Visa joins forces with Mesh: 175 million merchants have access to encrypted payments, and coins in wallets can be used to buy things directly. The era of encrypted payments is really here! After ten years of clamoring for crypto payments, why is Visa just letting go now? |What has changed in crypto payment this time?

Original author：WEB3AI

Original source：https://www.youtube.com/embed/3ouXfvm0dZ0

The core of the cooperation announced by Visa and Mesh on October 19, 2026, is just one sentence: users can directly use Bitcoin, Ethereum or stablecoin balances in the participating encrypted wallets to complete online and offline purchases at Visa's approximately 175 million merchants around the world. There is no need to apply for another encrypted debit card, do not need to sell the currency into legal currency in advance, and the merchant does not need to change any equipment. The background logic is that Mesh is responsible for the exchange and fund allocation between crypto assets and legal currency. Visa payment vouchers are automatically generated by the wallet application, and what merchants see is still a standard Visa transaction. This matter deserves serious dismantling, not because of the ten-year-old slogan "Cryptocurrency payments are finally available," but because it exposes a substantial shift in the attitude of card organizations towards crypto-assets: from defensive isolation to selective inclusion. Visa is advancing on stablecoins faster than most people realize. Visa Direct's stablecoin pre-funding function has moved from pilot to commercial deployment, and Inyo Global has become the first landing processor, covering more than 180 countries and regions; the annualized scale of stablecoin settlement completed through the Visa network exceeds 20 billion US dollars, more than 15 times more than a year ago; there are more than 160 stablecoin co-branded card projects in operation around the world, and the related payment scale has increased by approximately 200% year-on-year. But the other side of these numbers is equally true: Allium data shows that stablecoin payment volume reached $482 billion in the first nine months of 2026, a year-on-year increase of 45%, and the number of payments exceeded 1 billion, while stablecoin card consumption in the second quarter only accounted for 0.03% of Visa’s $4 trillion in payment volume during the same period. In other words, the growth rate of stablecoin payments is real, and its absolute proportion in Visa’s retail payment plate is still really small. The CEO of Visa made a very sober statement during the earnings call in February 2026: In markets like the United States where digital financial infrastructure is mature, stablecoins do not show obvious product and market advantages. This sentence explains why Visa prioritizes investing stablecoin resources in cross-border B2B, salary payment and remittance corridors, instead of rushing to push every currency holder to the supermarket to buy coffee. Mesh's role in this cooperation falls on the other side of this judgment: cross-border B2B solves the "business to business" problem, while Mesh solves the "wallet to cashier" problem. Mesh completed a $75 million Series C round of financing led by Dragonfly in January this year, with a valuation of $1 billion. It had previously provided underlying support for PayPal's "Pay with Crypto" and completed integration with Bybit Pay in September. Its core capability is to unify fragmented interfaces between different chains, different assets, and different wallets. However, the cooperation announcement did not answer three key questions: how to determine the commission ratio and exchange rate spread of Mesh, how dispute handling and refunds will be returned to users when there is a transaction problem, and whether the compliance capabilities under the MiCA framework can be adapted one by one in the more than 200 countries and regions covered by Visa. The Federal Reserve's implementation rules for the GENIUS Act were only issued for comment on September 24, 2026. The deadline for comments is November 30, and the supervision itself is still in progress. Looking at this cooperation in a larger picture, its real significance lies not in the number of "175 million merchants" itself, but in that it marks the shift from the narrative of crypto payments "bypassing card organizations" to the narrative of "being included in the existing track by card organizations". The door has been pushed open a crack, but whether the hinges on the door axis - economic model, consumer protection, regulatory adaptation - can not get stuck after the real transaction volume increases is what determines how big the crack can finally be opened.