Visa Direct Picks USDC for 24/7 Pre-Funding: What It Means for XRP

I have been living in New York for 8 years, and I am a restaurant manager. I send money home to the Philippines. I would say about like between $500 to $1,000 a month. I prefer sending money home through apps like World Remit or Remitly.

Up to $1,000 a month sent home from New York. Now, keep her in mind because on the 15th of October 2026, Visa announced that businesses could top up its money transfer service with a digital dollar called USDC at any hour, and weekends included. So, the man who runs Visa crypto labs said it was in production. In plain English, it's live for real businesses. It's not just a test.

So, XRP holders, Visa switched on 24/7 funding for payouts and picked USDC, not XRP. Within 3 days, a post on Twitter asked for holders if they felt let down. Here's why that choice makes sense and why it isn't the story some people think it is. If you own XRP, guys, stay with this one because Visa tackled the problem Ripple pitched XRP for using a different coin. It's a cousin of that problem, all right, not the same one, and I'm going to show you where they differ.

Now, put simply, Visa moved payout funding onto a stable coin, and it changes one thing: how we judge every big-name headline that mentions our coins. Now, before we go further, keep half an eye on the top line of the description. I'm going to tell you what that link is for the inside. The first 5 minutes, I'll put it there for anybody who has ever had money stuck somewhere between sending and arriving and wondered who was holding it. Because most of us know that feeling, right?

We send money to family abroad or pay a deposit on a holiday let late on a Friday, and the bank says it's gone. The other side says it hasn't arrived, and for 2 or 3 days, our money is somewhere we can't see. With a fee we didn't quite notice on the way out. Millions of people go through that every single month like the restaurant manager Bloomberg filmed in New York in May 2026, the one we heard at the start, up to $1,000 a month every month. Now, for a family like hers, the fees in the waiting area and detail of the small print, so they're the whole story, right?

Visa knows exactly where the money moves. In June 2025, Visa's chief executive Ryan McInerney told CNBC where he thought digital dollars would really earn their keep.

The secondary of product market fit is cross-border, and that can be remittances, person-to-person, or business-to-business transactions. And in both of those areas, those are additive opportunities for Visa, and we're embracing stablecoins and building and innovating on top of them to provide new use cases in those areas.

Remittances, which is just the word for money people send home, right? Plus payments between businesses. 16 months after that interview, Visa put real money behind those words. So, what exactly did Visa switch on, and why didn't XRP get the call? That's what we're going to work through properly, step-by-step with the sources on screen.

As always, guys, this is not financial advice. Please do your own research. Like if you're bullish, and let's run that intro.

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All right. Hey, road bull runners. Welcome back. Okay, let me deal with that first link first because it ties straight into the story. I'm not telling you to buy XRP.

No, I'm not because there might be better opportunities for you. I don't know you. I've not met you, and your situation might differ from what I believe. So, you need to know if your situation matches the advice given. And here's a habit plenty of us fall into.

We spot a big name in a headline, Visa, MasterCard, a big bank, and we assume it's good news for a coin that we hold without checking whether that coin was even in the announcement. Now, our altcoin pro course, right? It exists to fix exactly that habit. It covers what each coin you hold actually does, which jobs it actually has, and how much of your money it deserves. And also, what you'll do when the next big headline lands.

Here's how you start. You head to the first link in the description and fill in a short form. Then, you book your free 15-minute call, and one of the team's going to walk you through your own strategy and your own situation. If you're watching this on your phone, guys, just tap more under the video, and it's the first thing you'll see. Book it before the next big name headline arrives, so you read it with a plan instead of a hunch.

Then, come straight back because the next part shows you what Visa actually switched on. Now, Visa runs a service called Visa Direct. Businesses use it to push money out to people, wages for gig workers, payouts to online sellers, and money sent across borders. Now, to do that, a business has to put money into its Visa account first before the payments can go out. That's called pre-funding, and think of it like loading a travel card before a trip, except the business is loading it for thousands of payouts at once.

The catch is how that top-up travels. Normally it goes by bank transfer and bank transfers keep bank hours. So, if a business runs low late on a Friday, the top-up can sit waiting until the banks open again after the weekend and the people expecting their money wait with it. So, Visa first tested a fix in a pilot it announced on the 30th of September 2025. The idea was simple, right?

Let businesses top up with stable coins, which are digital tokens designed to hold a steady value, usually $1 each, and which can move at any hour. Now, on the 15th of October 2026, Visa said the pilot had moved into commercial use. The first company enabling it is a cross-border payments firm called Inno Global and the digital dollar is USDC. That's the stablecoin issued by a company called Circle. One tech site summed it up in a single line.

Said the stablecoin closes the banking hours gap. Now, within 2 days the news was all over the crypto social media. Coin Bureau's post on the 17th of October said businesses could pre-fund global payouts using USDC across Visa Direct's network and that's in more than 180 countries. Now, when I read it on the 21st October, right? It passed 56,000 views.

Here's how Visa itself explains why this matters. From a talk it did on payments forum earlier in 2026, which it actually posted on YouTube in September.

We have seen this math of growth because stablecoin settlement gives issuers and acquirers better options. You can settle in near real time, 7 days a week. It unlocks liquidity and it provides faster access to funds. We created these capabilities so we can enable stablecoin settlement on network. But now we're taking those capabilities and we're externalizing them for all of you.

We're integrating them into our Visa Direct money movement solutions.

7 days a week, that's the heart of it. Issuers and acquirers, they're are just the banks on each side of the card payment and the same speed is being offered to businesses through Visa Direct. Now, at the time of that talk, Visa put its stablecoin settlement at a run rate of over 7 billion dollars a year. A run rate just means the pace for a full year if it carried on at that speed. And on the 8th of September 2026, the block reported that Visa's figure had passed 20 billion dollars, more than 15 times that year.

That's fast growth, right? But let's keep it in proportion. Visa moves trillions of dollars a year, so 20 billion is a sliver. Even the speaker in that clip said 7 billion sounds like a big number, it's actually quite small. So, why should the restaurant manager in New York care about any of this?

Well, because every delay and every middleman has a price and somebody pays it. Now, here's the boss of Coins, a crypto company in the Philippines, talking to Bloomberg book. Check this out. 10 years ago, the cost of remittance of every dollar, it was 8%. With technology, with better connectivity and banking rails, that cost went down to like 2 to 4%.

By using stable coins, we can lower that cost to anywhere between, you know, 0.5% or 50 bips. 8% 10 years before that interview, 2 to 4% on good routes, and he's aiming for a half of a percent. Let's put that in real money. On 500 dollars a month, the gap between 4% and half of a percent is 17 dollars 50 every single month, or 210 dollars a year. Now, that's his target, that's not a promise, but it does show you why the biggest names in payments want a piece of this.

And it's not only Visa saying it. Here's an executive from Bitso, a Mexican crypto firm, in a customer video that Ripple itself published in February 2026.

The old model used to happen in days, if not weeks. Rather than going through four, five different hops and waiting a week for my money to land on the other side of the planet, I can do it like this. And I do it with stable coins, instantly, at almost a zero cost.

Listen she chose, stable coins, and that's on Ripple's own channel, in a video with XRP in the title. So, this brings us to the question plenty of us holders are asking, right? Post on Twitter on the 18th of October 2026 put it like this, translated from Korean, by the way. Are you disappointed that our USD or XRP were not selected in the news? When I read that on the 21st of October, it had about 16,000 views and my honest answer was, look at what Visa's problem actually was.

A business holding dollars needed to get dollars to Visa over the weekend. Dollars in, dollars out. For that job, a dollar token is the obvious tool because it's designed not to move in price but between sending and arriving. XRP does move in price, sometimes a lot in a day and that's not a flaw, it's simply built for a different job. Ripple's pitch for XRP has long been about the step in the middle and the moment one currency has to become another.

Instead of payment company keeping piles of money parked in advance and say Mexican pesos, XRP is meant to act as a bridge. Dollars go into XRP and XRP goes into pesos and settles in seconds. So, here's the difference I promised. Visa's news is a cousin of that problem because it's about money parked in advance but it's the dollar side of it, getting the top up of Visa on time. From everything I found in the coverage, it doesn't involve swapping one currency for another on a blockchain and none of the Visa material I found mentions XRP at all.

Ripple itself doesn't pitch XRP for every job, it actually launched its own dollar token, RUSD, in December 2024 and here's David Schwartz who was Ripple's chief technology officer in December 2024 explain how the two were meant to fit together.

RUSD and XRP will complement each other because of the inherent differences of the cryptocurrencies. [music] For Ripple's proprietary payment products, XRP will continue to be used as a bridge currency. [music] Given the XRPL's speed, cost, and scalability,

So, by Ripple's own account, the stablecoin and the coin are meant to work side by side. The dollar token holds the steady value, XRP is meant to be the bridge between currencies. And look at what happened when Ripple went after car payments. On the 6th November 2025, Ripple announced a pilot with Mastercard, WebBanker, Gemini also to settle car payments using their RUSD and XRP ledger. Now, that's a real win for the ledger but notice the pattern, right?

When a big card network wants a steady dollar, it reaches for a stablecoin, even on Ripple's side of the fence. Before anyone gets carried away in either direction, it's actually worth asking how big real stablecoin payments are. Bloomberg put that question to Matt Higginson at The Consult from McKinsey. Check this out.

So, you will hear in the media the trillions of dollars of stablecoin payments today. 99% of that is crypto related, not the sort of payments we'd think about which is company to company or even paying remittances person to person. And so we look at this situation today and say, how much real payments volume is there out there? And we think it's probably the order of a billion or two a day, which is tiny. The latest assessments we have are $390 billion in the total year.

About $390 billion a year of real payments. Now, in the same interview, he compared that with several trillion dollars a day of ordinary payments. So, stablecoin payments are growing fast, but from a small base, and that cuts both ways. It means Visa's move is early, not the finished picture, and it means nobody has won the race. Not Visa, not Circle, not Ripple, right?

Anyone telling you the outcome is settled in either direction is guessing. Okay, so what should we take from news like this, especially as XRP holders? Well, here's how I'd read it. When a household name like Visa moves into digital money, it tells you where the money is going. As I see it, Visa, MasterCard, and the big banks aren't arguing about whether digital dollars will be used.

They're arguing about who gets to run them. And that's genuinely good for the whole space and for the public ledger, some of them may end up losing. But, a big name moving into crypto is not the same as a big name picking your coin. Now, before you treat headlines as XRP news, ask a simple question. Did the company name XRP in its own announcement?

In Visa's announcement, the coin name was USDC. In Ripple's MasterCard pilot, it was RLYSD. Neither of those on its own tells you anything about XRP's price. And the real test for XRP is narrower and far more useful. Does it keep a job in the moment one currency turns into another?

And is that job growing? That's something you can follow with evidence, right? Which payment firms Ripple announces and what they say they use. It's a much better question than whose logo sits next to our coin in a thumbnail. Here's one for the comments.

Have you ever sent money abroad and had it gone missing for a few days? Tell me where it was going, how long it took to land, because I do love to know how common this really is. And if you like big name headlines checked against what the company has actually said, subscribe. If you remember one line from this video, make it this one. Visa's change was dollars in, dollars out, and a dollar token did that job.

Nothing I found from Visa says it needed XRP for it. XRP case rests on a different moment when money has to change from one currency into another. So, keep those two jobs apart in your head. The next big name headline gets a lot easier to read if you know this stuff. Whichever coin it names, you know.

Crypto curious risk passes also no guarantee of future ones, guys. Stay bullish.

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