Payments settled in stablecoins, digital tokens designed to hold their value against a reference currency like the dollar, have reached a $20 billion annualized run rate on Visa's network. The pace is more than 15 times what it was a year earlier.
An annualized run rate is the current transaction pace projected across 12 months, not a finalized yearly total. The $20 billion tells you how fast settlement is moving now.
Stablecoins occupy a different space in digital finance than assets like bitcoin. Their value is pegged to a reference currency and designed to stay there. A dollar-pegged stablecoin is meant to be worth one dollar when it arrives. That predictability matters in commercial and institutional settlement, where price swings between initiation and completion would create accounting complications. It is the property that makes stablecoins practical for payment infrastructure, and it explains why a card network like Visa would build rails to handle them.
The growth shows up in two ways. The more than 15 times gain tracks the scale of the annualized run rate against where it was a year ago. Payment volume on the same network rose nearly 200% year over year.