Visa and Sam Altman’s Ambition for Stablecoin Payments
Recently, global payments giant Visa has been reported to be in discussions with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to collaborate on launching a self-custody payment wallet that supports stablecoins. This move marks a new phase in the fusion of traditional finance and crypto technology—by integrating Visa’s global merchant network with Worldcoin’s blockchain identity system, the two parties aim to bring stablecoin payments into the mainstream market.
If the collaboration is successful, users may be able to directly use assets such as USDT and USDC to make purchases at 65 million merchants worldwide, with iris verification ensuring transaction security. For the crypto industry, this event could represent a crucial turning point in shifting stablecoins from merely a “trading medium” to a “practical payment tool.”
Why Traditional Financial Giants Bet on Stablecoins
Visa’s crypto strategy has long shown signs of its ambitions. In 2024, it partnered with Tencent Financial Technology to launch a cross-border remittance service covering over 1 billion WeChat users; in the same year, it collaborated with Singapore’s dtcpay to issue a digital currency Visa card that enables instant conversion between fiat and crypto assets. This collaboration with Sam Altman targets an even larger goal: using stablecoins to solve the high cost and low efficiency of cross-border payments.
Currently, the average fee for cross-border remittances is as high as 6.3% and takes 3–5 business days to process. In contrast, blockchain-based stablecoin payments can reduce costs to below 1% and achieve near-instant settlement. Visa’s involvement will further lower the user barrier—by leveraging on-chain Visa card functionality, users can pay cooperating merchants directly with stablecoins without manually operating a crypto wallet. This “seamless crypto payment” model could attract hundreds of millions of traditional finance users to try digital currencies.
How Worldcoin’s Identity Verification Empowers Payments
Sam Altman’s crypto project Worldcoin plays a central role in this collaboration. Since its launch in 2023, Worldcoin has generated a unique “digital passport” (World ID) for users worldwide via its iris-scanning device, Orb, and has built the World Network blockchain ecosystem. In this collaboration, World ID will be used for identity verification in the payment wallet, and, together with Visa’s KYC/AML systems, form a dual compliance framework based on “biometrics + on-chain behavior.”
This design addresses two major pain points in crypto payments:
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Money laundering risks due to anonymity: When users make stablecoin payments, the system will automatically verify their World ID and match it with on-chain transaction records, protecting privacy while meeting regulatory requirements.
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Complexity in user experience: The wallet supports automatic conversion between fiat and stablecoins, eliminating the need for users to manually handle exchange rates and gas fees.
Currently, World Network has also reached a technical partnership with crypto card service provider Rain, which has previously provided on-chain payment solutions for public chains such as Optimism and Avalanche.
Technical Challenges and Market Opportunities
Despite the grand vision, the collaboration between Visa and Sam Altman faces multiple challenges.
Technical Aspects: Maintaining blockchain network stability in high-frequency payment scenarios is crucial. Currently, the World Network’s TPS (transactions per second) is about 1,200, whereas Visa’s global network peaks at up to 65,000 TPS. To address this, the development team plans to introduce a hybrid consensus mechanism that combines PoS (Proof of Stake) with zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) to boost throughput to over 4,000 TPS.
Market Aspects: This collaboration could trigger a chain reaction among traditional financial institutions. For example, European bank BBVA has already announced plans to issue its own stablecoin through Visa’s tokenization platform, and JPMorgan Chase is accelerating the deployment of enterprise-grade on-chain settlement systems. For ordinary users, the large-scale adoption of stablecoin payments means lower cross-border consumption costs and more flexible asset management. On exchanges like JuCoin, tokens closely associated with payment scenarios (such as XRP and Stellar) have seen significant trading volume increases recently, reflecting market expectations for compliant crypto payment infrastructure.
Regulatory Compliance and Future Path
Regulatory stance is the core variable determining the project’s success. The U.S. SEC has previously investigated Worldcoin’s iris data collection, considering it a potential violation of privacy protection laws. In this collaboration, Visa and Worldcoin have proposed a “selective disclosure” solution: users can decide what range of payment information to disclose to merchants—for instance, providing only the transaction amount while hiding the wallet address. This design attempts to strike a balance between privacy rights and regulatory compliance.
According to the roadmap, the two parties plan to launch pilot programs in regions such as Southeast Asia and Latin America in the second quarter of 2025. These areas have strong cross-border remittance demands and relatively relaxed regulatory environments. In the long run, Visa may join forces with OpenAI to develop AI-driven risk control models that intercept suspicious transactions in real time by analyzing on-chain data. For the industry, the success or failure of this experiment will determine whether stablecoins can truly replace traditional systems such as SWIFT and become the cornerstone of next-generation financial infrastructure.
Neason Oliver
