In the past two days, Solanas AI proxy protocol meme coin PAYAI, which combines ElizaOS, lib p2p and IPFS, has risen from zero to a market value of $10 million, and currently remains at around $3 million, attracting market attention. However, it was not PayAIs technology or products that brought it back to life, but the attention of Cuy Sheffield, head of Visas crypto department, on the X platform.
Last August, Visa participated in the investment of Payman, an AI agent project, advocating that AI pay human employers to complete marketing tasks through the on-chain agent economy. Since then, Visa has shown its interest in AI+Crypto, not just curiosity, but a strategic judgment after in-depth research. This also provides important context for understanding Visas on-chain clearing system, stablecoin deployment path, and systematic layout of the next-generation payment network.
With the significant breakthrough of the US Stablecoin Act today, Visa is no longer just an intermediary for traditional payments. It is trying to build a new clearing network architecture with stablecoins as the core. In April 2025, this direction was more clearly indicated - Visa officially joined the Paxos-led Global Dollar Network (USDG) Stablecoin Alliance, becoming the first traditional financial institution to join and participate in building a de-banked global clearing system.
Visa is migrating the financial intermediary model that it has dominated for the past few decades to the chain. In the future crypto infrastructure, it does not want to be the second SWIFT, but intends to be the first Visa on the chain.
From Edge Product Manager to Head of Visa Crypto
Cuy Sheffields career is hard to define by a traditional path. Growing up in a rural town in Ohio, basketball was his early way to build confidence and find identity. In college, he chose to study at Pomona College in California, and gradually developed a strong interest in entrepreneurship and technology. After graduation, he joined a startup called TrialPay, focusing on the mobile app advertising ecosystem. In the process of building real relationships with customers, he unexpectedly developed a passion for sales, and this experience laid the foundation for his subsequent transformation.
In 2015, TrialPay was acquired by Visa, and Sheffield joined Visa as a product manager. He then worked in the companys internal strategic partnership department, mainly responsible for connecting with start-up technology companies. It was during this time that he began to pay attention to early signs in the crypto industry and tried to understand the potential systemic opportunities therein.
In 2018, the number of cryptocurrency users worldwide exceeded 40 million for the first time, and Visa set up a special project for Crypto Innovation Exploration for the first time. Sheffield took this opportunity to propose the establishment of an internal crypto team, the goal is not to invest in crypto assets, but to serve this group of users who are ignored by traditional payment networks. His logic is very direct: emerging wallets and trading platforms such as Coinbase, Binance, and MetaMask are attracting tens of millions of young users, but they can hardly complete payments within the Visa system - this is a structural user gap faced by Visa, and it is also an opportunity to update the underlying technology.
He convinced management and skeptics. Since 2019, he has officially served as the head of Visa Crypto, starting a journey of cooperation with companies such as Anchorage and Coinbase. His personal introduction page on LinkedIn reads: Committed to bringing Visa into the Web3 era. He himself has gradually been regarded by the industry as a key translator between the traditional financial world and the on-chain system.
Sheffield publicly stated that he is passionate about the crypto world and has long been learning and interacting on Twitter to understand the community language and technical boundaries. He also mentioned that his superpower is the ability to translate complex concepts into easy-to-understand language, and he always strives to be one of the best at explaining the crypto world to the public. This ability to explain and personal involvement has gradually made him stand out within Visa and become the promoter and spokesperson of this systemic transformation.
Visas Crypto Lab
Visa has always been known for its prudent nature, and is neither good at nor keen on radical narratives. The companys shift to crypto technology is not a sudden strategic leap, but a gradual system evolution process. Under the leadership of Cuy Sheffield, Visa divides its on-chain strategy into multiple stages, from the initial technical cognition to the subsequent business reconstruction, always maintaining a balanced judgment of risks and opportunities.
The first phase began roughly in 2019. During this period, Visas main goal was not to integrate blockchain technology, but to establish a basic understanding of the emerging crypto ecosystem. The company has invested in custodial service providers such as Anchorage to ensure that they can access on-chain assets in a compliant manner. At the same time, it has cooperated with trading platforms such as Coinbase and Crypto.com to issue crypto Visa cards, initially testing the payment paths and consumption behaviors of crypto users.
In 2021, Visa released the Crypto API, providing banking institutions with an interface tool for accessing stablecoin settlement. The essence of this move is not to directly enter the on-chain clearing market, but to observe how crypto assets affect their own payment models through embedded technology. Sheffield once compared this stage to the reappearance of e-commerce forcing the credit card system - encryption is not the enemy that subverts Visa, but an external variable that forces it to update its underlying logic.
Now it is 2022. Compared with the previous stage of technical trials, Visas strategic focus during this period has clearly shifted to the construction of a clearing path centered on stablecoins.
The first is to reach a cooperation with Circle to pilot the deployment of USDC as a clearing medium on mainstream chains such as Ethereum and Polygon. At the same time, Visa no longer regards stablecoins as speculative assets or payment corners, but officially positions them as clearing tools in the digital age. In 2023, Visa expanded the pilot to Solana, and at a developer conference, demonstrated the real-time clearing process of completing cross-border transactions through USDC, which was significantly faster than traditional cross-border clearing systems.
In addition to stablecoins, Visa has also begun exploring new scenarios such as NFT payments, DAO participation mechanisms, and automatic credit card payment for on-chain gas fees, attempting to transform itself from a payment network operator to a system service provider for the on-chain ecosystem.
The third phase will gradually begin in 2024, with the strategic focus shifting from technology deployment to the reconstruction of the global settlement architecture.
Visa is accelerating its access to multiple public chain networks such as Solana, Avalanche, and Polygon, and is working with traditional and emerging payment service providers such as Worldpay, Nuvei, and Stripe to promote the implementation of on-chain payments in traditional merchant channels.
In 2024, Visa launched the Crypto Advisory service, providing bank customers with integrated solutions covering crypto custody, wallet systems and stablecoin circulation, officially incorporating crypto business into enterprise-level financial infrastructure.
Entering 2025, Visas encryption strategy began to enter the substantive implementation stage, and a series of key collaborations and product launches showed its transformation from experimental exploration to systematic deployment.
In April this year, Visa reportedly joined the USDG stablecoin alliance led by Paxos to build a non-bank-led global settlement network with new financial institutions such as Robinhood, Kraken, and Galaxy Digital. In this alliance, Visas role is no longer a payment intermediary in the traditional sense, but a key backbone router between on-chain transaction flow and fund settlement paths.
Since then, one of the most iconic developments has been Visa’s cooperation with Middle Eastern fintech platform Rain to fully tokenize Visa card accounts receivable into USDC, enabling real-time on-chain clearing. This means that for the first time, the traditional credit card business has broken free from the constraints of the interbank clearing process and become a “native on-chain payment tool”, significantly improving its fund settlement efficiency and transparency, and laying the foundation for Visa to build a global clearing network that operates 24/7.
At the same time, Visa has also launched a stablecoin payment card program in the Latin American market, and has cooperated with Bridge to launch Visa cards bound to USDC in six high-inflation countries, including Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia. These cards are directly priced and consumed through on-chain balances, providing users with anti-inflation payment options in the context of drastic fluctuations in local currencies, and also helping Visa expand a de-intermediation payment scenario that does not require local bank support.
On the corporate side, Visa further promoted the on-chaining of bank assets and launched the Visa Tokenized Asset Platform (VTAP). The platform provides bank customers with one-stop services from stablecoin minting, custody to destruction, supporting them to deploy their own clearing mechanisms into the on-chain system. Many banks, including BBVA, have participated in this plan, aiming to issue and circulate their own stablecoins through VTAP, forming a complete closed loop connected to the Visa payment network.
Behind these deployments is a change in the structure of global capital flows. Bitwise data shows that in 2024, the total volume of global stablecoin transactions has exceeded Visas traditional payment processing scale for the first time.
Stablecoins have leapt from marginal assets to mainstream settlement media, making it impossible for Visa to maintain its industry dominance through traditional means, and it must redefine its role in the global payment network through on-chain paths. This reality has prompted Visa to shift its crypto strategy from peripheral experiments to core business reconstruction, and it also indicates that the global settlement system is entering a new era dominated by stablecoins.
Exploring Crypto, passive defense or active transformation?
At a time when the global payment system is still in the early stages of change, the transformation made by Visa is not a radical subversion, but a well-thought-out role reconstruction. Fundamentally speaking, Visa has traditionally played the role of an interbank credit intermediary: relying on its clearing network, dispute resolution mechanism and credit endorsement model, it provides efficient and secure payment channels for hundreds of millions of users and merchants around the world.
This system is irreplaceable in the Web2 era. However, in the on-chain world, as stablecoins achieve peer-to-peer transfers and 24/7 clearing, this trust structure based on intermediaries is being replaced by technology itself. The advantages of traditional processes are gradually weakened, and the value of intermediaries is being re-evaluated.
Visa chose not to resist but to actively integrate. Under the impetus of Cuy Sheffield, the company gradually redefined itself as a credit confirmer on the chain and a standard setter for payment protocols rather than just an extension of traditional finance.
Visa works with hosting service providers such as Anchorage and Fireblocks to ensure that it has the technical deployment capabilities at the on-chain node level; it is also exploring the inclusion of new assets such as CBDC, NFT, DAO, etc. into verifiable payment paths, providing them with Visa-level access standards and risk control support. On the user side, Visa is trying to incorporate stablecoins into its points system and design a reward mechanism based on on-chain interactive behaviors, so that on-chain identity and credit can become real-world usable assets.
This reconstruction is not limited to mature markets such as Europe and the United States. In regions with weak financial infrastructure such as Latin America and Africa, Visa has landed in a lighter posture, bypassing the banking system and directly providing on-chain clearing services between wallet service providers and merchants. This is a redefinition of the underlying structure of the global credit infrastructure: it is no longer based on bank accounts, but on-chain assets, identities and clearing paths. In the European and American markets, Visa has assisted traditional banks in entering the stablecoin clearing track by launching the VTAP platform and Crypto API, trying to build a composite financial network composed of banks, merchants and on-chain assets.
Behind all this, Visa is systematically promoting a new credit architecture: it does not control user assets, does not store on-chain data, but builds a trusted settlement path covering the world. This is not a blind pursuit of the Crypto narrative, nor a complete abandonment of the existing system, but an updated understanding of its own role. Visa is neither SWIFT nor Coinbase. What it has shaped is an on-chain backbone service provider that is between the two and has structural organizational capabilities and technical adaptation capabilities.
Visas uniqueness lies not in its compatibility with cryptocurrencies, but in its attempt to build a new payment track based on stablecoins. It does not provide wallets or custody user assets, but it continues to play the role of on-chain credit confirmer between 1.5 million merchants and 14,500 institutions around the world. By coordinating the circulation path between fiat currency and stablecoins, Visa has actually become a de-banking clearing hub.
As we enter 2025, Visa’s stablecoin strategy is no longer a question of whether to participate, but a question of “how to lead”. Cuy Sheffield is promoting a systematic project that will last for five years and is centered on institutional adaptation. It is not about making Visa a crypto-native enterprise, but about making Visa the organizer and standard setter of the on-chain financial order.
Stablecoins are not a challenge to Visa, but the direction of Visas self-evolution. Cuy Sheffield plays the role of the institutional architect in this reconstruction. He is not keen on speculative trends, nor has he shouted slogans for some revolutionary technology. What he promotes is the update path within the financial system, starting from the system and process. He knows that Visa cannot become a crypto-native company, but it can become one of the most organized non-crypto institutions in the on-chain system.
Visas future has never been about whether it will be replaced by cryptocurrencies but about how to become a part of the crypto world. The path chosen by this payment giant is neither conservative nor aggressive - it is to steadily build a new financial infrastructure in the structure of time. And this future has already happened quietly.
