Visa Quietly Issues RFP for a New Stablecoin Settlement Partner After Mastercard Closed BVNK, Eyeing Open USD and Multi-Region Coverage

Visa is circulating a request-for-proposal to onboard a new stablecoin settlement partner, according to documents seen by CoinDesk and published August 18, after Mastercard closed its acquisition of BVNK earlier this year. The RFP targets a partner with multi-region licensing — specifically in the U.S., Canada, the UK, and Singapore — and the capacity to swap and support multiple stablecoins including the new Open USD consortium token. On the same day, Korea Payment Networks announced it had completed a proof-of-concept for USDC payments, and Visa confirmed that the OUSD token will serve as the initial supported asset on its newly launched Visa Stablecoin Platform.

What the Visa RFP Actually Wants

Per CoinDesk's report, the Visa RFP describes the need for 「the ability to swap and support a range of stablecoins,」 plus settlement capacity for the newly introduced Open USD stablecoin project, which is fronted by Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, and a consortium of more than 140 firms. The need for a stablecoin partner licensed in all major markets has narrowed the universe of potential counterparties, Visa said; the payments giant is looking at one settlement partner and one OTC partner in particular, both with crypto-exchange licenses in the four named jurisdictions. The previous partner — BVNK — is now part of Mastercard, which is no longer in a position to serve Visa as a neutral third party.

The Open USD Context

Open USD (OUSD), governed by the new Open Standard entity led by founding CEO Zach Abrams (cofounder of Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure firm Stripe acquired for $1.1 billion in 2024), was unveiled in June with more than 140 partner companies including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, BlackRock, Coinbase, Google, and Shopify. The consortium model lets partner businesses mint and redeem OUSD with no fees and no volume caps, and the partner keeps nearly all the earnings generated by the reserves backing the token — a structural break from the current issuer-captures-the-yield model used by Tether and Circle. The token is expected to launch later this year, beginning natively on Solana before expanding to other networks.

Why This Matters for the Stablecoin Race

The race is now structurally different. The global USD stablecoin market stands at approximately $310 billion in market capitalization with Tether and Circle dominant, but the supply of stablecoins in circulation is down $10 billion from its May 2026 peak of $320 billion — likely indicating a migration to yield-bearing tokenized dollars like Circle's USYC, Franklin Templeton's Benji, and BlackRock's BUIDL. BNY analysts project the stablecoin category could reach $1.5 trillion in circulation by 2030. At the same time, major U.S. banks have disclosed their own tokenized deposit network through The Clearing House, and a circle of payments incumbents — Visa, Mastercard, Stripe — are simultaneously launching their own stablecoin rails and on-boarding new settlement partners. The cost of being a non-participant in 2027's tokenized-dollar network is now clearly negative.

Korea in Parallel

Outside the Visa-Mastercard consortium contest, Korea Payment Networks (KPN), a subsidiary of Korea Credit Data, said on August 18 it had completed registration with the Financial Supervisory Service in late July as a prepaid electronic payment instrument issuer and manager, and had built a proof-of-concept for USDC payments through its payment-gateway checkout. KPN is in talks with large franchises, retailers, and public institutions for prepaid service integration. 「We will sequentially pursue partnerships with large franchises, retailers and public institutions we are in talks with to expand prepaid services into a main business,」 CEO Seo-jin Shin said. The combined signal is that stablecoin rails are no longer a U.S.-only story — they are being built into the payment stacks of major Asian acquirers in parallel with the U.S. consortia.