In the past two days, a meme coin PAYAI on Solana, an AI agent protocol integrating ElizaOS, lib p2p, and IPFS, has risen from zero to a market value of $10 million, currently maintaining around $3 million, attracting market attention. However, what revived it was not PayAI's technology or product, but a mention by Cuy Sheffield, Head of Crypto at Visa, on the X platform.
In August last year, Visa invested in an AI agent project called Payman, advocating for AI to pay fees to human "employers" to complete marketing tasks. Since then, Visa has shown interest in AI+Crypto, not just out of curiosity, but as a strategic judgment after in-depth research. This provides important context for understanding Visa's on-chain settlement system, stablecoin deployment path, and systematic layout for the next-generation payment network.
With significant progress on the US stablecoin bill today, Visa is no longer just an intermediary for traditional payments. It is trying to build a completely new clearing network architecture with stablecoins at its core. In April 2025, this direction was further clarified - Visa officially joined the global dollar network (USDG) stablecoin alliance led by Paxos, becoming the first traditional financial institution to join and participate in building a de-banking global clearing system.
Visa is migrating the financial intermediary model it has dominated for decades to the chain, and in the future crypto infrastructure, it does not want to become a second SWIFT, but aims to be the first "on-chain Visa".
From Edge Product Manager to Visa Crypto Head
Cuy Sheffield's career path is hard to define through traditional routes. Growing up in a rural town in Ohio, basketball was his early way of building confidence and finding identity. In college, he chose to study at Pomona College in California, gradually developing a strong interest in entrepreneurship and technology. After graduation, he joined a startup called TrialPay, focusing on the mobile app advertising ecosystem. In the process of building real relationships with clients, he unexpectedly developed a passion for sales, which laid the foundation for his subsequent transformation.
In 2015, TrialPay was acquired by Visa, and Sheffield joined Visa as a product manager, later working in the company's strategic cooperation department, mainly responsible for interfacing with tech startups. It was during this time that he began to pay attention to the early signs of the crypto industry and tried to understand its potential systemic opportunities.
In 2018, when the global cryptocurrency user base first exceeded 40 million, Visa established a "Crypto Innovation Exploration" special project. Sheffield seized this opportunity to propose forming an internal crypto group, with the goal not of investing in crypto assets, but of serving this group of users overlooked by traditional payment networks. His logic was straightforward: emerging wallets and trading platforms like Coinbase, Binance, and MetaMask were attracting millions of young users, but they could hardly complete payments within Visa's system - this was a structural user gap for Visa and an opportunity for underlying technological updates.
He convinced the management and the skeptics. From 2019, he officially became the head of Visa's Crypto department, starting a collaboration journey with enterprises like Anchorage and Coinbase. His LinkedIn profile reads: "Dedicated to bringing Visa into the Web3 era." He was gradually viewed by the industry as a key translator between the traditional financial world and on-chain systems.
Sheffield openly stated that he is passionate about the crypto world, consistently learning and interacting on Twitter to understand community language and technical boundaries. He also mentioned that his "superpower" is the ability to transform complex concepts into easily understandable language, always striving to be one of the best at explaining the crypto world to the public. This explanatory power and personal involvement gradually made him stand out within Visa, becoming a promoter and spokesperson for this systematic transformation.
(Translation continues in the same manner for the rest of the text)On the enterprise side, Visa further promotes "on-chain banking assets" by launching the Visa Tokenized Asset Platform (VTAP). The platform provides a one-stop service for bank customers from stablecoin minting, custody to destruction, supporting the deployment of their own clearing mechanisms to the on-chain system. Multiple banks, including BBVA, have participated in this plan, aiming to issue and circulate their own stablecoins through VTAP, forming a complete closed loop connected to the Visa payment network.
Behind these deployments is a change in the global capital flow structure. Bitwise data shows that the total global stablecoin transactions in 2024 have for the first time exceeded Visa's traditional payment processing scale.
Stablecoins have risen from marginal assets to mainstream clearing media, forcing Visa to redefine its role in the global payment network through on-chain paths rather than maintaining its industry dominance through traditional means. This reality has prompted Visa to shift its crypto strategy from peripheral experiments to core business restructuring, also signaling that the global clearing system is entering a new era dominated by stablecoins.
Exploring Crypto: Passive Defense or Active Transformation?
At a time when the global payment system is still in the early stages of transformation, Visa's change is not a radical disruption, but a carefully considered role reconstruction. Fundamentally, Visa traditionally played the role of a credit intermediary between banks: relying on its clearing network, dispute resolution mechanism, and credit endorsement model to provide efficient and secure payment channels for hundreds of millions of users and merchants worldwide.
This system was irreplaceable in the Web2 era. However, entering the on-chain world, as stablecoins achieve point-to-point transfers and round-the-clock clearing, this trust structure based on "intermediaries" is being replaced by technology itself. The advantages of traditional processes are gradually being eroded, and the value of intermediaries is being re-evaluated.
Visa's chosen path is not resistance, but active integration. Under Cuy Sheffield's push, the company has gradually redefined itself as an "on-chain credit confirmer" and "payment protocol standard setter," rather than just an extension of traditional finance.
Visa collaborates with custody service providers like Anchorage and Fireblocks to ensure technical deployment capabilities at the on-chain node level; it is also exploring incorporating new types of assets such as CBDC, Non-Fungible Tokens, and DAOs into verifiable payment paths, providing them with Visa-level access standards and risk control support. On the user side, Visa attempts to incorporate stablecoins into its points system, designing reward mechanisms based on on-chain interaction behaviors, thereby making on-chain identity and credit usable assets in reality.
This reconstruction is not limited to mature markets like Europe and the United States. In regions with weak financial infrastructure such as Latin America and Africa, Visa instead lands in a lighter manner, bypassing the banking system and directly providing on-chain clearing services between wallet service providers and merchants. This is a redefinition of the underlying structure of "global credit infrastructure": no longer premised on bank accounts, but centered on on-chain assets, identity, and clearing paths. In European and American markets, Visa assists traditional banks in entering the stablecoin clearing track through the VTAP platform and Crypto API, attempting to build a composite financial network composed of banks, merchants, and on-chain assets.
Behind all this is Visa's systematic advancement of a new credit architecture: not controlling user assets, not storing on-chain data, but building a globally covering "trusted settlement path". This is not a blind follow of the Crypto narrative, nor a complete abandonment of the existing system, but an updated understanding of its own role. Visa is neither SWIFT nor intends to be Coinbase; what it is shaping is a "on-chain backbone service provider" between the two, with structural organizational capabilities and technical adaptation abilities.
Visa's uniqueness is not that it can be compatible with crypto, but that it is trying to build a new payment track with stablecoins as the underlying layer. It does not provide wallets or custody user assets, but continues to play the role of an "on-chain credit confirmer" among 1.5 million merchants and 14,500 institutions globally. By coordinating the circulation path between fiat currency and stablecoins, Visa has actually become a de-banked clearing hub.
At this moment entering 2025, Visa's stablecoin strategy is no longer a question of whether to participate, but "how to dominate". What Cuy Sheffield is pushing is a systematic project focusing on institutional adaptation that has been ongoing for five years - it is not to make Visa a crypto-native enterprise, but to make Visa the orchestrator and standard setter of the on-chain financial order.
Stablecoins are not a challenge to Visa, but the direction of Visa's self-evolution. And Cuy Sheffield is playing the role of an institutional architect in this reconstruction. He is not enthusiastic about speculative trends, nor has he ever shouted slogans for any "revolutionary technology". What he is promoting is an update path starting from within the financial system, from institutions and processes. He knows that Visa cannot become a crypto-native company, but can become one of the most organizationally capable non-crypto institutions in the on-chain system.
Visa's future has never been about "whether it will be replaced by crypto", but "how to become a part of the crypto world". The path chosen by this payment giant is neither conservative nor reckless - it is steadily constructing a new financial infrastructure within the structure of time. And this future has already quietly occurred.
