Visa has added the Monad blockchain to its stablecoin settlement program. Issuers and acquirers that take part can now settle payments over the network, giving them another route outside traditional banking rails.
Monad enters a longer list
Monad joins a roster that already includes Avalanche, Ethereum, Solana, Stellar, Circle’s Arc, Base, Canton, Polygon and Tempo. Visa added Arc, Base, Canton, Polygon and Tempo on April 29, 2026, which brought the total to nine at the time.
The basic idea is not complicated. When a customer taps a Visa card, funds eventually have to move between the card issuer and the merchant’s bank. That back-end step is settlement. Visa’s program lets participants use stablecoins on public or institutional blockchains instead of relying only on legacy systems.
Growth numbers and reach
Visa said its annualized run rate for stablecoin settlement was $7 billion when it announced the April batch of chains. That was up 50% from the previous quarter. By October 2026, the figure had reached a $25 billion annualized run rate. Visa called it a tenfold jump year over year.
The program was running across 10 blockchains in all five of Visa’s geographic regions by then. It supports five stablecoins. More than 225 stablecoin-linked card programs are active in over 50 countries, and transaction volumes on those programs are growing more than 150% year over year.
Monad was not a sudden pick. It appeared in Visa’s on-chain analytics with nearly 1 million stablecoin transactions in August 2026, before the formal addition.
Why Visa keeps adding chains
Visa has described itself as stablecoin agnostic and blockchain agnostic. The company says it is not trying to pick a winning chain or a winning dollar token. On some networks, it goes further. Visa acts as a validator on Tempo and Canton, so it helps run infrastructure rather than just using it.
For Monad, the inclusion is a credibility marker. Being named alongside Ethereum, Solana and Avalanche in a Visa settlement program suggests a major payments company sees the chain as usable for real money movement.
For the wider market, the trend line matters more than any single addition. Visa’s run rate grew from $7 billion to $25 billion in a year, and the number of supported chains keeps rising. Still, settlement volumes remain small compared with Visa’s fiat operations. Adding more chains also brings operational complexity. Stablecoin regulation and network reliability are open questions, and perhaps always will be while the rules keep changing.
