In the past two days, a meme coin called PAYAI, which integrates ElizaOS, libp2p, and IPFS into an AI agent protocol, surged from zero to a $10 million market cap on Solana, currently holding steady at around $3 million, attracting market attention. However, what brought it back to life was not PayAI's technology or product but a shoutout from Visa's Head of Crypto Cuy Sheffield on the X platform.

Back in August last year, Visa was involved in an investment in an AI agent project called Payman, advocating for using on-chain agent economics to have AI pay fees to human "employers" to complete marketing tasks. Since then, Visa has shown interest in AI+Crypto, not just as a curiosity but as a strategic decision after in-depth research. This also provides important context for understanding Visa's advancement in on-chain settlement systems, stablecoin deployment paths, and systematic layout for the next-generation payment network.

With significant progress in the US Stablecoin Act today, Visa is no longer just an intermediary for traditional payments; it is now attempting to build a new settlement network architecture around stablecoins. By April 2025, this direction was further emphasized as Visa officially joined the Global Dollar Network (USDG) stablecoin alliance led by Paxos, becoming the first traditional financial institution to participate in building a decentralized global settlement system.

Visa is transitioning the financial intermediary model it has dominated for decades to the blockchain. In the future crypto infrastructure, it aims not to be the next SWIFT but to be the first "on-chain Visa."

From Edge Product Manager to Visa Crypto Lead

Cuy Sheffield's career path is challenging to define using a traditional trajectory. Growing up in a rural town in Ohio, basketball was his early way to build confidence and seek identity. During college, he chose to study at Pomona College in California, gradually developing a strong interest in entrepreneurship and technology. After graduation, he joined a startup called TrialPay, focusing on the mobile app advertising ecosystem. Through establishing genuine relationships with clients, he unexpectedly developed a passion for sales, laying the foundation for his later transition.

In 2015, TrialPay was acquired by Visa, and Sheffield joined Visa as a product manager, then working in the company's internal strategic partnership department, mainly responsible for engaging with early-stage tech startups. It was during this time that he began paying attention to early signs of the crypto industry and tried to understand the potential systemic opportunities within it.

In 2018, the global user base of cryptocurrency surpassed 40 million for the first time, and Visa established the "Crypto Innovation Exploration" initiative for the first time. Taking this opportunity, Sheffield proposed the formation of an internal crypto team, with the goal not being to invest in crypto assets, but to serve this group of users who were overlooked by the traditional payment networks. His logic was straightforward: Emerging wallets and exchanges such as Coinbase, Binance, and MetaMask are attracting tens of millions of young users, but they can hardly complete payments within the Visa system — this is a structural user gap that Visa faces, as well as an opportunity for a fundamental technology update.

He convinced the management and skeptics alike. Starting in 2019, he officially assumed the role of Head of Visa Crypto, embarking on a cooperation journey with companies like Anchorage and Coinbase. His LinkedIn profile reads: "Committed to bringing Visa into the Web3 era." He himself is gradually being seen by the industry as a key translator between the traditional financial world and on-chain systems.

Sheffield publicly stated that he is passionate about the crypto world, and has long been actively learning and engaging on Twitter to understand community language and technical boundaries. He also mentioned that his "superpower" is the ability to translate complex concepts into easily understandable language, and has always strived to become one of the best at explaining the crypto world to the public. This explanatory power and personal involvement have gradually set him apart within Visa, making him a driver and advocate of this systemic transformation.

Visa's "Crypto Lab"

Visa has always been known for its stability and is not good at nor inclined to "radical narratives." The company's shift towards crypto technology is not a sudden strategic leap but a gradual systemic evolution process. Under the leadership of Cuy Sheffield, Visa has divided its on-chain strategy into multiple stages, maintaining a balance between risk and opportunity from initial technical awareness to subsequent business restructuring.

The first stage roughly began in 2019. During this period, Visa's primary goal was not to integrate blockchain technology but to establish a basic understanding of the emerging crypto ecosystem. The company successively invested in custody service providers like Anchorage to ensure they could access on-chain assets in a compliant manner, while collaborating with Coinbase, Crypto.com, and other exchanges to issue crypto Visa cards, tentatively exploring the payment paths and consumption behaviors of crypto users.

In 2021, Visa released the Crypto API, providing banking institutions with an interface tool to access stablecoin settlement. The essence of this move was not to directly enter the on-chain clearing market but to observe how cryptocurrencies impact its own payment model through "embedded technology." Sheffield once likened this stage to a reenactment of the "e-commerce pressuring the credit card system" — crypto is not Visa's enemy of disruption but rather forces it to update the external variables of its underlying logic.

Fast forward to 2022, compared to the previous phase of technical experimentation, during this period, Visa's strategic focus notably shifted towards building a settlement path centered around stablecoins.

First, a partnership was established with Circle, piloting the deployment of USDC as a settlement medium on mainstream chains such as Ethereum and Polygon. At the same time, Visa no longer views stablecoins as speculative assets or peripheral payments but formally positions them as a "settlement tool for the digital age." In 2023, Visa will expand the pilot to Solana, showcasing a real-time settlement process for cross-border transactions using USDC at a developer conference, with speeds significantly outperforming traditional cross-border clearing systems.

In addition to stablecoins, Visa has also begun exploring new scenarios such as NFT payments, DAO participation mechanisms, and on-chain gas fee credit card auto-settlement, attempting to transform itself from a payment network operator into a system service provider within the on-chain ecosystem.

The third phase gradually unfolds from 2024, with a strategic shift from technical deployment towards the global settlement architecture's restructuring.

Visa accelerates access to multiple public chain networks such as Solana, Avalanche, Polygon, and collaborates with traditional and emerging payment service providers like Worldpay, Nuvei, and Stripe, driving the adoption of on-chain payments in traditional merchant channels.

In 2024, Visa introduced Crypto Advisory services, offering banks comprehensive integration solutions covering crypto custody, wallet systems, and stablecoin circulation, formally incorporating crypto businesses into enterprise financial infrastructure.

Entering 2025, Visa's crypto strategy begins to move into a substantive implementation phase, with a series of key partnerships and product launches demonstrating its transformation from experimental exploration to systematic deployment.

In April of this year, reports indicated that Visa joined the USDG stablecoin alliance led by Paxos, collaborating with new financial institutions like Robinhood, Kraken, and Galaxy Digital to build a non-bank-led global settlement network. In this alliance, Visa's role is no longer that of a traditional payment intermediary but rather a crucial "backbone router" between on-chain transaction flow and fund settlement pathways.

Subsequently, one of the most iconic developments was Visa's partnership with the Middle Eastern fintech platform Rain to fully tokenize Visa card receivables into USDC, achieving on-chain real-time settlement. This means that traditional credit card operations have, for the first time, broken free from the interbank clearing process, becoming a "native on-chain payment tool." Its fund settlement efficiency and transparency have significantly improved, also laying the foundation for Visa to build a 24/7 global settlement network.

Meanwhile, Visa also launched a stablecoin payment card program in the Latin American market, partnering with Bridge to introduce USDC-tied Visa cards in six hyperinflationary countries such as Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia. These cards directly transact from on-chain balances and provide users with an inflation-resistant payment option amid severe local currency fluctuations, also helping Visa expand into an "intermediary-free payment scenario" without requiring local bank support.

On the enterprise side, Visa further advanced the "tokenization of bank assets" and introduced the Visa Tokenized Asset Platform (VTAP). This platform offers bank customers a one-stop service from stablecoin minting, custody to destruction, supporting them in deploying their proprietary settlement mechanisms into blockchain systems. Several banks, including BBVA, have participated in this initiative, aiming to issue and circulate proprietary stablecoins through VTAP, forming a complete loop with the Visa payment network.

Behind these deployments is a change in the global fund flow structure. Bitwise data shows that in 2024, the total global stablecoin transaction volume exceeded Visa's traditional payment processing scale for the first time.

Stablecoins have risen from the periphery to become a mainstream settlement medium, making it impossible for Visa to maintain its industry leadership through traditional means. Instead, Visa must redefine its role in the global payment network through an on-chain approach. This reality has prompted Visa to shift its crypto strategy from peripheral experiments to core business restructuring, signaling the global settlement system is entering a new era dominated by stablecoins.

Exploring Crypto, Passive Defense, or Proactive Transformation?

At a time when the global payment system is still in the early stages of transformation, Visa's transformation is not a one-time radical disruption but a well-thought-out role reconstruction. Fundamentally, Visa has traditionally played the role of an interbank credit intermediary: leveraging its settlement network, dispute resolution mechanism, and credit endorsement model to provide efficient and secure payment channels for hundreds of millions of users and merchants worldwide.

This system was irreplaceable in the Web2 era. However, as we enter the on-chain world and stablecoins enable peer-to-peer transfers with around-the-clock settlement, this trust structure based on "intermediaries" is being replaced by the technology itself. The advantages of traditional processes are gradually being weakened, and the value of intermediaries is being reassessed.

Visa's chosen path is not resistance but proactive integration. Under the leadership of Cuy Sheffield, the company is gradually redefining itself as an "on-chain credit attester" and a "standard setter for payment protocols," rather than just an extension of traditional finance.

By partnering with custody service providers like Anchorage and Fireblocks, Visa ensures its ability to deploy technology at the on-chain node level. At the same time, Visa is exploring the inclusion of CBDCs, NFTs, DAOs, and other new asset types in verifiable payment pathways, providing them with Visa-level access standards and risk management support. On the user side, Visa is attempting to integrate stablecoins into its loyalty program, designing a reward mechanism based on on-chain interactions to make on-chain identities and credit usable assets in the real world.

This restructuring is not limited to mature markets such as Europe and the United States. In regions with weak financial infrastructure like Latin America and Africa, Visa is taking a more lightweight approach, landing bypassing the banking system to provide on-chain settlement services directly to wallet providers and merchants. This is a redefinition of the underlying structure of the "global credit infrastructure": no longer based on bank accounts but on on-chain assets, identities, and settlement pathways. In the European and American markets, Visa is assisting traditional banks in entering the stablecoin settlement track by launching the VTAP platform and Crypto API, attempting to build a composite financial network composed of banks, merchants, and on-chain assets.

Behind all this is Visa's systematic promotion of a new credit architecture: not controlling user assets, not storing on-chain data, but building a global "trusted settlement path." This is not a blind pursuit of the crypto narrative or a complete abandonment of the existing system but a refreshed understanding of its role. Visa is neither SWIFT nor does it intend to become Coinbase. What it is shaping is a "blockchain backbone service provider" positioned between the two, with organizational and technological adaptability.

Visa's uniqueness lies not in its ability to be crypto-compatible but in its attempt to build a new payment rail with stablecoins at its core. It does not provide wallets, does not custody user assets, but among its 15 million merchants and 14,500 institutions worldwide, it continues to play the role of an "on-chain credit confirmer." By coordinating the circulation path between fiat and stablecoins, Visa has effectively become a decentralized clearing center.

As we enter the year 2025, Visa's stablecoin strategy is no longer a question of whether to participate, but a question of "how to lead." Driven by Cuy Sheffield, it has been a five-year-long, institutionally aligned systemic engineering effort—it is not about making Visa a crypto-native company, but about making Visa the orchestrator of the on-chain financial order and a standard setter.

Stablecoins are not a challenge to Visa, but a direction for Visa's self-evolution. And Cuy Sheffield plays the role of an institutional architect in this restructuring. He is not enthusiastic about riding the speculative wave, nor has he ever shouted slogans about some "revolutionary technology." What he is driving is a path of renewal from within the financial system, starting from institutions and processes. He knows well that Visa cannot become a crypto-native company, but it can become one of the most organized non-crypto institutions in the on-chain ecosystem.

Visa's future has never been about "whether it will be replaced by crypto," but about "how to become a part of the crypto world." The path chosen by this payment giant is neither conservative nor reckless—it is steadily building a brand-new financial infrastructure within the structure of time. And this future has silently arrived.

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