Visa is hunting a stablecoin settlement and OTC partner after losing BVNK to Mastercard. The mandate requires exchange licences in four jurisdictions simultaneously. Coinbase is the only larg
Visa has issued a request for product seeking a firm that can swap and settle multiple stablecoins, and the document reviewed by CoinDesk carries one condition that quietly disqualifies most of the crypto industry: the winner must hold cryptocurrency exchange licences in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Singapore at the same time. The role replaces BVNK, the stablecoin payments firm Mastercard agreed to buy for up to $1.8 billion in a deal that closed on August 3, 2026, handing Visa’s own settlement provider to its closest competitor. Visa declined to comment.
Moving stablecoins is easy. Moving them legally across these four markets is not, because each one classifies the activity differently. Washington treats it as money transmission, split between federal registration and state-by-state licensing. London routes it through electronic money rules. Ottawa pushes it into securities law via provincial regulators. Singapore handles it as payment services licensing under the central bank.
Firms normally solve this by stitching together regional partners. Visa explicitly does not want that, and the reason is operational rather than ideological: every extra counterparty means another contract, another compliance review and another reconciliation trail for what is nominally a single settlement leg that has to close in minutes.
WHO CLEARS THE FOUR-MARKET BAR Coinbase 4 / 4 · CLEARS THE BAR US: FinCEN MSB + state MTLs UK: FCA-authorised EMI Canada: CSA Restricted Dealer Singapore: MAS major payment institution Circle 3 / 4 · CANADA MISSING US: money transmitter, NYSE-listed UK: EMI licence Canada: no exchange or OTC dealer status Singapore: MAS MPI licence Paxos 2 / 4 · UK AND CANADA MISSING US: NYDFS trust charter UK: no comprehensive FCA registration Canada: no Restricted Dealer status Singapore: MAS MPI licence Kraken 3 / 4 · SINGAPORE MISSING US: FinCEN registered UK: FCA EMI Canada: FINTRAC MSB Singapore: no MPI licenceCompiled from public regulator registers and company disclosures. Visa has not published a shortlist; the candidate assessment is ETHNews analysis based on current licence status.
Coinbase Prime already runs institutional OTC flow at the size Visa needs, and the Canadian registration is the piece rivals lack, won through a pre-registration process that took most foreign applicants well over a year. Singapore, the other scarce permission, is in hand.
Then comes the awkward part. Open Standard, the consortium behind Open USD, counts Visa, BlackRock, Alphabet and Coinbase among its backers. Visa would be hiring a consortium peer to settle the consortium’s own token, handing that peer visibility into cross-border flows while competing with it elsewhere. Procurement teams have signed stranger deals. They have also killed deals for less.
Circle co-launched Visa’s first USDC settlement pilots and remains the issuer institutional desks reach for by default. It also issues stablecoins rather than operating a licensed exchange or OTC broker-dealer in Canada, and the RFP asks for a counterparty that can quote and swap tokens competing directly with USDC. Open USD’s design strips minting and redemption fees and routes reserve income toward distributors, a model that already pressures Circle’s core economics. Asking it to run neutral swap rails across that token set is a difficult commercial conversation before the licensing file is even opened.
Circle could bolt on a Canadian broker. That fixes the map and breaks the single-partner mandate.
Paxos built backend rails for PayPal, Mercado Libre and Interactive Brokers, and its NYDFS trust charter plus Singapore licence are genuinely strong. Britain and Canada are empty. Closing both means an acquisition or a multi-year application cycle, and Visa lost its provider this month. Kraken fails at the other end, compliant across the US, UK and Canada with a deep OTC desk but no Singapore licence, and Singapore is the Asian settlement hub for the entire corridor rather than a box a payments network waives for a favoured bidder.
Visa is not starting from zero. Its existing Zero Hash arrangement supports stablecoin payouts, though reporting indicates it does not cover every licensed market named in the request, which suggests an interim architecture already running underneath the search. That lowers the pressure to sign badly and raises the odds Visa eventually splits the mandate by function: payouts through one provider, OTC swaps and settlement through another.
The real clock is product, not procurement. Visa launched its Stablecoin Platform in July 2026 with Open USD as the first supported token, and Open USD is expected to go live later this year under Zach Abrams, co-founder of the Stripe-owned Bridge. Settlement has to be contracted, integrated and tested before that launch.
Three things shift if Visa holds the four-market line. Licensing stops being overhead and becomes the product, meaning a firm with average technology and four regulators behind it outbids a firm with excellent technology and one. Consolidation gets a new driver, with acquisitions increasingly aimed at licences dressed as technology, particularly Canadian restricted dealers and Singaporean MPI holders. And issuers lose leverage to settlers, because whoever sits between Visa and every supported token sees the flow and prices the swaps.
The stablecoin market sits near $287 billion in value outstanding, a level it has hovered around since supply growth flattened earlier this year. Worth watching over the next quarter: Anchorage Digital and Zodia Custody. Neither is a natural OTC counterparty today, but both hold bank-grade charters in the jurisdictions where the frontrunners are thinnest, and a mandate written this narrowly tends to surface bidders nobody had on the board.
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