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

The payments industry may seem "old," but it remains one of the earliest and most technologically advanced segments of the financial system. While the market is still debating whether cryptocurrencies are assets, the two payment giants—Visa and Mastercard—have reached a consensus on a more fundamental engineering question: Is there a more efficient settlement layer that can be embedded into the existing payment system, rather than requiring a complete overhaul? The answer is stablecoins. Recently, Visa announced the opening of USDC settlement to banks in the US 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 appear cutting-edge, but its logic remains highly restrained. Instead of building its own closed blockchain system, it directly integrates the Solana network and the USDC stablecoin into its settlement backend, offering it as an available option within its existing clearing process. Key Data: In the US, institutions such as Cross River Bank have begun using USDC for settlements through Solana. Visa's disclosed annualized settlement volume exceeds $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, which previously relied on working days, has been compressed into continuous settlement 24/7, significantly reducing the time funds are in transit and liquidity requirements. It's worth noting that Visa hasn't packaged this capability as a "financial paradigm shift" or "disruptive innovation." It repeatedly emphasizes **standardization and productization**—viewing stablecoin settlement as a deployable and replicable foundational capability. This also explains why Visa recently launched its stablecoin advisory service: its goal is not to push banks "towards crypto," but rather to help them understand and access next-generation settlement tools. In this system, stablecoins are not independent financial products, but rather more like foundational modules embedded in the payment network. Mastercard: Building a "Compliance Connection Layer" Unlike Visa's "direct connection to public chains," Mastercard has chosen a more complex path of "alliances and collaborations." Multi-chain cooperation: It hasn't bet on a single path, but rather collaborates with Ripple (XRPL), Gemini, and Middle Eastern institutions. Compliance puzzle: It prefers to build a "pluggable compliance connection layer." Mastercard's self-positioning is very clear: it doesn't attempt to become an extension of any particular 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 connection and adaptation. This model is particularly suitable for complex scenarios with high compliance requirements, such as cross-border payments, B2B settlements, and RWA. The Settlement Layer Battle Points to a $40 Trillion Redistribution While their management paths differ, Visa and Mastercard are highly aligned on a key judgment. What they are truly concerned about is not the growth in the scale 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 technological layer. Once fund flows can be settled peer-to-peer on-chain, the intermediary value of traditional clearing networks will be reassessed. This is precisely why the two major card organizations must intervene early and clarify their own positions. Visa's latest report's mention of "stablecoins potentially reshaping the global $40 trillion credit market" is not simply a narrative of 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 happening outside the public eye. It's not a user-facing frenzy, but a technological migration occurring in the back-end systems: 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.