Visa (V) has made its first attempt at running a blockchain infrastructure, the company said Tuesday, functioning as an “anchor validator” node on the Stripe-backed Tempo blockchain.
Visa, a long-time collaborator of the payment services provider, has configured and managed the validator node completely in-house, after six months of working 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 a number of other blockchains after 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, Visa’s blockchain engineers have “lived and breathed 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 have been an early design partner and have worked very closely with the Tempo team, looking at designing infrastructure that can support many types of new payment flows, and in particular 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 allows software and AI agents to pay for services autonomously.
“Visa is a big part of MPP,” Sheffield said. “We’ve added the MPP card specification. We announced Visa CLI, a wallet built on top of MPP where agents can use a Visa card to spend money. So we’ve been deeply involved with Tempo and the MPP ecosystem, and now we’re running the underlying infrastructure on Tempo.”
There is no doubt about Stripe’s conviction when it comes to putting together an end-to-end blockchain-based system for stablecoin payments. But if we take a step back, some people might wonder how open and decentralized such a system is.
In response, Sheffield said Visa is simply being pragmatic and looking for products that can boost payment volume.
“Our view has always been that decentralization is a spectrum,” said Sheffield. “There are many use cases where decentralization for the sake of decentralization does not solve a problem. I think we are now entering a phase in the crypto industry where decentralization is not the core value proposition. What matters is whether a new payment infrastructure is fast, efficient, programmable, and can outperform an existing payment infrastructure for certain use cases.”
Stripe entered the stablecoin industry when it acquired stablecoin specialist Bridge for $1.1 billion in 2024. Earlier this year, Mastercard made a similar move and bought stablecoin company BVNK for $1.8 billion.
When asked if Visa has plans to offer its own stablecoin, Sheffield said:
“It’s so early and the rules aren’t even fully written yet. We’ve spent a lot of time with the OCC (Office of the Comptroller of the Coin) and others,” he said. “I think Visa can play many different roles, but in everything we do, we want to make sure we do it in partnership with our customers and our network.”