Visa is testing the possibility of paying with stablecoins on the Solana blockchain

Payment giant Visa has launched a pilot project that will allow merchants to use the USDC stablecoin on the Solana network. In 2021, the company began testing USDC on the Ethereum blockchain in partnership with Crypto.com

Solana was chosen due to faster and cheaper transactions compared to the blockchain of the leading altcoin.

The project partners are WorldPay and Nuvei. They will act as recipients of USDC from a Visa account with the stablecoin issuer Circle to interact with merchants.

«The pilot demonstrates how combining USDC with Visa’s innovations is opening up the future of payments, commerce, and financial applications,» said Circle CEO Jeremy Alleyre.

The head of Visa’s cryptocurrency division, Kai Sheffield, told Fortune in an interview that the processing time for transferring funds would remain unchanged.

«At this early stage, we are simply providing the ability to send or receive USDC instead of a bank transfer, but the transfer is not necessarily faster. Over time, I think there is potential to change this,» Sheffield said

As a reminder, Ukraine became the first country in the world where Visa launched a digital authentication program. According to the developers, the Digital Authentication Framework (DAF) program guarantees the security of cardless transactions while remaining easy to use.