Let's talk about Visa's support for stablecoin settlement. Firstly, many people may not fully understand how Visa (or Mastercard) operates. Visa itself does not issue cards or lend money to merchants. It is a pure intermediary responsible for information processing and rule making. Taking the United States as an example, Visa's operational process is mainly divided into three stages: Phase 1: Authorization (Can I spend money?) When the cardholder swipes the card at the merchant, the merchant's acquiring bank sends the transaction information to VisaNet. VisaNet identifies card numbers and routes requests to the issuing bank. The issuing bank checks the account balance or limit and responds with "approve" or "reject". Visa returns the results to the acquiring bank and then to the merchant. Phase 2: Liquidation Usually at night or at the end of a trading batch. The acquiring bank packages and sends all transaction data for that day to VisaNet. VisaNet performs offset calculation. It calculates the net position of each bank. For example, the customer of issuing bank A spent a total of $100 million today, while the merchant of issuing bank A (if it is also an acquiring bank) should have received $20 million today. So the net obligation of issuing bank A is to pay $80 million. Phase Three: Settlement (Transfer of Funds) Based on the net amount calculated through settlement, Visa instructs the settlement bank to transfer funds between the accounts of the issuing bank and the acquiring bank. Previously, we used to use channels such as wire transfers. ---Dividing line--- And this time Visa announced its support for USDC, not to say that retail investors can spend stablecoins through Visa, but that issuing banks and merchants can use stablecoins to repay accounts in the third stage settlement. In the past, Visa's banks owed payments to Visa merchants, which could only be repaid through traditional bank transfers (in US dollars and fiat currency). But now, they can directly transfer USDC from their cryptocurrency wallet to Visa to settle this account. Coincidentally, Mastercard also announced yesterday that it supports stablecoin settlement in the Middle East region. And Visa is in the United States this time, which shows that as I predicted before, after the passing of the stablecoin genius bill in the United States, the entire industry is accelerating rapidly. However, it should be noted that Visa refers to "Select partners" here. The implication is that this is not a feature open to all US banks, probably mainly aimed at financial institutions or enterprises related to encryption. Overall, this is still a bit impressive, indicating that the ideological stamp of stablecoin=real money as an anchor is deepening. The more people accept that 'stablecoins=real money', the more real stablecoins=real money, and the tighter the anchor.