Shinhan Financial partners with Visa to pilot stablecoin infrastructure in South Korea
DeFi & Yields ·
Shinhan Financial and Visa will test stablecoin issuance, remittances and B2B settlements using Visa's enterprise infrastructure, according to Coindesk.
The pilot covers a stablecoin platform intended to support card payments, AI-based payment models, and both B2B and B2C transactions, per reporting from The Block. Two distinct sources have now covered the tie-up, pointing to a coordinated push by a major South Korean financial group to build stablecoin rails on top of Visa's existing enterprise network rather than a standalone blockchain system.
The arrangement fits a broader pattern in which Visa positions itself as connective tissue between digital-asset issuance and its established settlement infrastructure rather than building competing blockchain rails from scratch. Visa operates VisaNet, the messaging and settlement network linking card-issuing banks to merchant-acquiring banks, and processed roughly $15 trillion in payment volume in 2024. That scale gives any stablecoin experiment built on top of it immediate access to a payment network already wired into banks and merchants, which is presented as the structural rationale for partnering with Visa rather than deploying independent settlement infrastructure. South Korea is tagged as a jurisdiction of interest for this activity, per Leviathan's Atlas.
The Shinhan-Visa pilot sits alongside a cluster of other Visa-linked crypto initiatives disclosed around the same period, including an Intelligent Commerce Connect launch for AI agent payments with Sei-based Sumvin among pilot partners, a self-custodial Bitcoin wallet integration through Exodus Pay, and Visa's role as a validator on the Tempo payments blockchain alongside Stripe and Standard Chartered's Zodia Custody. Taken together, these moves suggest Visa is treating stablecoin settlement, card issuance, and machine-driven payments as parallel tracks rather than a single product line.
What remains unspecified is the pilot's timeline, transaction volume, and which stablecoin or stablecoins Shinhan intends to issue or support. It is also unclear whether the B2B settlement function will operate domestically within South Korea only or extend to cross-border remittances, and whether other South Korean banks are expected to join a similar arrangement with Visa. Further detail on regulatory approval status in South Korea has not been disclosed in the available reporting.