Visa and Brale test whether privacy-aware stablecoin rails can handle institutional settlement on Canton

Visa and Brale have launched a proof of concept aimed at a question that has become central to the next phase of onchain finance: can a regulated stablecoin move through institutional settlement flows without exposing more transaction data than banks, payment firms and corporate counterparties are willing to share? The companies said they are testing SBC, a U.S. dollar-backed token issued by Brale, on the Canton Network. The effort is focused on settlement rather than consumer payments, and it is being framed as an evaluation of whether privacy-enabled blockchain infrastructure can support the operational standards large financial institutions expect.

The pilot matters because many stablecoin demonstrations succeed on speed but run into more difficult questions around confidentiality, workflow control and compatibility with existing treasury operations. According to the companies, the Canton-based setup is meant to test faster and programmable settlement while still allowing payment firms and financial institutions to control the visibility of sensitive transaction data. That balance is important in institutional settings, where the commercial value of a transaction often depends not only on when it settles, but also on who can see details around counterparties, cash movements and internal processes.

Visa said it plans to evaluate SBC as an additional stablecoin option for institutional settlement use cases, with native support on Canton giving it a way to test the token across real-world payment flows. In the company’s view, this is not just a technical experiment with a new blockchain venue. It is also a way to measure what it would take to bring programmable, privacy-conscious settlement into production environments. Cuy Sheffield, Visa’s head of crypto, said the work with Brale is intended to explore how SBC on Canton can support institutional use cases that require both programmability and privacy controls.

That framing fits the path Visa has already taken in digital-dollar infrastructure. The company first enabled stablecoin settlement in 2021, and it said its pilot had reached a $7 billion annualized run rate as of April, up 50% from the prior quarter. Visa also said the pilot now spans nine blockchains: Arc, Base, Canton, Polygon, Tempo, Avalanche, Ethereum, Solana and Stellar. Those figures suggest the company is no longer treating stablecoins as a narrow crypto experiment. Instead, it is widening the set of networks and token formats it can evaluate as potential settlement layers for global payment activity.

The broader market backdrop helps explain why payment networks are still pressing forward. Dollar-pegged token supply is approaching $300 billion, according to The Block’s data dashboard, giving the sector a scale that is increasingly difficult for large payment companies to ignore. The same data shows Tether’s USDT at roughly $188 billion and Circle’s USDC at around $76 billion, underscoring how large the existing stablecoin base has become before newer institutional models are fully in market. In that context, a test around SBC is less about proving that dollar tokens can exist and more about proving that they can be governed in ways large institutions will actually use.

For now, the Visa-Brale initiative remains a proof of concept, not a production launch. Still, the direction is clear. The companies are testing whether stablecoins can function as an institutional settlement layer that combines always-on availability with programmable workflows and tighter privacy controls than open public rails typically offer by default. If that model works, it would strengthen the case that the next wave of stablecoin adoption will be decided less by retail speculation and more by whether payment operators can move real money, on schedule, with the same operational discipline they expect from traditional financial infrastructure.