Visa Hits $7B Stablecoin Settlement, Stripe Opens Accounts in 100+ Countries, and Fairblock Tackles Transaction Privacy

It is important to note, however, that the $7 billion figure has limits. Visa described the number as an annualized run rate for a pilot program and did not break it down by blockchain, stablecoin, partner, or geography . That means the headline figure reflects current velocity extrapolated forward, not a trailing twelve-month total, and the exact mix of live production versus test volume is unknown.

The expansion builds on Visa's late-2025 move to bring USDC settlement to U.S. institutions through partners like Cross River Bank and Lead Bank on the Solana blockchain . With the multichain expansion now covering over 130 card programs in more than 50 countries, Visa is methodically creating a settlement layer that its partners can use regardless of their preferred blockchain .

Stripe's Two-Pronged Strategy: E-Commerce Checkout and Stablecoin Banking

Stripe's mid-2026 stablecoin infrastructure breaks into two distinct but complementary pillars: making stablecoins usable for everyday e-commerce payments and turning them into a global business banking rail.

Shopify Integration Brings USDC to Millions of Merchants

In June 2025, Stripe deepened its partnership with Shopify and Coinbase to let merchants across 34 countries accept USDC, the dollar-pegged stablecoin issued by Circle, on the Base network . The integration was designed to be invisible from a technical standpoint. Merchants can use their existing checkout flows—Shopify Payments, guest checkout, and Shop Pay—without new gateways or additional integrations .

For customers, the experience means paying with any of hundreds of supported crypto wallets. For merchants, Stripe automatically converts incoming USDC to local currency by default, eliminating foreign exchange headaches. Merchants who prefer to hold the stablecoin can claim USDC directly into their own wallet instead .

By February 2026, the integration had moved from early access to a fully operational component of Shopify's commerce infrastructure, transforming what stablecoin acceptance looks like at e-commerce scale .

Stripe Treasury Adds Stablecoin Balances in 100+ Countries

The larger strategic news came at Stripe's Sessions 2026 event, also on April 29. Stripe relaunched its Treasury product with native stablecoin support, allowing businesses in more than 100 countries to hold U.S. dollar-denominated stablecoin balances directly inside their Stripe accounts . Stripe's official documentation, current as of late May 2026, confirms that stablecoins are supported in financial accounts in "more than 100 countries" .

The product supports Circle's USDC and, following Stripe's earlier $1.1 billion acquisition of stablecoin orchestration firm Bridge, the USDB stablecoin . Businesses can send, receive, and hold these stablecoin balances much like a traditional fiat bank account, but with the ability to move funds across borders instantly using crypto rails .

Stripe also announced that Treasury balances will soon be backed by noncustodial wallets from Privy, enabling businesses in more than 150 markets to instantly move money across borders . The expanded global payouts preview extends stablecoin send capabilities to 160 countries .

This is a deliberate push into what Stripe calls "economic infrastructure": giving businesses—especially those in countries with volatile local currencies or limited banking access—a way to operate entirely in U.S. dollars using stablecoin rails . The Treasury move builds on the initial stablecoin financial accounts Stripe launched in May 2025 in 101 countries, which itself came just three months after closing the Bridge acquisition .

The Privacy Gap: Why On-Chain Transparency Is a Problem

All of this growth surfaces an uncomfortable truth about the blockchains these payment giants are using: they are radically transparent. On public networks like Ethereum, Solana, or Base, transaction amounts, sender and receiver addresses, and balances are visible to anyone with a block explorer .

For consumer payments and business-to-business settlement at the scale Visa and Stripe are pursuing, this visibility raises concrete problems. Competitors could monitor a merchant's revenue flows in real time. Business counterparties could reverse-engineer supply-chain payments. Front-running bots could extract value by seeing transactions before they finalize . In short, the financial privacy that traditional banking and card networks provide by default is absent on most blockchain rails.

Fairblock's Encryption Infrastructure: A Privacy Layer for Mainstream Payments

Fairblock, a cryptographic infrastructure project, has been building solutions aimed directly at this gap. Its technology allows users to encrypt transactions before they are submitted to a blockchain, then set conditions under which they are decrypted and executed—for example, after a certain block number or once a specific on-chain event occurs .

The approach uses a combination of identity-based encryption (IBE), witness encryption (WE), and eventually fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), letting developers program confidentiality into applications without sacrificing the composability that makes blockchains useful . In its current V1 testnet implementation (called FairyRing), Fairblock uses threshold condition ID-based encryption (TIBE) for pre-execution confidentiality .

In March 2026, Fairblock partnered with Noble, a Cosmos-based asset issuance chain, to bring confidential stablecoin transfers, balances, and selective disclosure to Noble's EVM AppLayer . The partnership specifically targets the kind of stablecoin payment and settlement flows that Visa and Stripe are scaling, giving developers a way to build privacy-preserving compliance tools—such as revealing transaction details only to designated auditors or regulators—on top of the fast execution layer Noble provides .

Fairblock's broader roadmap extends beyond any single chain. The project is building encryption primitives that can be embedded as precompiles into various blockchain execution environments, making on-chain confidentiality available across major ecosystems . The long-term bet is that as stablecoin payment volumes grow, the demand for programmable privacy will expand from crypto-native DeFi applications to every business that moves money on-chain. For the payments industry, that may prove to be the missing piece that turns pilot programs into permanent infrastructure.