The RFP asks for exchange licences in the US, Canada, UK and Singapore, plus settlement support for Open USD — the joint stablecoin project Visa is building with Stripe and Mastercard.
Visa has circulated a request for proposals seeking a new stablecoin settlement and over-the-counter partner, according to a document seen by CoinDesk. The RFP went out after Mastercard closed its $1.8 billion acquisition of BVNK on 3 August, taking the firm that had processed Visa's stablecoin flows out of the running.
The requirements are unusually specific. Bidders need cryptocurrency exchange licences in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Singapore, the four jurisdictions where Visa wants to run stablecoin settlement immediately. They need to hold and swap a variety of stablecoins on demand. And they need to settle the newly announced Open USD, the joint stablecoin initiative Visa is building with Stripe and Mastercard, designed to give merchants a single dollar-denominated rail that abstracts away which issuer sits behind it.
The list narrows the field sharply. Multi-jurisdictional exchange licensing is scarce. Coinbase, Kraken and a handful of others hold enough of the relevant permissions to plausibly bid; smaller specialist firms without US or UK coverage are excluded before the process starts. That is the direct consequence of Mastercard buying the natural incumbent: Visa has to find a partner that is either large enough to already hold the licences or nimble enough to move fast, and the two categories rarely overlap.
Visa took a strategic stake in BVNK in May 2025 at roughly a $750 million valuation, then entered a broader partnership in January to route stablecoin payments through Visa Direct, its real-time cross-border network. That plumbing was what let Visa tell corporate clients it could move USDC or USDP the same way it moved fiat. When Mastercard paid up to $1.8 billion for the whole firm three weeks ago, Visa's plumbing became Mastercard's plumbing, and Visa's stake became a cheque and a lesson.
The lesson is not subtle. Card networks have spent the past two years describing stablecoins as an infrastructure upgrade rather than a competitive threat, and they have done so by wrapping the tokens inside their existing settlement rails. That wrapping needs a counterparty that can hold the tokens, price them, and move them across borders under a stack of regulatory regimes at once. If a card network does not own that counterparty, the counterparty is one acquisition away from working for a rival.
Open USD is the strategic response. Announced as a Visa-Stripe-Mastercard project, it is designed to look like a single dollar to a merchant while sitting on top of whichever issuer offers the best terms at settlement, whether USDC, USDP, PYUSD, or something newer as the market develops. The point is disintermediation of the issuer, not of the card network. But an OTC settlement partner has to be able to swap between the underlying tokens in real time, or the abstraction leaks. That is why the RFP specifies swap capability alongside licensing.
The timing puts pressure on Visa. Mastercard now controls the piece of infrastructure Visa spent eighteen months integrating with, and it will not be advertising a warm handover. Every month Visa spends running a stablecoin product on borrowed rails is a month in which corporate clients might rethink whether Visa Direct is the right stablecoin rail after all. The RFP does not name a deadline, but the operational pressure to close within the quarter is obvious. Anything longer and the momentum Visa built up over the first half of 2026 starts to look like it belongs to someone else.
Merchant-side demand is not standing still while all this plays out. Shopify added Arbitrum as its fifth chain for USDC checkout in late July, and KSNET signed 330,000 Korean merchants onto Solana Pay in early August. The addressable market for a wrapped-stablecoin card product is not waiting for Visa to sort out its back end.
The commercial terms of the eventual deal will decide whether Visa repeats the BVNK mistake. If the company can secure the partner on a service-provider basis without an equity stake, it avoids writing another cheque that turns out to underwrite a competitor's acquisition. If the winning bidder demands equity as the price of exclusivity, Visa will have to decide whether to buy in and cap the upside, or stay at arm's length and accept the risk that Mastercard runs the same play again. There is a version of this outcome in which Visa ends up owning a crypto exchange. That would have been unthinkable eighteen months ago; the fact that it is now a credible option says more about where card-network competition has moved than any single deal announcement.
