the pilot remains a small slice of Visa’s total payments landscape.

In March, Visa expanded its collaboration with Bridge, a Stripe subsidiary, to support a global card program that enables stablecoin-linked payments. The development signals a broader appetite for bridging stablecoins and traditional consumer-facing payment experiences, where on-chain settlement could reduce friction for merchants and users alike. That move complements the ongoing pilot by linking stablecoin settlement to card-based spend, a critical channel for mainstream adoption.

Industry momentum and regulatory environment

The steady growth of stablecoin settlement efforts reflects a broader industry pattern as major payments firms experiment with on-chain settlement layers. Mastercard has been active in this space as well, enabling stablecoin-linked card spending in the United States through wallet integrations, marking a parallel track in the push to normalize crypto-based settlement within everyday commerce.

Beyond card programs, fintechs are integrating blockchain-enabled settlement into their workflow. Modern Treasury, a payments software provider, announced its integration with Polygon to help businesses move stablecoin payments more quickly, a move that adds to the ecosystem’s momentum toward on-chain settlement. The U.S. regulatory landscape is also shifting gradually; the GENIUS Act provides clearer standards for payment stablecoins, a development shaping both policy and market participants’ risk and compliance planning. The balance of evolving regulation with rapid fintech innovation will influence how much-scale adoption of stablecoin settlement ultimately achieves.

On the broader market front, stablecoins continue to grow. DeFiLlama data indicates that the total value of stablecoins in circulation has surpassed $320 billion, up roughly 150% since early 2024. That expansion underscores both the demand for stable value on-chain and the potential liquidity that could underpin new settlement rails as financial institutions test and deploy cross-chain flows.

What to watch next

Investors and builders should monitor whether the expanded network support translates into measurable improvements in settlement speed, cost, and reliability for partner programs, as well as how institutional participants respond to the evolving regulatory backdrop. The coming quarters will reveal whether Visa’s pilot can scale beyond pilots and become a meaningful component of the broader payments infrastructure, alongside rising activity from competitors and fintechs pursuing similar goals.

For readers tracking the ecosystem, the ongoing integration work—both in corporate pilots like Visa’s and in third-party workflows such as Modern Treasury’s Polygon collaboration—will indicate where on-chain settlement might become a normalized option in enterprise payments. As policy clarity improves and liquidity expands, the next phase of stablecoin settlement could reveal its true potential for cross-border efficiency and around-the-clock operations.

Source: Visa press materials and industry reporting, with additional context from market coverage tracked by Cointelegraph and industry data aggregators.

April 29, 2026 – Realmint officially launches today, opening doors for retail investors to access RWAs through a smarter, data-driven platform. Backed by Injective Foundation and Cointelegraph Accelerator, the platform combines scoring, aggregation, and one-click access to tokenized assets.

Why RWA retail isn’t here yet

The market for tokenized real-world assets is growing fast, but for most users, understanding what they’re actually buying is still far from simple. The barrier isn’t access, it’s understanding.

Assets are distributed across multiple chains and platforms, forcing users to manually navigate different ecosystems before even comparing options. Two tokens can represent the same asset, such as gold, while having completely different structures, levels of transparency, and risk profiles. One might be backed by audited reserves with clear redemption terms; another might offer little more than a whitepaper. For most users, these differences are not obvious, and there’s currently no simple way to tell them apart.

Realmint

Today, Realmint goes live to fix exactly that. Backed by Injective Foundation and part of the Cointelegraph Accelerator program, the platform aggregates over 50 tokenized commodities across chains including Ethereum, Polygon, Base, and more, allowing users to discover, understand and compare RWAs through a single interface. Stocks, bonds, and other asset classes are already in the pipeline and will be added weekly.

Realmint score

Instead of presenting raw data alone, the platform evaluates each asset across six dimensions: Enforceability, Backing, Control, Exit, Liquidity, and Social. The result is a composite score from 0 to 100, so users can compare assets at a glance without needing to parse whitepapers, run due diligence, or dig through on-chain data manually.

One-click execution

Starting week 2, Realmint will integrate execution directly into the same flow. Users will be able to explore assets, compare them side by side, and buy RWAs across different chains starting from USDC on Injective, all in a single gasless transaction. No wallet setup friction either: Realmint uses Privy to let users create self-custodial wallets in seconds, without leaving the platform.

Realmint rewards

A rewards system is on the way, and early activity on the platform will matter. What you do before June counts. Early engagement with RWAs on the platform is already being tracked.

Realmint is now live. Explore, compare, and understand RWAs before you invest.

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For a decade, the crypto industry has gathered at Consensus to discuss what was coming next. This year, something different is happening. The future has started arriving.

Real-world assets are being minted onchain. Stablecoins are quietly becoming the connective tissue of global commerce. Prediction markets are turning probability into a tradable asset class. The institutions that once dismissed all of this – Morgan Stanley, Nasdaq, the NYSE, DTCC, SWIFT, Franklin Templeton – are now sending their senior people to Miami to talk about how they fit in.

When Consensus 2026 convenes May 5–7 at the Miami Beach Convention Center, it won’t feel like a conference about crypto’s potential. It will feel like a summit about what happens next now that crypto’s promise has become the financial industry’s new reality.

The institutions have landed

For years, traditional finance circled the crypto industry from a cautious distance. That distance has collapsed.

The 2026 speaker roster reads like a who’s-who of institutional legitimacy: Mastercard, PayPal, T. Rowe Price, Nasdaq, NYSE, Morgan Stanley, SWIFT, and DTCC alongside crypto’s foundational builders. The sponsor list tells the same story: JPMorgan, Fidelity, Coinbase, Google, Bridge by Stripe, Broadridge, Circle, Grayscale, FTSE Russell and more. These are not exploratory delegations. They are bets.

“Consensus brings every pillar of the industry together for the largest crypto trade conference in North America,” says a Coinbase spokesperson. “That’s exactly where we want to be in order to move the needle.”

What drew them all in? The short answer is 24/7 markets. The longer answer is what those markets made possible.

Always on, everywhere at once

Blockchain infrastructure runs on internet time – no opening bell, no closing hour, no pause in price discovery. For years, traditional finance treated this as a quirk. They’ve since realized it’s a competitive advantage they don’t have.

In a world where capital moves at the speed of information and users expect their financial lives to work at midnight in Dubai as well as they do at noon in New York, always-on markets aren’t a novelty. They’re the standard. And now TradFi is racing to meet it.

The conversations at Consensus 2026 won’t debate whether 24/7 markets matter. They’ll debate the playbook: settlement rails, custody infrastructure, regulatory guardrails, and who controls the on-ramps.

Stablecoins: from bridge to backbone

Stablecoins were once described as a bridge between crypto and fiat. That framing is now outdated. Stablecoins have become infrastructure – the settlement layer for cross-border payments, the backbone of onchain commerce, and the first credible competitor to SWIFT for moving dollars at scale.

The next frontier is programmable money: protocols like x402 and Tempo’s Machine Payments Protocol are pointing toward a world where value moves as frictionlessly as data – without intermediaries, delays, or borders.

Expect stablecoins and their infrastructure to anchor multiple-stage conversations at the event. Cloudflare Chief Strategy Officer Stephanie Cohen, Robinhood SVP Johann Kerbrat, Ondo President Ian De Bode, and Tether US CEO Bo Hines will be among those shaping the conversation about stablecoins as a global settlement layer.

Everything gets tokenized

Tokenized treasuries. Onchain private credit. Fractional real estate. These sounded like thought experiments three years ago. Today, they are live products with real AUM, with institutions like Franklin Templeton and T. Rowe Price building on public blockchains.

What has changed is the convergence. Stablecoins provide the liquidity layer. Tokenized assets supply the product. Platforms like Coinbase create the access points. The infrastructure that once served only crypto-native users can now serve anyone with a brokerage account, a bank account, or a smartphone.

“Coinbase is now the Everything Exchange where you can trade crypto, stocks, commodities, prediction markets, and derivatives all in a single account,” says Max Branzburg, Coinbase’s head of consumer and business products. “Coinbase is also playing a central role as the trusted bridge that’s bringing the next trillion dollars of real-world assets onchain.”

That’s not a marketing line, it’s a roadmap. And Consensus is where that roadmap gets debated and amplified.

The unlikely onboarding ramp: prediction markets

Crypto’s new killer app may not be the one anyone expected. Prediction markets – platforms that let users trade on the outcomes of elections, economic events, sports results, and essentially anything quantifiable about the future – have quietly become one of the industry’s most powerful onboarding tools.

Kalshi, the CFTC-regulated prediction market leader, has shown that users arrive to take a position on inflation or a geopolitical flashpoint and leave having learned about wallets, tokens, and onchain transactions. The gamification is a gateway. The underlying infrastructure is the same blockchain rails that power DeFi and institutional RWA platforms.

Kalshi’s head of crypto John Wang will join Consensus to lay out his vision for the future of onchain sports betting and prediction markets – a sector that is growing faster than almost anything else in crypto and pulling in a user profile that traditional exchange products never could.

Miami: the right city for this moment

Consensus’ return to Miami is not incidental. The city has transformed into a nexus of finance, technology, and capital formation – a place where Latin American remittance flows, global wealth management, and crypto-native startup culture overlap in ways that feel unique to this moment in history.

“Miami is no longer just a leisure destination – it’s America 2.0,” says Ellie Platis, Solana’s Head of Events, who is hosting Solana Accelerate alongside Consensus. “A convergence point for the future of capital and culture. Its dynamic rise makes it the perfect place to showcase Solana’s role in powering the proliferation of Internet Capital Markets.”

With 20,000 expected attendees spanning crypto builders, Wall Street veterans, Washington insiders, and the next wave of onchain entrepreneurs, Consensus 2026 is less a conference about what’s coming and more a working summit for people who are already building it.

Why this year is different

Crypto has passed through several distinct eras. The ideologues arrived first, then the builders, then the speculators. The current wave is different: it’s the practitioners – asset managers, payment networks, regulators, and corporate treasurers – who are arriving not to explore but to deploy.

The technology has matured to meet them. Settlement is faster. Custody is institutional-grade. Regulation – slowly, fitfully, but unmistakably – is clarifying. The conditions for mainstream adoption are no longer aspirational. They are here.

Consensus 2026 is where that adoption gets a name, a framework, and a direction. The tokenization of everything isn’t coming. It’s already underway. Miami is where the industry decides what it looks like at scale.

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Join 20,000+ industry leaders at Consensus 2026, May 5–7, in Miami. Register now at consensus.coindesk.com

The latest holding pattern for the bill to fully insert the crypto sector into the U.S. financial system was centered on Senator Thom Tillis’ request that bankers get more time to negotiate the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act’s approach on the contentious topic of stablecoin rewards. That may be over.

Tillis told reporters on Wednesday that the work on the Clarity Act — the industry’s top objective in Washington — has “addressed a lot of the concerns” of the banking lobbyists who have been defending the turf of interest-bearing deposits they argued could be threatened by stablecoin yield. The Republican lawmaker said, “I’m going to encourage the chair to move forward with the markup,” according to a Fox Business transcript of the remarks.

That could throw open the chance for a mid-May hearing of the Senate Banking Committee, which needs to advance the legislation before a final version can be hashed out for a vote of the overall Senate. If anything else gets in the way of that timing, it could be fatal for the 2026 Clarity Act, because the remaining Senate schedule has little room for flexibility.

The legislation faces several hurdles before it can hit President Donald Trump’s desk to be signed into law. First is a so-called markup hearing that gives lawmakers a chance to pursue amendments to the language. Tillis said he intends to give stakeholders a chance to see the compromise text on stablecoin yield days before the hearing, and he welcomed bankers to stay in negotiations if there are other points they want to get across.

“There may be a few more that we can get there, if they want to come and work in good faith,” Tillis said.

Crypto insiders have been critical of the banking industry’s apparent reticence to embrace compromises, as has Trump himself, who said over the weekend that he wouldn’t let bankers ruin the Clarity Act. The industry is taking Tillis’ latest remarks as a positive sign for movement.

“There is more momentum than ever for a markup in May,” said Cody Carbone, CEO of the Digital Chamber that advocates for crypto policy in Washington. “We support getting this bill on the committee calendar as soon as possible, and we are hopeful it will move imminently.”

Other sticky provisions remain to work out, potentially most notably a Democrat-driven section banning government officials from personal business interests in crypto — an effort targeted primarily at Trump and his family, who are heavily engaged in the industry. Tillis has reportedly said he agrees that the bill needs such an ethics requirement, though this issue wouldn’t come up in the Banking Committee’s work.

Another potential hangup that crypto advocates are eyeing is the push from Senator Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, that some aspects of the legislation — including legal protections for decentralized finance (DeFi) developers — ought to pass through his committee.

Any additional delay to the bill will jeopardize its chances to get off the ground, with about 11 weeks remaining open in the Senate calendar before the lawmakers fully disperse for midterm election demands. A Senate passage would then land in the hands of the U.S. House of Representatives, which already passed its own version of the Clarity Act last year. Any uprising among House Republicans could add further issues to the bill’s chances, but advocates are so far counting on the House to approve the Senate’s final product.

The House has recently struggled to reach alignment with Senate efforts, such as over the funding of the Department of Homeland Security.

Read More: Crypto’s great hope in Senate’s Clarity Act still has a path to survive tight calendar

Senator Cynthia Lummis told the Bitcoin 2026 conference that the Lummis CLARITY Act warning centers not just on the 2030 timeline but on a structural argument: the current simultaneous alignment between the House, Senate, and White House on crypto legislation is genuinely rare in Washington and will not persist indefinitely if the May markup window is missed.

Lummis CLARITY Act remarks at the Bitcoin 2026 Conference in Las Vegas on April 27 moved beyond the 2030 timeline to make a structural argument about political conditions. Lummis told attendees that the current moment is defined by a rare coincidence: the House has already passed the CLARITY Act 294 to 134, the Senate Agriculture Committee has cleared its version, and the White House under Trump has publicly backed the bill as a national priority. “This kind of support is rare in Washington and may not last long,” Lummis said, framing the political window as the most consequential variable rather than the bill’s content, which she said is “almost 99% sorted out.”

Lummis CLARITY Act Case Rests on Political Alignment, Not Just Timing

The structural argument Lummis is making is distinct from the 2030 deadline warning. It is not only that the next Congress might not prioritize the bill. It is that the specific combination of a crypto-aligned House majority, a Senate Banking Committee with sufficient Republican votes, an SEC chair who has publicly said the agency is ready to implement the legislation, and a White House that has called the bill a national security priority does not assemble automatically and does not hold together indefinitely in an election cycle. A House flip in November, a shift in Senate committee composition, or a change in executive branch priorities could disassemble that alignment and require the industry to start from scratch under a new Congress with different incentive structures. As crypto.news reported, Lummis first issued the public 2030 warning on April 10 with an X post reading “This is our last chance to pass the Clarity Act until at least 2030. We can’t afford to surrender America’s financial future,” but the Bitcoin 2026 appearance adds the political alignment dimension: it is not just about the calendar but about whether this specific configuration of institutional will can be maintained.

What Permanent Legislative Status Would Mean for XRP, Bitcoin, and Ethereum

The permanent legislative outcome Lummis is arguing for would convert the March 17, 2026 joint SEC-CFTC classification of XRP, Bitcoin, and Ethereum as digital commodities from a regulatory determination into binding federal statute. As crypto.news documented, the March joint taxonomy named 16 digital assets as digital commodities, representing approximately 78 to 80% of total crypto market cap. But that taxonomy is an executive action, subject to reversal by a future SEC chair or shift in White House priorities without any Congressional action required. The CLARITY Act would prevent that by writing the commodity classification into law. Standard Chartered has set an $8 XRP target contingent on the bill passing. JPMorgan has called midyear passage a positive catalyst for digital assets broadly. As crypto.news tracked, with the Warsh confirmation now resolved and the Banking Committee’s most pressing competing obligation removed, a May markup is structurally possible but requires Chairman Tim Scott to formally notice the bill for action and release the final text 48 hours before any committee vote.

Why the Political Alignment Argument Is the Strongest Case for Urgency

The political alignment case is analytically more persuasive than the calendar case alone, because it explains why previous deadline misses did not produce the same consequence. In January, the deadline was missed because of stablecoin yield disputes. In April, the deadline was missed because the Warsh confirmation consumed the calendar. In both cases, the underlying conditions were still favorable: the White House still supported the bill, the Senate Republican majority was still intact, and the House text was still alive. If the May window is missed and the midterms change the political configuration, the conditions themselves change, not just the timeline. As crypto.news noted, Mike Novogratz said on a podcast this week that the bill “probably gets done in May,” but added explicitly that the political will behind it depends on the same tri-branch alignment Lummis described. Galaxy Research puts overall passage odds at 50-50 or lower for 2026.

Lummis chairs the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Digital Assets, chairs the BITCOIN Act effort, and has announced she will not seek re-election, making her one of the few senators with no personal electoral incentive to delay action on the bill.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage received about £5 million (around $6.7 million) from crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne before announcing his run for the Clacton seat in 2024, The Guardian reported Wednesday.

The Conservatives have referred him to the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, while Labour has also accused him of breaking House of Commons rules.

Farage confirmed the gift in an interview with the Daily Telegraph, saying it was meant to keep him “safe and secure for the rest of my life” after a milkshake was thrown at him in 2019 and a firebomb attack on his home last year.

Harborne, a Thailand-based businessman with a 12% stake in stablecoin issuer Tether, made the payment in 2024. Farage announced his Clacton candidacy in early June last year and won the seat in July.

A Reform UK spokesman called the payment a “personal unconditional gift” given before Farage was elected and said his decision to stand as an MP was “entirely unrelated.”

The spokesman, the report added, said “We are confident everything has been declared in accordance with the rules.”

The Commons code of conduct requires new MPs to register benefits received in the 12 months before their election, and says any benefit should be registered if there is doubt. Reform says the gift falls under the exemption for purely personal gifts.

The country’s main opposition Conservative Party wrote to Parliamentary Standards Commissioner Daniel Greenberg asking him to examine whether any of the funds were used to support political activity rather than security. Labour chair Anna Turley said Farage “appears to have broken the rules again.”

U.K. crypto donations

Harborne gave Reform £9 million, then worth around $12 million, late last year in the largest single donation to a U.K. political party from a living person on record.

Earlier this month, BitMEX co-founder Ben Delo said in an op-ed he had given Reform £4 million ($5.1 million) since the start of the year.

The U.K. government imposed an immediate moratorium on crypto donations to political parties in March, citing the Rycroft review’s warning that digital assets could be used to channel foreign money into U.K. politics.

The ban covers donations of any size and will be written into the Representation of the People Bill, with criminal penalties for non-compliance.

That same month, Farage invested £215,000 ($286,000) in Stack BTC, a London-listed bitcoin treasury company chaired by former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, taking a 6.31% stake through his investment vehicle Thorn In The Side.

Global payments giant Visa has expanded its stablecoin settlement pilot to include Polygon and four other blockchain networks, signaling continued experimentation with crypto-based payment infrastructure.

The pilot, launched by Visa in 2023, allows partners to settle transactions using stablecoins rather than traditional banking rails. Newly supported networks include Polygon, Base, the Canton Network, Arc and Tempo. They join existing supported chains such as Ethereum, Solana, Stellar and Avalanche.

The expansion comes as the program has reached an annualized settlement run rate of roughly $7 billion, growing about 50% quarter over quarter, according to Visa. Despite that growth, volume remains small compared to the company’s core payments business.

According to Visa, the initiative is designed to evaluate whether stablecoins can offer faster settlement, round-the-clock availability and efficiencies in cross-border payments.

Source: Cointelegraph on X

Visa has been increasing its focus on stablecoin-based settlement. In March, the company expanded its partnership with Bridge, a subsidiary of Stripe, to support a global card program that enables stablecoin-linked payments.

Related: Visa deepens blockchain push with Tempo validator node launch

Stablecoin payments race heats up

The growing focus on stablecoin settlement comes as competitors such as Mastercard step up activity in the sector, including enabling stablecoin-linked card spending in the United States through integrations with wallets like MetaMask.

On Wednesday, payments software provider Modern Treasury said it integrated with Polygon to help businesses move stablecoin payments faster, adding to the growing push into blockchain-based settlement. The San Francisco-based fintech acquired stablecoin and fiat payment platform Beam in October.

In the United States, momentum has also been shaped by the passage of the GENIUS Act, which establishes clearer regulatory standards for payment stablecoins.

Key stablecoin statistics and average cost savings relative to traditional payments. Source: Bessemer Venture Partners

As regulatory clarity improves, both crypto-native companies and fintechs are increasingly competing to build and control the infrastructure underpinning stablecoin payments, particularly the settlement layer that moves funds between institutions. However, broader policy questions, including whether stablecoins can offer yield, are still being debated in a proposed US market structure bill, which has so far stalled.

The total value of stablecoins in circulation has surpassed $320 billion, increasing nearly 150% since early 2024, according to DeFiLlama data.

Related: Polymarket drops USDC.e for USDC-backed token in exchange overhaul

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