Lloyds and Visa Settle $750,000 in USDC Over Seven Days, Including Weekends, in Live Stablecoin Pilot
Lloyds and Visa Settle $750,000 in USDC Over Seven Days, Including Weekends, in Live Stablecoin Pilot #
Visa and Lloyds Banking Group have completed a seven-day live pilot using USDC stablecoins to settle $750,000 in payment obligations, with funds reaching Visa’s US operations in under an hour. The settlement included transactions that cleared over the weekend, when traditional settlement rails are typically inactive.
Rather than moving customer money for a crypto exchange or a fintech app, the test placed stablecoin infrastructure directly into the settlement stack linking a major high-street bank and the world’s largest card network. According to Tokenization Insight, the settlement flow ran from Lloyds’ Corporate Markets branch in Jersey, through Archax, a regulated digital-asset infrastructure provider, onto the USDC stablecoin rail, and finally to Visa in the United States.
The architecture combined private and public blockchain environments. Lloyds operated its own node on the Canton Network, a blockchain built for regulated capital markets with configurable privacy controls. Visa supported settlement on a separate public blockchain. The trial tested whether institutional settlement could work across different blockchain environments without requiring all parties to share a single ledger.
Traditional interbank settlement between card issuers and networks typically follows batch cycles tied to business days, leaving weekend and holiday periods with no settlement activity. Routing obligations through USDC allowed settlement to move in near-real time on any day of the week.
For Visa, the experiment is part of a stablecoin settlement program that has expanded over the past year. The network now supports nine blockchains for stablecoin settlement and reported an annualized settlement run rate of $7 billion as of April 2026, up 50 percent quarter-on-quarter. Canton Network was among the five blockchains added to the program in April.
For Lloyds, the pilot continues a series of blockchain experiments. In January 2026, the bank claimed a first by using tokenized deposits on Canton to purchase a tokenized UK gilt in partnership with Archax. The USDC-Visa settlement test connects Lloyds’ institutional treasury function to a global payment network via stablecoin rails rather than conventional correspondent banking.
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