BitcoinBTC, ethereum and other major cryptocurrencies are trading sideways despite a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) insider priming the market for a $15 trillion earthquake.
The bitcoin price has lost most of its summer gains in recent weeks, dragging down the price of other top ten coins ethereum, BNBBNB, XRPXRP, cardano, dogecoin, solana, tron and toncoin, even as China issues a game-changing update.
Now, payments giant VisaV has said it will ramp up its use of Circle’s USDC stablecoin on its network, potentially opening the door to future bitcoin and crypto expansion.
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Visa will increase its experiments using Circle’s USDCUSDC, the second-largest stablecoin by market capitalization after tether, to improve the speed of cross-border payments and will begin sending the U.S. dollar-pegged USDC to select merchants via the solana blockchain in a newly announced pilot.
“Expanding the pilot exemplifies how pairing USDC with Visa’s innovation opens up the future of payments, commerce, and financial applications,” Circle chief executive Jeremy Allaire said in a statement.
“In this early stage, we’re really just giving the option to send or receive USDC instead of a bank wire, but we’re not sending money out faster or receiving money in faster necessarily,” Cuy Sheffield, Visa’s head of crypto, told Fortune. “Over time, I think that there’s potential to start doing that.”
Sheffield wrote in a blog post that Visa sees “significant potential for blockchain networks,” adding: “Blockchains today share some parallels with the early internet—particularly more than their fair share of skeptics, hecklers, and critics.”
Despite the announcement emphasizing the early stage, experimental nature of the pilot, many in the crypto community were quick to cheer the news. “Writing on the wall, stables will become defacto interbank settlement solution via card networks. Even my non-crypto fintech friends are fired up about this,” crypto venture capitalist Nic Carter posted to X (Twitter), adding this is “a huge deal.”
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The news follows the launch of PayPal’sPYPL PYUSD ethereum-based stablecoin, while Bernstein analysts have predicted the stablecoin market could potentially grow to $2.8 trillion in the next five years as global financial and consumer platforms begin to use public blockchains to power value exchange on their platforms.
Last month, major U.S. crypto exchange Coinbase acquired an equity stake Circle and shut down their jointly managed Centre Consortium, which had operated USDC, with Circle taking full control over USDC issuance and governance. USDC is slated to launch of six new blockchains between September and October, bringing the multi-chain access of USDC up to 15.
Alongside Visa’s announcement, The Block has published data that showed solana users have fallen to their lowest level in more than two years in the aftermath of the solana-linked FTX bankruptcy and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) branding solana’s sol an unregistered security.
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