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1. Monad joins Visa stablecoin settlement
The Monad Foundation said on Tuesday, November 10, that the Monad blockchain has been added as a network for Visa stablecoin settlement, giving banks and payment firms in the card network's program one more chain on which to settle their obligations with Visa. Visa's annualized stablecoin settlement run rate stood above $25 billion as of September 2026.
Word of the addition came from the foundation, not from the payments company. The foundation's release carries a statement from a Visa executive, but Visa had not put out an announcement of its own when the news was made public. Monad's official account on X described the option as live.
In practical terms, the change concerns the back-office step that follows a card purchase. Once transactions have been authorized and cleared, the institutions on either side of the network, the card issuers and the acquirers, square their positions with Visa. Stablecoin settlement swaps the bank transfer normally used for that step for a transfer of tokens pegged to a currency such as the dollar or the euro, sent over a blockchain. Participants in Visa's program can now choose Monad as the chain that carries those tokens.
Stablecoins are digital tokens designed to hold a fixed value against a reference currency, and they move on blockchains that operate around the clock. That schedule is one reason payment companies have taken an interest in them for settlement, because traditional bank transfers are tied to banking hours and can pause over weekends and public holidays.
Nothing about the arrangement alters what a cardholder sees at the checkout. The shopper still pays with a card and the merchant is still paid in the usual way. What changes is the rail that financial institutions use among themselves and with Visa once the purchase is complete.
2. What the release leaves unanswered
Two details that would show how the new option will be used in practice are missing from the foundation's release. The document does not identify which stablecoins will settle on Monad, and it names no card issuers or acquirers that intend to use the network. Acquirers are the banks and payment companies that process card payments on behalf of merchants, while issuers are the institutions that provide cards to consumers and businesses.
Those gaps are significant because a settlement route depends on the assets and counterparties attached to it. A stablecoin has to be available on the network, and a participating institution has to elect to send its settlement payments that way. With neither a token nor a participant named, the release establishes that the route exists but gives no indication of how much money will move across it.
Visa Chief Executive Ryan McInerney told analysts on the company's October 27 earnings call that Visa supports five settlement stablecoins: USDC, USDG, EURC, PYUSD and SBC. The foundation's statement does not say whether all, some or none of those five will be usable on Monad.
The absence of a parallel statement from Visa adds a further layer of uncertainty. The quote from a Visa executive inside the release indicates that the company took part in the announcement, yet the scope of the integration has so far been described publicly only by the blockchain's own foundation and its social media account.
3. Where Monad sits among Visa's settlement chains
Visa last published a full list of its settlement networks on April 29, when it put the pilot at nine blockchains. Four of them were already part of the program at that point: Avalanche, Ethereum, Solana and Stellar. The other five, Arc, Base, Canton, Polygon and Tempo, were added on that same day.
By the autumn, the count had moved. On the October 27 earnings call, McInerney said Visa supports 10 settlement blockchains, though he did not list them. Neither Visa nor the Monad Foundation has said whether that total of 10 already included Monad, which leaves open whether Tuesday's announcement explains the unnamed tenth network or describes an addition on top of it.
The length of the list reflects the approach Visa has taken to the technology. Instead of standardizing on a single chain, the company has assembled a menu and left the choice to the institutions it settles with. Dan Roesbery, Visa's vice president of global onchain partnerships and go-to-market, said in the foundation's release that adding Monad "expands the options available to our partners." He described the move as another step toward multi-chain settlement infrastructure for stablecoin-enabled payments.
For a blockchain project, a place on that menu is a form of validation from one of the largest names in payments. It is not, however, a guarantee of usage. Each supported network competes with the others for whatever share of settlement activity issuers and acquirers decide to move onchain.
4. What is Monad?
Monad is a Layer 1 blockchain, meaning a base network that processes and records its own transactions, and it is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), the software environment in which Ethereum applications run. The network held its token sale on Coinbase in November 2025, making it a comparatively recent entrant among the chains Visa works with.
EVM compatibility is the main practical argument the foundation makes to payment firms. According to the foundation, issuers and acquirers whose custody, wallet and compliance systems already work with Ethereum can usually connect to Monad without building new systems. For an institution that has already integrated Ethereum-based tooling, adopting another EVM network is closer to an extension of existing work than a fresh project.
The foundation also points to the network's speed. It says Monad handles 10,000 transactions per second, produces a new block every 400 milliseconds and runs on more than 200 independently operated validators. It reports finality in 800 milliseconds. Finality is the point after which a transaction can no longer be reversed, a property that matters in settlement because the receiving party needs certainty that the funds it has been sent are permanently its own.
All of those performance figures are the foundation's own. The release does not include measurements from Visa or from any participating institution, and since no settlement partners have been named, there is no public record yet of how the network performs under payment-related load from the program.
5. Settlement volume passes a $25 billion annual pace
Growth in the program itself forms the backdrop to the announcement. In April, Visa put the pilot's annualized settlement run rate at $7 billion and counted more than 130 stablecoin-linked card programs. The Monad release, citing Visa figures, says the run rate reached $25 billion as of September 2026, roughly 10 times the level of a year earlier, with more than 225 card programs live.
McInerney gave the same numbers on the October 27 call, telling analysts that the run rate "surpassed $25 billion in annualized volume, up 10x year over year." Set against the April figure, the September number is about 3.6 times larger, an increase that took place over roughly five months.
A run rate is a projection, not a record of what has already been settled. It takes the recent pace of activity and extends it across a full year, so a $25 billion run rate describes the speed at which stablecoin settlement was happening in September, not the total processed over the preceding twelve months.
The rise in card programs, from more than 130 to more than 225, indicates that the expansion is not only a matter of existing participants sending larger amounts. More products that link cards to stablecoins are operating, and each of them generates settlement obligations that can be met onchain.
6. Privacy feature is still months away
Part of what the foundation is promoting has not been delivered. The release says Monad's Private Settlement feature will reach Visa's partners "in the coming months." The feature is designed to keep commercially sensitive payment details hidden from the public while still allowing auditors and regulators to see them. It is not live.
Confidentiality is a long-standing obstacle for financial institutions considering public blockchains. On an open network, the amounts, addresses and timing of transfers are generally visible to anyone who looks. For a bank or payment processor, that visibility can expose the size of its flows and the identity of its counterparties to competitors.
Visa has already used privacy as a selling point for other chains in the program. In its April announcement, the company described Canton as "built with configurable privacy for regulated capital markets" and said Tempo focuses on moving stablecoin liquidity privately. Monad's planned feature would place it in the same conversation once it launches.
Keone Hon, co-founder and general manager of the Monad Foundation, framed the issue as the central question for the sector's future. "The next phase will be defined by whether institutions can keep sensitive flows confidential without leaving open networks," he said.
7. What comes next
Several open questions will determine how much the addition matters. Visa has yet to describe the integration in its own words, and its confirmation would settle whether Monad is one of the 10 settlement blockchains McInerney referred to in October.
The stablecoins that will be supported on Monad, and the first issuers or acquirers to settle over it, have also not been disclosed. Until they are, the network's role in the program cannot be measured in volume.
Visa's own reporting offers the clearest way to follow the program's progress. The company has updated its run rate and card program figures in April and again on its October earnings call, and further disclosures of that kind would show whether the pace recorded in September has been sustained.
The Private Settlement feature has no firm launch date beyond the foundation's statement that it will arrive for Visa's partners in the coming months. Its delivery will show whether Monad can offer the confidentiality that Visa has highlighted on Canton and Tempo.