The world’s biggest fintech and the world’s largest payments network are expanding their stablecoin partnership. Visa and Bridge, a crypto startup acquired by Stripe in 2025, intend to launch stablecoin-backed cards in 100 countries across Europe, Asia, and Africa, the two companies announced on Tuesday. The announcement follows a commitment in April, when the two firms said they would launch in Latin American locales including Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico.
The cards, now live in 18 countries, allow customers to take stablecoin balances they have in crypto wallets and use them to pay for purchases at businesses like delis, clothing stores, or any merchant that accepts Visa. Companies, including the wallet startup Phantom, come to Bridge to create their own branded, stablecoin-backed debit cards, and Visa acts as the card’s payments network.
“Anyone who’s building a stablecoin wallet needs to have a card connected to it if they want consumers and businesses to be able to have that value held in the wallet spent in the real world,” Cuy Sheffield, Visa’s head of crypto, told Fortune.
Friends or foes?
Some proponents of stablecoins, or cryptocurrencies pegged to real-world assets like the U.S. dollar, say they threaten dominant companies like Visa and Mastercard. Instead of relying on decades-old networks, consumers can send and receive dollars instantly on blockchains. That perception has soured some investors on credit card companies. The day after the Senate passed the Genius Act, a bill that regulates stablecoins, the stocks of the two dominant card giants fell.
But Bridge’s expanding tie-up with Visa underscores how the disruption narrative may be overstated, and how fintechs are becoming more integrated with legacy payment companies. Another stablecoin startup, Rain, which recently raised $250 million at nearly a $2 billion valuation, also issues stablecoin-linked cards in partnership with Visa.
“For consumers buying things individually, online, and in stores, over the last 40 years, we’ve built this very robust network of merchants and acceptance,” Zach Abrams, cofounder and CEO of Bridge, told Fortune. “That network is going to be really valuable in a world with stablecoins and in a world without stablecoins.”
One area where Abrams does see stablecoins potentially supplanting card networks is through agentic commerce, a term that describes a yet-to-be-realized arena in which AI agents make purchases on behalf of humans. “There is this whole new world that may be created when agents want to transact and acquire things with an incrementality and a velocity that is very unique from the way the card networks were built,” he said.
In addition to expanding its work with Visa, Bridge will participate in an ongoing pilot from the payments network giant that explores the feasibility of settling charges with stablecoins on blockchains, instead of traditional bank transfers. Participants in the pilot already include the fintechs Worldpay and Nuvei. “We think if we can move billions of dollars on chain, we can move trillions of dollars on chain,” said Sheffield, the Visa executive.
