Monad joins a longer list
Visa added Monad to its stablecoin settlement program, giving participating issuers and acquirers another chain for settling card payments. The move puts Monad alongside Avalanche, Ethereum, Solana, Stellar, Circle’s Arc, Base, Canton, Polygon and Tempo. That is a crowded lineup, and it says something about how Visa is approaching the payment rail question.
Monad is the newest chain in the group, but not the first recent addition. Visa added Arc, Base, Canton, Polygon and Tempo on April 29, 2026, taking the total to nine at the time. The roster has kept expanding since then. For Monad, the listing is a credibility signal. Being named next to Ethereum and Solana in a Visa settlement program suggests the chain is being treated as usable for real money movement, not just as an experiment.
What settlement actually means
The concept is less abstract than it sounds. When someone taps a Visa card, money still has to move between the bank that issued the card and the bank serving the merchant. That back-end step is settlement. Traditionally it runs over banking rails. Visa’s program gives issuers and acquirers another option: settle in stablecoins over a public or institutional blockchain instead. It does not replace the card network. It changes one part of the plumbing behind it.
Growth and open questions
Visa’s stablecoin settlement volume has grown fast. When the April batch of chains was announced, the annualized run rate was $7 billion, up 50% quarter over quarter. By October 2026, Visa said the figure had reached a $25 billion annualized run rate, a tenfold jump year over year. The program was then running across 10 blockchains in all five of Visa’s geographic regions and supporting five stablecoins. More than 225 stablecoin-linked card programs are active in over 50 countries, with transaction volumes growing more than 150% year over year.
Visa has described itself as stablecoin agnostic and blockchain agnostic. It is not trying to pick a single winning chain or dollar token. On some networks, including Tempo and Canton, Visa also acts as a validator, which means it helps run infrastructure rather than just using it.
The caveats are still real. Settlement volumes remain small compared with Visa’s fiat operations, and spreading across many chains adds operational work. Stablecoin regulation and network reliability are open questions. Perhaps the larger point is the trend: Visa’s run rate rose from $7 billion to $25 billion in a year, and the number of supported chains keeps climbing. For Monad, that is a useful endorsement. For the market, it is another sign that stablecoin settlement is moving from side project to standard option.
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