Visa Says It Wants to Build the Rails for Lending in ‘Onchain Finance,’ Its New Name for DeFi

Visa built the world’s largest payment network that pushes nearly $16 trillion in payments through its virtual pipes. Now it wants to do the same for lending in the world of decentralized finance (DeFi).

The report, titled Stablecoins Beyond Payments: The Onchain Lending Opportunity, reframes decentralized finance as “onchain finance” – a deliberate rebrand aimed at making decentralized credit sound compatible with institutions in the era of the GENIUS Act – and outlines how banks and private credit funds could plug into it.

Visa envisions institutions acting as liquidity providers to programmable lending protocols, while it supplies the data, compliance, and infrastructure that make participation viable. The payment network believes that its familiar name and trusted rails would entice institutions – with their trillions in capital – to come onboard.

Visa’s whitepaper marks a clear shift in tone from crypto experimentation to institutional infrastructure. The company says the emerging “onchain finance” market has already issued more than $670 billion in stablecoin loans since 2020, with lending activity reaching new highs in mid-2025.

That scale, Visa argues, shows stablecoins have evolved beyond trading tools to become the backbone of automated credit markets that run continuously and settle instantly.

To illustrate the model, the report highlights three examples where stablecoin-based credit is already functioning at scale.

Morpho, a liquidity “meta-layer,” connects institutional wallets and exchanges like Coinbase, Ledger, and Bitpanda, allowing borrowers to post tokenized bitcoin as collateral for USDC loans. Credit Coop, which Visa directly partners with, uses smart contracts to split and redirect merchant receivables.

And lastly, Huma Finance which supports cross-border working-capital loans, automating supplier payments and recycling liquidity to generate double-digit annual yields.

As the report outlines, Visa’s strategy looks a lot like it does for TradFi. It doesn’t plan to issue tokens or directly fund loans. Rather, it’s a technology play without exposure to counterparty lending risk.

Instead, the payment network wants to own the rails: the APIs, analytics, and settlement systems that allow programmable credit to plug into the traditional financial world. It wouldn’t be involved in crypto projects, just facilitate the connections between them and TradFi.

Just as it once turned card payments into a global network, Visa now hopes to do the same for onchain credit, positioning itself as the infrastructure layer of programmable finance.