Visa (V) has made its first foray into running blockchain infrastructure, the company said on Tuesday, operating as an “anchor validator” node on the Stripe-backed Tempo blockchain.
Visa, a long-time collaborator of the payments services provider, configured and managed the validator node entirely in-house, following six months of joint work with Tempo’s engineering team to integrate the card giant’s infrastructure directly into the blockchain, according to a press release.
Visa plans to run nodes on some other blockchains following the Tempo integration. The card network had previously said it will join the Canton Network, where there are plans to serve as a “Super Validator.”
For the past seven years or so, Visa’s blockchain engineers have been “living and breathing stablecoins,” said the head of Visa's crypto team, Cuy Sheffield. Now the focus is on supporting the evolution of new payment flows such as machine-to-machine commerce using AI agents, he added.
“We've been an early design partner, working very closely with the Tempo team, looking at designing infrastructure that can support many types of new payment flows, and particularly agentic payment flows,” Sheffield said in an interview with CoinDesk.
Tempo, which is also backed by crypto investment firm Paradigm, went live last month with Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), a protocol that lets software and AI agents pay for services autonomously.
“Visa is a big part of MPP,” Sheffield said. “We added the MPP card spec. We announced Visa CLI, which is a wallet that is built on top of MPP where agents can use a Visa card to be able to spend. So we've been deeply involved in the Tempo and the MPP ecosystem, and now we're running the underlying infrastructure on Tempo.”
There’s no doubting Stripe’s conviction when it comes to assembling an end-to-end blockchain-based system for stablecoin payments. But, taking a step back, some people might question how open and decentralized such a system is.
Sheffield, in response, said Visa is simply being pragmatic, looking for products that can drive payment volume.
“Our view has always been that decentralization is a spectrum,” Sheffield said. “There are many use cases where decentralization for the sake of decentralization doesn't solve a problem. I think we're now entering a phase in the crypto industry where decentralization is not the primary value prop. It's whether a new payment infrastructure is fast, efficient, programmable and can outperform some existing payment infrastructure for certain use cases.”
Stripe moved into the stablecoin industry when it acquired stablecoin specialist Bridge for $1.1 billion in 2024. Earlier this year, Mastercard made a similar move, buying stablecoin firm BVNK for $1.8 billion.
Asked if Visa had any plans to offer its own stablecoin, Sheffield said:
“It's so early and the rules haven't even been fully written yet. We spent a bunch of time with the OCC (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency) and others,” he said. “I think there are many different roles that Visa can play, but everything we do, we want to make sure that we're doing it in partnership with our clients and our network.”