The digital payments company has raised its stablecoin settlement capabilities with Circle’s USDC stablecoin to the Solana blockchain, designed to offer high-speed performance

Visa is going deeper into crypto to increase the speed of cross-border payment transactions.

The San Francisco-based digital payments company has raised its stablecoin settlement capabilities with Circle’s USDC stablecoin to the Solana blockchain, designed to offer high-speed performance, the company said in a statement Tuesday.

The payments firm said it is one of the first leading financial institutions to use the Solana network at scale for settlements.

Solana is around 2% higher on the news, while bitcoin and the wider market have slipped.

Visa also has started pilot programs with merchant acquirers Worldpay and Nuvei, which process debit and credit card payments for businesses globally, as per the statement. Their clients now may opt for USDC stablecoin settlement rather than receiving fiat currencies.

The payments firm first began testing USDC for treasury operations in 2021. The firm ran a pilot program with crypto exchange Crypto.com, using the Ethereum blockchain for settling cross-border payments made with Crypto.com Visa cards.

By leveraging stablecoins such as USDC and global blockchain networks such as Solana and Ethereum, we are helping to improve the speed of cross-border settlement and providing a modern option for our clients to easily send or receive funds from Visa’s treasury, Cuy Sheffield, head of crypto at Visa, said in a statement.

The development is another benchmark for traditional financial (TradFi) institutions leveraging blockchain technology. The stablecoin market can potentially grow to $2.8 trillion in the next five years as global financial and consumer platforms tap the tokens on public blockchains to power value exchange on their platforms, said research firm Bernstein.

Stablecoins are a subset of crypto currencies with prices pegged to an external asset, predominantly to the U.S. dollar, and growingly used for remittances and savings vehicles in developing regions.